Public Republic

Peter Kraevski Photo: Robert Couse-Baker The torn-up wallpaper of propriety the savaged slippers of domesticity the loneliness with its unreeled balls of yarn this is the dog of my affection and the cat of yours

Roumen Leonidov From The End of Mythology Photo: DerrickT it’s cozy, safe and warm. So they say. Something like a sanatorium for fanatic manikins. But I don’t buy this. Both my eyes have seen this mantle trailing on its own. No wonder it’s the choicest tablecloth for stains. I can hear them humming underneath: “The […]

Roumen Leonidov Photo: madmolecule awful pleasure thinking is. Even if a person thinks whether it’s worth thinking. It’s awful when one reclines in repose and doesn’t want and cannot think about one’s brains. It’s awful that homo sapiens doesn’t think. And there comes the homunculus and there comes the homunculus stalin-hitler and with what an […]

Milena Valkanova Photo: Temari 09 You are burning And I am stern We reside On the edge of expectations While you are fending off The tide Of neurotic insecurity I would caress The endeavors And little deaths But you’d rather hide Behind The oblong idea Of constantly renewed cells Of painful understanding

Kristin Dimitrova Photo: Robert S.Donovan Without laboratories, without conservatories, without observatories, the small town sighs in the afternoon; pears are dropping down through people’s dreams and the town clock is struck dumb at ten to five, like a calf gaping at the men in bloodstained aprons. The mosque used to be the tallest building here,

Aksinia Mihailova Photo: glitter feet At night, against the curtains so many moths are beating their wings, their silver dust tracing rows of knots, writing down my most enticing dream.

Aksinia Mihailova Photo: jenny downing In the morning, when I brush my hair looking in the mirror, he is reading his newspaper, Many days in a row I keep telling him my incessantly recurring dreams of the city of white walls and a dreadfully hollow frame, of the city of Breton and immensely alluring lilies […]

Kristin Dimitrova Photo: s.e.re Now I feel easy because I expect nothing. The roughly polished glass of the North Sea is far off, yet through a roundabout way reaching the equator. Africa (blue nomads among men-eating sands) a week ago lent its back to a Leonid shower: stars fell piercing through hot and cold atmospheric […]

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer Снимка: jsome1 Often I Wish I Were a potato. Eyes opened in all directions. Unafraid of the cold earth. The difference between life and death for somebody.

Tanya Kolyovska Photo: lepiaf.geo We did not have much time. The stooped back wind (we are all of us maimed) showed the road in the woods. The silence made us look like shadows that had ruined their bodies. We wanted to feel our skin and become one whole with it again. … Sincere, we strictly […]

Photo: lmaji Morning comes out of the blue with free freshness and a babble of dying stars. The stairwell smells of coffee. Behind doors people are weightless. At bus stops they nestle against invisible pillows and hope to hear a voice announce False start. Morning is cancelled. Back to bed, all of you. Translated into […]

Yassen Vassilev To Ajabez your voices cross my head sift the holy out of the world possess mountain peaks biblical cities and the three crosses of golgotha echoes from the rocks of kamen briag and somehow I know that I will never ever walk alone

Tanya Kolyovska Photo: Ctd 2005 For Krassi I The rainbow loses all stability if you hurl it belly down. II The street was expressive – with shades in the eyes and the spilt over skies. III A talking olive tree. Translated from Bulgarian by Valentin Krustev

Tanya Kolyovska Photo: normanack Carmen looks like a little old wife now used to what comes in her life. But her turkey mate stomps, he’ll split the earth because that’s the way he makes love.

Tanya Kolyovska Photo: Joe Shlabotnik Across a well of autumn rays The street sets out For the sky. The trees stream down molten. Homeless dogs Warm the sidewalk. The shadows vanish.

Yassen Vassilev Photo: orvalrochefort in a city under glass lid chafed knees will rub the rails will print the map of the net she-wolf romulus and remus synchronicity and constant the neon eyes will blink rails and tunnel through time metro tomorrow yesterday today

Bozhana Apostolova Photo: Westsun There’s nothing the matter with me, everything’s nice… I hear my voice from the depth of a precipice. And my soul, oh, God, like a small lump of ice In the drink of the darkness melts down… And vanishes. Translated from Bulgarian by Valentin Krustev and Donna Martell

Tanya Kolyovska Photo: shinealight Men, somehow, Don’t call forth memories in me. Diligent, obedient, Devoted. Counter clockwise.

Yassen Vassilev Photo: kwerfeldein the one who gives birth to himself hardly suffers from oedipus complexes hardly knows electra closely he crawls as a snake out of the ground and evil omens thrive around

Ivan Hristov Photo: Cane Ludico Rosso For Vladimir Levchev And we were sitting there somewhere in our little country, in our little neighborhood, in our apartment building. We were sitting silently and drinking. And then we talked.