• Kamelia Spassova in translation

Kamelia Spassova in translation

You’re all locked up

in my obscura’s case .

The voyeur in any case is not a passive observer,

nor is he the only one observing –

the portals of time shrink and stretch

in the most natural way of all gateways.

His gazes lie corpse to corpse,

even the best ones click in his trap –

after all, memories must be manufactured.

Some smile: handfuls of bashfulness,

others show that they know:

we are always naked – with our hats and shoes,

our hidden thoughts appear on the negative,

so he knows – we know –

and see how he ravenously swallows us with his eyes.

Let him watch them, I am watching him.

I fire pointblank,

the camera blinks,

I slowly wind the film.

On the List

On some lists              
he’s tucked in between Husserl and
Ivan h. Hristov, who isn’t the Ivan
whom the postmen in Bdin think of from time to time,
but simply some hajji, perhaps a newspaper patron
from the beginning of the last century
for this Ivan it cannot be established
when he was born
or even when he died, not by the Academy of Science’s archives,
nor by the gigantic spider webs that sparkle
at night, when they sip my blood and in the morning my veins are
travelling paths pointing to a quick arrival
yet if the power goes out unexpectedly or global crises kick off
the cobwebs collapse, the data collapse, the fingers contract
and then we once again decide
who is the victim who is the spider
while according to the list Jesus was born a few years
before Christ and there is a year for his death.

title

the most expensive chiseled

letters

are those on gravestones

they go for a lev

or a lev-fifty a piece

the price depends

on the company

or the kind of folks you come across

they carve out your name

and don’t dig any deeper

that’s enough

for death to recognize you

proof that you existed

because in the end that’s all you’ve got

that’s why poets

are also necrophiliacs

footnotes

as soon as I saw

the dedication

a ritual and baptismal certificate

I wished

that I had written the book

the table of contents also impressed me

with its clarity of expression

the layout itself

its order and certain witty phrases

for a long time I searched for my name

on the cover

but in its place, carved out in a large font was:

we’ve buried the authors in the footnotes

a gathering for the aggrieved

5 p.m. on page 5

symbols

when we interchange

the latin alphabet with the cyrillic

we change identities

we attune ourselves to the timetable

to the weather forecast to the jury

and other inevitable circumstances

we’ve gone over to monkey-o-glyphics [1]

so as to understand ourselves

we’ve regressed, rebooted

now we’re waiting for a banana

so we can continue

to vegetate

to give ourselves meaning

as only we know how

and to keep on with

our monkey business

The Final Stop

The overcoat, gray and considerate,

moves over next to the beige slicker

They sit like that in silence

what is there left for them to say anymore

they understand each other perfectly well with sighs

She clutches her bag fiercely

so her false teeth and legs

don't chatter

He holds onto her, holds onto his cane

holds out for clean and ironed underwear

with his other hand he holds her hand

when the stop comes

Plot № 17

my reserved seat

is a noah’s ark

built in case of

unexpected storms, hurricanes

or whatever kind of natural disaster

I keep a blank sheet of paper there

sharp pencils and books

left to be read

in another lifetime

            I have everything I need

            to continue your existence

            and to be together with

            your absence

I bury the letters deep within me

and wait for them to sprout

I wait for the terrible thing to pass

just don’t forget, I keep telling myself,

just don’t forget, to dig yourself up

A Brief Apocalypse in the Library

where the books meet in a row

and the drawers have gathered all the entries

it is most pleasant between two and four

the light falls

vertically

so that someone’s face

becomes a photograph

he who sees it

knows peace

there the door always creaks

it attracts all the mortals’ gazes

gathered into themselves between the lines

and somebody’s shadow

slowly

runs outside

this is the end

I think to myself solemnly

and yet keep a hold of myself

a wind whips up a storm whips up

the worlds break apart and fly off

both the mortals and the books struggle

with insanity, recharged

in this movement

I keep control of myself

I hold one final page

it is the only thing I see

I read and delve deeper

but there’s no way to do it

for long

the change is not noticeable

I know that panic has begun

to drown me

and I don’t understand anymore and I can’t

but the shadow slips in

sits across from me

and everyone goes back to their places

in the tongue

with pits in their tongues

children laugh

and quickly swallow

whatever comes along

everything is so simple

when the joints are soft

they don’t wait, don’t hold back

nor bite nor chew

they just stick their tongues out at you sometimes

and if you are careful enough

you can catch a glimpse

of how the pit slowly

swells up

 

Translated by Angela Rodel

[1] Bulgarians use the term majmunitsa or “monkey-o-glyphics” to refer to the strings of gibberish that appear when a program cannot correctly read a font, as frequently happens with Cyrillic fonts.

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