So, exile 1410

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.
       .

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.

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