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i’m tormented by certain questions thoughts dim fancies on the edge of my vision flickering shadows weight upon my heart i’ve spoken of...
Excerpts
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[pp. 7–9]
A Mobile Mind
Each of us contains a tiny inheritance that only those belonging to a family can appreciate. We all have ...
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Swallow, oh, swallow, save this day!
Smart tailor of skies,
sharp-winged one,
tail like scissors,
beak needlelike,
song ...
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And then it’s over. Karel is home that night. He sees me from the kitchen window and comes to the door, eyes wide with excitement and a...
•••
Winter
To Sandra
To live a winter,
your roots must rest
and the water freeze in your core.
Stay motionless, white, a...
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pp. 14–18
II
I just wrote about Undo and Redo at considerable length, but barely added a word about Mom and Dad. As someone wro...
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pp. 51–56
Am I, after the whole course of treatment, a
better person now? I’ve screwed up an unbelievable amount
of shit over ...
•••
5:07 a.m.SALME
The snow has compacted into dense drifts. I have to lift my short legs high with every step and bring them down with full...
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Leo
We had nothing left.
It had been that way for some time alread...
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maidens shipwrecks final judgement dayshave been no strangers the last thirty yearsI was one of those jacks of all trades toopart alcoholic...
•••
From the collection Just About Love
Girls’ toys
These girls have no mothers;the mothers are with the boys.With the brothers who can n...
•••
p. 12
ON SPACES
Sometimes it seems like everything begins with departures. That not distances, but spaces, are what matters. Thei...
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Man has the mind of an animal. Inside, he fails spectacularly to draw a line between a little fun and the misery of lifelong rearing and re...
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There lived a man who was in the habit of saying: “Be what may, but may there be order at home!” The man believed that people were created ...
•••
I could recounthow curacao’s longest bridge is called“our swinging old lady”and passing over the bayyou sure don’t surpass yourselfbut ...
•••
“Hello, balloon!” Oscar spoke into his mobile. “Can you hear me?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” a somewhat nasally voice immediately replied. “I’m...
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WEEK ONE. DAY ONE.May 27, 1949When Aunt Mari (as she was called by some of her younger Estonian colleagues) was approaching the maternity w...
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I realized I was
very far from home on the very first morning there, in a suburb of Toronto,
when I woke up (which had happened several tim...
•••
Peeling seconds
my coat and boots
are left dancing hollowly
when drunks sway on the highways
and the woods have dried up
...
•••
This time Marius moved with utmost care and memorised exactly where he’d come from. He no longer had any intention of dozing off or meeting...
•••
(Tuum, 2018)
OH SUN OH LIGHT OH DUST
I
this could be rum’s dialogue and quotation marks
but that woman I saw in the woods yeste...
•••
We attack from three sides at once. From the south where the moat is now the shallowest and it’s possible to nudge the siege tower up to th...
•••
(Verb, 2018)
Obolon
Obolon’s raspberries.
...
•••
*
in the clear winter night there’s
one window still light,
behind it
a grown man curses his
slow computer.
that man is me...
•••
Excerpt from the chapter “Deportation”
The widow Glafira’s sauna has been heated. Sitting in the cramped dressing roo...
•••
I went to visit the world.
How it smelt,
how it moved and hummed!
The blood stirred in my arm – svelte,
vein...
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Undivere Manor, North-Central Estonia. 1979.
Arno was left alone in the lounge of the sauna house. I suppose I should...
•••
*
It wasn't I who made you this way
said Darwin,
the divine intuitive care of genetics opted
to give you light hair and a dark l...
•••
Wednesday, January 28th, 2015, ~3:00 PM
My throat hurt and felt swollen. At first, I thought I’d caught a cold from the open wi...
•••
Cycle
The night before last Wednesday,
my pup died of infection,
and was laid to rest out back
until the resurrection.
He won’t be poki...
•••
it’s just about late enough that the clock hands show
you’re-a dope-for-caring-
but-time-for-us-to-have-one-more-drink-now
and some guy i...
•••
With Mihkel Mutt’s (1953) first novel since his hefty work The Cavemen Chronicle (2012), the unparalleled master of Estonian irony has emerg...
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they dance with you, gravity, everyone.
but only the brave know the steps they should take.
you’ve got that cruel but equalizing trait:
b...
•••
where do little
fat girls go
when insulted
beneath clotheslines
behind a house
to practice
to practice a speech
for
getting back at
...
•••
an old man wearing
a cotton-padded coat
rubber boots
just stopped before me and said he sees my opening
I was upset
doubtless means som...
•••
one time in grade school
the topic of reading class was
fairy tales redone by Disney
(that’s not quite how we classified it back then
...
•••
A fairy tale about warm light.
A fairy tale about the hundred faces of loneliness.
A reflective fairy tale about your life.
A fairy tale ...
•••
Cutlets for Gogol
Katerina had been crying over Grigory’s disappearance the entire day, alone downstairs. She finally pulled herself togeth...
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Too nice a drunk
locking up my bike in front of the store
a babbling drunk approached me
I wanted to withdraw
but he said
listen
you...
•••
1960
They meet up at Tiina’s house after school. Tiina puts her bag in her room and follows Vova, because he wants to show her his turtle...
•••
An oracle proclaimed to a Theban king
that he would live a long and happy life —
not one younger kinsman would slay him.
We would never h...
•••
SIMPLE POEM
happiness once came into the yard
and the yard was ever so happy
then happiness came into the room
and the room was ever so ...
•••
*a hot day in Brezhnev’s timeand I still just a little girlin a blue cotton print skirtflee through the yellow corn fieldfrom the big peopl...
•••
Formica rufaThe ant,which I drained out of a birch juice jardidn’t dienor was it dead,though I killed it already for the fifth time,I p...
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Just then, there was a loud knock on the front door. It opened with a squeak, like a dry cough, and suddenly a short, totally strange old m...
•••
* * *what’s the use of poetryI ask you – whatdoes poetry reconcileour divorced parentspit-a-pat holding handsbring them together againas it...
•••
The Star-Bright HourThe wind won’t ask: to what did life amount?To yourself you’ll render your own account.However long, however dark the n...
•••
A knot. I adjust one endon the other, then I draw the latteron the former, into the center of the noose.It resembles the imageof a tree wit...
•••
CrooningI am so fleetingsighed the girl to the seaoh, what can I doyou are eternalI am transparent like yousighed the girl to the windowoh,...
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Jaanus stood on one leg without losing balance. The concrete surround of the burial plot was exactly the same width as his sandal. When he ...
•••
I am an Estonian poetI come from Lasnamäewhat is Lasnamäe?an eastern districtof our capital citythere are grey buildingsfive and nine store...
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LAMADA KARJAMAAL HIIREHERNESLamada karjamaal hiirehernes,tulitav päike pää kohal kõrges;põse all poolniisked rootsud pehmed,purused pebred ...
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EELKEVADISES METSASOtsin sinililli eelkevadises metsasega leia.Kivi õitseb längus päikese käes,kivimudilasi vudib ringi,nii et silmade ...
•••
from the collection The First Will (Esimene tahe):* * *A tired woman on the buscompares my chestwith that of her daughtercompares my shoesw...
•••
In a desert kingdom, in a city located at the borderline between the sea and the desert - let us call it OIL CITY because of its big oi...
•••
Chapter 13I was sitting on the steps outside the shop chewing on a blade of grass. Rita came and asked what was wrong. Nothing, I answered ...
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The evening of nightbirdsNightbirds sing all evening long.How all the air and all the world breathesin the screaming pain of nightbirds!We ...
•••
TO BE A DOG-APARTMENTto be a dog-apartment with three barking roomswith a snout-bathroomwhere one tap dribbles coldand the other hot slobbe...
•••
I was woken by some kind of clattering–whistling din. I hadn’t yet opened my eyes, I hadn’t yet become conscious, when through my sleep I r...
•••
ULLO IN BERLIN AS A CHILD, ANNO 1923Ullo did not recall his impressions of the railway journey. But he did remember the taxi journey to Unt...
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RINGED MOONMoonlight falls distant and dry,Frosting the snowfields in lustre;Trees shudder darkly and sigh,And, to win warmth, seem to clus...
•••
This letter was written in Helsinki, even though the recipient also resided there. It is dated simply : Good Friday, 1905.My dear “Kame...
•••
The prize-winning poem byMARI VALLISOO I Don’t Build Ei ehitaI don’t build...
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It was night - he stopped a while, drew his hand across his forehead, thought briefly, then took the raft over the river. For a long time h...
•••
A THOUSAND TIMESA thousand times the falling coffin lidhas tried to keep me underneath,where the dove, my dream, has veered amidwarm ashes ...
•••
Am I really a shaman, I thought, as I packed my things that sunny day, ready to abandon pleasant Berlioz Street and head for Burgundy. Thi...
•••
I would give you my heart, but I can’t findanywhere even the scent of its buttercups,I have lost it somewhere, where one wandersunder golde...
•••
AS A CHILD, I thought the most skilful person I knew was the woman who sold bread at the baker’s. How did she manage with her sharp knife t...
•••
Yes still this sense that those rare
soulbirds who really hear and know
touch as well as flight
must be sheltered from night’s...
•••
ONLY THE MISTS ARE REAL
The wind is a shuttle made of elm-wood,I am but an airy web of duskWhich God’s tapering fingers of a unicorn’s b...
•••
*
The sugar dissolved in the coffeeand spring began,scented and sweet.Your hands danced upon the tableThe long forgotten steps of me...
•••
The young pastor knows that it is not substance but surface that matters. Substance is what people do not often understand, or do not even ...
•••
Silence and ViolenceLong ago on a windy hunta horrible happiness abruptly bloomed in me and the landscape congealed only its pungentb...