by Petar Matovic

The asphalt lane of the street has kicked out
the television picture, now these dimensions are mixed. Silicon
pollen concentrates energy. The world is coming

from out of an electric socket. Only that sound similar to a heart
in the thorax of an athlete makes noise in the appearance of a hologram
surroundings: in the lines of walkers, the trail of the lined trees and the curb.

Biosimulations do not come from laboratories, but from emotions,
colors snap in nerves, impulses have overfilled aorta,
the body transforms into a thunder lot: we are dispersed like light,

transpersonality condenses us. We are gentle transmitters,
floating in laser beams safely as in a placenta, outside
of the cosmos frequency. We are a heresy, and we take comfort in it.

Translated by Ivana Rogar

by Petar Matovic

The paths spread out like a sediment from an overturned cup
of coffee, chaotic visions. Automobiles in the rush hour: the sudden
multiplying of tapeworms across the roads: I am a joint
of a huge parasite, inhaling oil fumes with
pleasure: the peace after work, in which I could
steep the steep of the just: agnus dei.

Beams flash against the metallic hood, they break against rapid bumpers. Torsos
behind windscreens, tireless portraits
from an office, from glass partitions /memory: without a word, routinely: wrist, signet —
rear –view mirror! / Then I spot them: the history which overtakes you on the highway,
without a turn signal.

What an idyllic sight: the asphalt is steaming, roadmen in fluore– scent overalls, the
pathway is trembling with machines
in a haze of the Indian summer’s smog. And what a tremendous corridor
    this is
— the speedometer is warning fatefully about worlds
into which you cross over, now already experienced like a tightrope walker.

Translated by Ivana Rogar

by Petar Matovic

     for J. Hristic

In the night, if you go out to the balcony, you will not see the stars
you will not see anything. Because the balcony is in the city center, and the veil of
electricity has hidden flares of deep sky
objects, which maybe don’t even exist anymore.
Expanses are created out of vertigo, the image shudders
as if on an unstable surface, not without trepidation: if the edges
of the scene enter the sight, what is left outside? You hear the jugular vein
like an echo on a sonar. It is the same to harken the body and cosmos,

if you took deeper. The spark of a bang bears the remembrance
of the beginning’s shock; it wanders further, pregnant in anonymity
and witnessing. But a reflection is an unexpected incident
of the space change. The thought and smoke disappear equally: Immersed
in light as in darkness. The profusion of splendors is not left
without attention. The street brilliancy remains undiminished. Only
the curtains get thicker and better closed.

by Jeffrey Thomson

When the tree came down
across the fence in the night
and blustered its barky limbs
across the lawn, missing
our bed and room by inches,
I heard only the mute swan
of my own sleep. When
traffic spun past weaving
its dangerous cloth of taillights
and the stoplight on the corner
flashed its amber Morse,
I was listening to the unending
echoes of rocks in the canyon
of quiet. When the skunk
ambled in and the night
smelled of burned rubber
and oilfires, I was carefully
unaware of the tiny openings
of the stars. When nightjars
sang their minor key lament,
like the low smoky hush
of blues in the dark, when
planes blinked across
an upturned bowl named
the sky, when happiness
and sorrow lacked their own
names, I was memorizing
the language of nothing.
When I was compelled to attend
the convening of the committee
on night’s evanescence, I was hard
at work adjusting the machinery
of silence. When the muster
of names was shouted out,
when my presence was
required, and the flowers
of the apple orchard blossom–
ed into moths made of white–
ness itself, like the ash
of bodies burned on ghats
above night’s holy river,
I slept as we each sleep,
inside the husk of comfort
and at the mercy of all.