Public Republic

Mariana Velichkova

Photo: Niffty..
We are honest and decent
reasonable, chaste again
frigidly faithful
almost sterile
burdened by rules and pain

Dimana Ivanova
Translated from Bulgarian to English by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Photo: wili
I want to weave you in my hair,
pack you in my skin,
slip you on my finger,
like a wound from a wedding ring.

Kristin Dimitrova
Photo: mikebaird
No, he wasn’t
fat or skinny,
tall or short,
he wasn’t good or evil, but
only neutral, like a geometric point –
no mass, but how it pierces the sheet.

Aksinia Mihailova

Photo: bslmmrs
When you leave
pieces of yourself
in the bodies of other women
and try desperately
to find yourself
complete
in the words,
I see our home
like a ghost boat
floating against the current
of the river;
but the boatman is [...]

Roumen Leonidov

Photo: Stuart Chalmers
At Central Station
in the center of the snack joint
the drunk railwaymen
are drinking their twentieth beer…
Boys that hang around
are hitting on Diddy
once again,
Diddy, the beauty behind the buffet;
time and again they raise their glass trumpets
blowing them ardently,
then at the cash register
they search their pockets for small change…
At the end of the workday,
at [...]

Roumen Leonidov

Photo: Anosmia
Because my straitjacket armor was a bit too short
they shod me in a pair of knights’ boots,
they pulled a helmet over my eyes, my hands
they chopped off, just in case.
And because it’s only knights I’ve met since then,
I rush to handshake them,
rush to handshake them,
rush to handshake them.
And sometimes I survive.
Translated from Bulgarian [...]

Kerana Angelova

Photo: HaPe_Gera
Caterpillars wriggle
And creep fluffily
It’s difficult to believe
Their mother is the butterfly
With oriental eyes
Her wings made of ashes and beams of light
Her flight above oval meadows
As aslant as the dance of souls
Butterflies have such a lot of
Sky to fly
And
What a lot of names, my God, butterfly-like
Catocala
The Sky Bluish
The Fiery
The Lemony
The Big Crescent
Apollo’s Butterfly
Mourning Cloak
The [...]

Roumen Leonidov
From The Night of the Salesman

Photo: DerrickT
In an empty room a little boy is sitting cross-legged
With its back to us.
The child is naked, it is obvious he is resting his chin
On an elbow, thinking. The square of the floor rises
Into a cone, the room turnes into a small transparent
Pyramid.
The boy floats in transparency
Head down. [...]

Roumen Leonidov

Photo: Mira Dimova
Every morning I tear away the tip of my tongue
so that I can lick
so that I can lick
and I lick
and I lick tranquilly
the fishbone of tranquility.
Who can keep me from licking
I was ordered to lick my lips
I was ordered to lick my lips
like the cat that generated
the cat that generated herself
I have [...]

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 creed is part of the particular.
What’s common is the sum of stains.
The sum total of [...]

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 awful pleasure
what an awful pleasure
the thugs march in throngs.

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
of despair, of my thoughts

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 layers
and people in countries
with unclouded skies
made wishes.
The papers say that in China
a falling star killed [...]

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 followed the track.
The air was ripping off its face
[...]

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 English by Gregory O’Donoghue