Circling Zero - Ana Ristovic

We are independent women.

We breathe asthmatically

while waiting for new love. We pop pills

of unfulfilled promises. We drown in murky dreams.

Twenty-four hours a day we painfully make love

to a migraine and forgive her

because she is female.

 

Independent. For our men

we cook dishes taught to us

by their predecessors.

Clitoris-shaped pasta.

Ketchup dripping like menstrual blood

yet promising only the licking of plates.

But still we believe in the arc de triomphe

which rises between the bedsheets

and the kitchen table.

 

We play them the music

we lost our virginity to.

Pensive among seductive

lingerie, we keep underwear

with the invisible track of old sperm.

We gyrate our hips as if turning a mill:

after a while it drips

only sticky bitterness.

 

Yet we claim that we no longer believe

in sharing the same breath

between mouths

and more often we’re left breathless

yet we claim that we use the centrifuge

of the washing machine

only when sitting on it –

good intercourse may occur.

In the prewash and rinse cycles

instead of clothes we throw in

pieces of our thinned out skin.

 

Independent women. We censor

our all to soft words.

We support the revision of feelings

and the theory arguing that innocent Eve

was created first, and that Adam

bit into the poisoned apple

because he wished for God to create

two more phalluses from the serpent:

poor thing, he thought one

wouldn’t be enough.

 

Independent, we claim, more than ever.

Yet during lonely nights, in our tight vulva

more and more, we insert a magical finger,

as if placing a bullet into the chamber

which refuses to fire.

And we smile with sadness in dreamless dreams.

And the sage hand, circling

the soft zero.

---

Ana Ristovic (born 1972) Serbia

Translated by Steven and Maja Teref

Source: National Poetry Library