kunčice

You stick it on to Ostrava with a hyphen, but it’s a village.
There’s a church, an old school,
a few houses scattered alongside the track.
When you get off,
you’re surrounded by factories, a closed college,
depots, halls, depots, halls, chimneys, depots and halls.
You can’t buy a newspaper anywhere,
can’t sit anywhere, can’t get a drink anywhere,
because this town is for working
and the town for living in is somewhere else.
There’s a small train station here
covered with polystyrene make-up.
How many tracks are there?
Twenty?
Thirty?
You can transport coal along them
to the whole world.
You can transport steel along them
to the whole world.
You can transport cars from Hyundai Nošovice
to the whole world.
But to read you go to Havířov,
where they also want a train station like this,
in hastily pinned-together clothes from an artist’s impression,
with a decorative hem of castle tiles.
So that they can hide there
from unemployment,
from a stolen age,
from recollections of a muted life,
from the stupid lyricism of the weather
and wait until the InterCity RegioJet of the RegioJet company passes,
taking them to see their children in Prague.

the sea
49.8387344°N, 18.2848303°E

From the satellite measurements it transpires
that our mattresses
with their unwashed stains of continents
are moving apart
at a speed of a few millimetres a year,
whilst we still love each other
on the calm surface of the day.

When it is all over,
you pass me a joint on the balcony
at an astronomical angle like a telescope,
you want to know if I can also see
a car, a wedding, children.
But I can hardly see to the end

of a television programme,

and so you go to pack up the love
for the holiday books
and the seagulls shriek at us
from the shore of the Ostrava dump,
the final destination for all plans
which can no longer be recycled.

You sleep in the shallows, beyond the tide of energy-saving light.
It washed up to you from somewhere in the depths,
where interest and private loans mate.
Curled up, you resemble a shell,
and so I put my ear to you
and listen to the scratched gramophone record

with the sounds of the sea,

all of this humanity
which we in this space probe are
has been launched towards the planet of the god Neptune,
so that he can bless us on our lonely voyage.

grexit

You decided –
last minute.

A new swimsuit
crisscrossed your still untanned nudity
like the sea routes of international trade,
until you turned your back on the changing-room mirror
and the price tag made you look like
just another item in the sale.

Then at home on the internet
you searched for an even better price,
lost in the results
like the slash in the middle of the URL address,
the slash between the key word and the number of hits,
between the account number and the sort code,
between the tons of carbon dioxide and the year,
between billions of euros and the Greek debt,
the slash in the equation
which is being used to calculate
how much it costs

which someone is using to calculate
and it isn’t you.

Translated by Graeme Dibble