by Fríða Ísberg

wet paper
tangled in birch branches 

inside the window, smoking,
a woman with red hair

says to herself:
they can’t hear me anymore

irises
slip into the white
like burst egg yolks

the living room is heavy

on the carpet,
fragile things, scattered,

soaked in bile

she wraps them
cautiously
in old newspapers

and shoves them back
down her throat

Translated by Fríða Ísberg and Meg Matich.
Originally appeared in EuropeNow journal.

by Bragi Ólafsson

Undirdjúpin
The Deep

A ship sails from land.
It moves away like people drift
apart: it becomes smaller
than it was

when it lay in the harbour,
and smaller and smaller still
as the harbour expands
and the sky narrows in.

So little has it become
when it meets the horizon
that if it ever had any hope
that battle is lost — and it sinks

Translated by K. B. Thors.
Originally appeared in, Circumference, Poetry in Translation.

by Bragi Ólafsson

þögnin
the silence

finally then — but not
until then — at the end of summer,
when the excavators, saws, drills and high
pressure pumps were silenced,

were we able to go out in the yard
and sit down, as we had originally planned
when we bought the house, but then already

fall was beginning to settle in,
the sun not as high in the air
as in early june,
when the drills were switched on, and excavators

driven into the neighboring yards,
saws started up and high-pressure pumps
on the highest setting

Translated by K. B. Thors.
Originally appeared in, Circumference, Poetry in Translation.

by Aðalsteinn Ásberg Sigurðsson

The earth is too big
for little men
too little for
big men, with
growing impatience
for the masses;
it’s far too delicate
for all manner
of oracle.
But it is my Earth
our Earth.

Translated by Meg Matich.