Tomaž Šalamun, tr. Matthew Moore
[THE AGE BOILS]
The age boils. The other age boils,
but won’t leave a trace.
The age boils with no sun.
The age boils with sun.
MILES AND MORE
Fairytale decadents, wrinkled
people. Raise the crazed
animal. Bake her belly. I suck
blue lips in the dust that
melted already. Alexandra’s
gunned down, already gone
into debt. I cut my head off slowly,
wipe the sweat of my brow
off the counter. People were kind
to me and savage. Come with me,
come and see, he kissed me, and
he begged me, kindly, oh please,
could he slaughter me? Let me
sunbathe the pillar, dear leader!
“CLOUDS HAVE SEQUENCE, BUT NO CONTEXT THAT WE CAN BELIEVE.”
Norman Dubie, snatch out the
cougar's eye and use it
to erase. I ruined my battered
dinghy. Burdens
lifted my chin. I licked a clone
to death. Flooded
all my flowers. Mounds lived
in front of him in
houses. We martyred buffalos.
They ran off the
walls. We flashed, pink syringes.
Then came James
Dean. He was small and hideous.
He was big and beautiful.
Tomaž Šalamun (1941–2014) published more than fifty books of poetry in Slovenian. He was born in Zagreb, Croatia. His first collection of poetry, Poker, was published in 1966. He was renowned among his generation as a leader of the Slovenian avant-garde, and one of the great poets of Central Europe in the 20th century. His most recent books, published in English posthumously by Black Ocean, are Andes (2016) and Druids (2019).
Matthew Moore is a poet, translator, and editor. His poems appear widely in literary publications including The Carolina Quarterly, Fence, Lana Turner, Second Stutter, and elsewhere. From 2012 to 2020, he co-edited the online poetry journal Flag + Void. He is the translator of Tomaž Šalamun's Opera Buffa, forthcoming from Black Ocean in 2021. He was born in Illinois.