The Angel (Your picture)
Sleep now, as though you’d never in your life occupied a frame,
As though your hands had never set even this picture in a frame,
As though they had not arranged cuttings that float
*
Alexandria
For Mohab Nasr
All these years my friend
As though we’re here by mistake
Waiting until the roads clear
To drive unlicensed trucks
And face the border guards
With forced laughter and cash.
We dream of places that were they found
We’d be no good for, my friend,
Forced to mix with the statues
To swap their talk with them
To be jammed in among them
With frozen limbs, looking and not seeing,
Our heads bowed down at home
We excuse ourselves from going to the quarries
That we might try reproducing in secret,
Mourning our endangered line.
All these years plucking up the courage
To declare we are not statues
And then collapse in pieces from their plinths,
Dead with flattened heads,
With eyes bulging out like mother-of-pearl,
With holes in our bones.
How is it, my friend, after all these years
All we can utter is croaking?
Trans. Qisasukhra
Nailia Kulieva (found poem*)
I am Azery girl.
I am single without children.
I am 22 year old,
born in the 4th Februar
1978 year.
I have a small height: 1.46,
I am looking for the man
not higher then 1.70.
My weight is 48 kilo g.
I live in Azerbaijan
in Baku city.
My profession
operator telephonist.
I know Turkish and Russian.
Now I am learning English
and writing with help of translater.
I am romantic, tender, kind,
sometimes a bit capricious,
sometimes a bit shy.
But always very faithful girl
to my dear man.
I like housekeeping very much.
My proposal is marriage.
I want to meet the man
from 27 till 40 year.
*Personal ad on site advertising girls from Eastern Europe for marriage
