Public Republic

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.

He had white, shiny bones and –
wrapped in a mantle of a missing
colour – he carried, in the style of the 15th century,

a scythe.
I was coming back from the store while
he was probably going there because

how else would I meet him, so
he stood in my way.
I asked him who he was.

I will come twice, he answered,
once at 7, and then again.
At 7 I woke up.

from: My Life in Squares (Smokestack Books, 2010)

“My Life in Squares”
Kristin Dimitrova

Publisher:Smokestack Books
ISBN: 978-0-9560341-7-5

My Life in Squares is an introduction to the work of a major European poet and one of the most original writers to emerge in recent years from the ‘new Europe’. A prize-wining and widely anthologised writer, Kristin Dimitrova’s work has been published in 22 countries and translated into 19 languages. Oblique, subtle and witty, her poems creep up on her subjects from behind, demonstrating that looking at something sideways is not the same as avoiding the issue.

More about the book and the author: http://www.smokestack-books.co.uk/books/dimitrova.html