strands
  • Home
  • Competitions
    • Strands International Flash Fiction Competition >
      • Results
      • Competition Judge
      • Submit
    • Water - Short Story (May 31, 2017) >
      • Results
      • Important Dates
      • Rules
    • Fire - Short Story (Nov 30, 2016) >
      • Results
      • Competition Judge
      • Important Dates
  • Contact
  • Call for Submissions
  • Lit Sphere
    • Novels >
      • Mrs. Saville by Ted Morrissey
      • Shueli's Star by Anna Sujatha Mathai
    • Poetry
    • Visual Art
    • Short Fiction
    • Creative Nonfiction
    • Reviews
    • Interviews
Strands Publishers

LIT SPHERE

Ezine

So, exile 1410

11/28/2019

0 Comments

 
Poetry ~ Dragan Todorovic

​        After a kiss you will go into exile.
 
       Exiles shop in cheap supermarkets, five minutes before closing, buying expired food at reduced prices. Next day their gums bleed. They rinse their mouth with Listerine, until they lose all sense of language and are capable of saying anything.
        Exiles are never to be trusted.
 
        After a kiss you will go into exile.
 
       While driving on the roads that were written and never built, so darkened and never lit, you think of her. Midnight news on Four: The war in the East has reached new levels of brutality. People are caressed by their enemy and left shivering, opening their bodies in vain. Desert winds enter where love should have been. They die on the inside; on the outside alive.
 
         After a kiss you will go into exile.
 
       Later, you meet the ghost whose room you’re sharing for the night. She is silent at first, looking at you. You remind me of someone, she says. You put your glass down and reach for her hair. And you can feel it and cannot feel it. And she does kiss you and doesn’t kiss you, and you are in her but never in her, and everything opens when everything closes, and your body is empty but your body is a temple.
       You sleep with the faint light next to you.
       You never were. She never was.
       After a kiss you are in exile.
       .
Picture
Dragan Todorovic is the author of a dozen books of non-fiction, poetry and fiction. His novel Diary of Interrupted Days was shortlisted for Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Amazon First Novel Award and other prizes. The Book of Revenge, his memoir, won The Nereus Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Sound art project In My Language I am Smart, commissioned by CBC Radio One and Deep Wireless Festival, was published on a CD in 2012. His works have often been anthologised.
He teaches creative writing at the University of Kent and is mostly interested in liminal forms of expression.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Strands

    Fiction~Poetry~Translations~Reviews~Interviews~Visual Arts

    Archives

    October 2022
    March 2022
    December 2021
    September 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    December 2020
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Competitions
    • Strands International Flash Fiction Competition >
      • Results
      • Competition Judge
      • Submit
    • Water - Short Story (May 31, 2017) >
      • Results
      • Important Dates
      • Rules
    • Fire - Short Story (Nov 30, 2016) >
      • Results
      • Competition Judge
      • Important Dates
  • Contact
  • Call for Submissions
  • Lit Sphere
    • Novels >
      • Mrs. Saville by Ted Morrissey
      • Shueli's Star by Anna Sujatha Mathai
    • Poetry
    • Visual Art
    • Short Fiction
    • Creative Nonfiction
    • Reviews
    • Interviews