by Carl Dennis

You have to keep alert if you want to distinguish
Between a man giving by nature
And a man selfish by nature
Who’d like to become more giving.

Both men volunteer to work one night a week
In the kitchen at Loaves and Fishes,
Dishing out tuna casserole to the regulars.

For the one giving by nature, it’s a pleasure
To help in a task where there’s no delay
Between wish and accomplishment.
For the one selfish by nature, it’s a pleasure
To behave all evening like someone else.

Here comes one of them back from a walk
To the farthest grocery, the only store
Supplied by growers fair to their pickers.
Is it the giving one, eager to help the deserving,
Or the selfish one who hopes to become,
With practice, more moved by the thought
Of acting justly than he’s been so far,
To find it congenial, not merely proper?

To guess who’s who, you have to notice
Which one needs a nap in the afternoon,
A sign of the extra work required
To learn the lines of a part that feels unnatural.
And then the work of speaking
With such conviction that even he
Will be uncertain he can tell the difference
Between the man he’s playing
And the man he is.

by Marko Pogacar

Honey melts in tea, completely, unlike you with serious music, and unlike me in
you,

the tense wire of the never–ending call, a crowded bar,
no place for you, and the elevators that are always broken,

the stairs unfold into eternity, like conversations about politics, and just as
someone notices that totalitarianism and democracy

are only a question of numbers, someone pulls the plug,
the picture disappears and everything starts again: voices

leaking through walls, and evening falls into your hands, like a miner descending into
his pit, yet still, the shoes left at the door

prove the living exist, but what does it mean to live
as winter comes scrolling like cold breath out of your throat,

and builds its nest in the dark alphabet; all those hurried unknown people with
familiar names, an afternoon split in two, like Korea;

the tea and honey have already melted, inseparable,
and this viscous liquid is love: how do I get to you; how do I reach you?

Translated by Tomislav Kuzmanovic and Kim Addonizio

by Marko Pogacar

Rosehips in garden beds, no–one expresses opinions,
figs, dried and fresh,

both hollowed out with beaks, overhead an absence of earth,
which is the sky. the scarecrow has ceased to do what it’s supposed to.

curves elongate time, but they don’t make it filled, precise,
like telephone wires that pressure us into closeness, connect us

with other beings, the scarecrow works in a completely opposite
way than the telephone, this morning a dog drank the marrow from its legs

and it fell, a carbonized cross before a black man’s house, clothes that you can’t
take off. such is the mechanism of nature:

everything we have sown sprouts, regardless of little obstacles, long afternoons, and
inner balance, everyone always says: sure,

and all the friction invested in the transformation of love into the endlessly
small packages of life means nothing now: rosehips dried, time elongated
     and clean,

the earth’s full offer to love me rotting in my chest, everywhere around unbound
vowels, open hands, weeds and much more.

translated by Dunja Bahtijarevic and Anthony Mccann

by Marko Pogacar

Like half of a peach
in its southern sweetness.
like raspberries, like peas.
a cow mooing
out of the white alliance of bones.
baked beans, earth’s kidneys,
meat for domestic animals.
something that breeds milk
when the roads are distant
and winter righteous and severe.
like fish, ragout, something like that.
we live quietly in the darkness of a tin can
then someone lifts the lid
and lets in sound and light;
there, suspicious white light.

Translated by Dunja Bahtijarevic, Dona Massini