Poetryzine magazine presents the selected poems from the poem cycle WOMEN'S CURSE by the Montenegrin poet Katarina Saric
The hormon theft
I love myself being newly born only just stretched, a soft puff of gentle pink, in love with poetry, calligraphy and the stamps in the melted vax And in that shirt with a big dot in the middle which I saved for you to lean on when you are here I like to take my barge to Beška and write in princess Jelena's style
I like lying in too, and straw hats with large brims and the handmade lace embroidery and lavender smelling in the underwear chest But most I like when I get bored with myself thus newly born And I steal your hormones and I kick myself under the wardrobe and let the dust fall on the scrapbook I put on that sweating bag and the headphones and I change into a snake body already before the new page on which I trust the full stop with my heel
and I answer to no one and I rollick and wander around, I throw the rope, drive the cattle and I am familiar with everyone when I rest lying on my hip with a lover in every town and when I really don't care where you might be
The funny poem
It is good And I only feel like laughing and for no reason And I only feel like singing and dancing and jumping Not because I am light-footed or light-minded on the contrary While you are so serious and grey One real bogeyman always at a razor blade along the edges of weeping Who is right and who is wrong what you should and what you shouldn't do But perhaps my thoughts are deeper and heavier Perhaps, if I let them go
I would smash off
your balance trays
Enough of that! I don't care
not even to utter It is good even when it is not And nothing is wrong with me I only feel like laughing
The Masochist Poem
It is winter. It opened a little wound on my left palm, there will be some money, it's what they say when your palm itches. The little wound is a crater now, I've rummaged it out (the gold diggers would rejoice!) in a masochist in a lustful way I push all my memories inside it. They are many and they clang terribly (you used to hate when I make noise): one football gaiter through which you touched my foot (our first touch). And a radiator which I'm using these days instead of a blanket and an eternally empty bottle of plum brandy (homemade) an eternally unfinished manuscript (even the wardrobe in which I wanted to stack your ironed shirts). It gulped all my words and my female nagging, the screams and the downpours and the inflated balloons which you never wanted to run after (and that's why you punctured them?). Gulped your boyish swaggers and your need to punish me with silence, manly. Heavily and for a long time. So it grew every day more and it got inflated too, one hyperbole, bluish and ugly an unspeakable toad. I am waiting for her infectious sublimation so it may burst, so the dirt leaks out. So that you too are gone. So that I too am gone. So that we leak out with it. So that the memories and all the insults with which we spilt blood fighting
leak out too (when for the first time we, as one symposium, shoot the noise together), because we were not for each other. Because we were (were we not?) alike, as once we used to be, as we are now. As this little wound, a grotesque,
in the crater of winters. And it is only now that we are the same. The perfect identity. Perfectly punctured and empty. And yes. Now we would be the match: The perfect couple.
I cannot stand rainy afternoons jazz and always the same flashbacks Looking back at our car drives at sunsets while with my folded knees curled on the seat
I'm finishing up cigarette in flight
nailed to your profile your beard, two or three days old and that cavity above your upper lip one funny hair from the mole on your nose I cannot stand tasteless chewing gum strawberries and the bursting of balloons that sweet teasing without inhibition
Petting
my thighs at the traffic lights
in a standstill
Lolling out
in stunts
when I throw my head out of the window
and the wind ruffles my hair
they remained cramp tied I cannot stand tears or hangouts by the road chips for jukeboxes and cappuccino from the machine poetry evenings And always the same lesions that break my shins at every new step Or long-distance love I cannot stand This accursed weakness that burns every bridge but in vain its attitude
it strands me on the very bar spats me on that very shaft with a spray of mud through an eternally open wound Which again
only pours me out
instead of killing me I cannot stand rain
neither the sound of jazz These flashbacks intermittently always along those unchangeable rails The burst in the temples and the smell of burnt by the road always from those unchangeable ashes
The third tango
My daughter is playing on the square with the city band a contraption which stands for a classical piano synthesizer it is called-- abusively says my dad who is horribly unnerved by noise synthesized time unites all the sound and sense and I still somehow hope that it will unite all the old Slavs he kept beseeching god that she not be like me--a naked whim not to stitch for score She plays the waltz from the First Echelon
of a Soviet film I've never managed to see but I do remember some of the remakes local allusions to the theme Komsomolets on for the steppes of Qazaqstan
on to get rich overnight I didn't have to see well, haven't I seen the one the Kopaonik excursion the years in which rock'n'roll died
and there was no one to drive with me on the midnight train
when drunk I shed my hymen with the first machinist man
from the discotheque in an unease less I'd be the only chaste before the certificate of graduated maturity and to be continued some domesticated and already famed bone-breakers -- who translate every imported idea unspeakably literally -- pulled the first guns against real bullets of some who had but billiard cues
there is again a fault in the brain and the conk broke before it flowered
our shortened graduation excursion through our shortened land No one danced with me the graduation dance for there were thirty two of us skirts at that language school My daughter is playing the first tango from the Echelon she really stamps on it with her left foot yet still in the drained land I am dancing to her earthquake on my own path and I know already that it has never been for nothing that not me is she that she will pay them my debt
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