I live here only with pigeons
in a building everyone abandoned
and which even I am abandoning
to walk now through the innards of apartments
and observe fingerprints of former neighbors on pieces of furniture
in the morning I go onto the balcony among shingles and bird droppings
such is my life
blurred windows to the past
and the sediment of dreams against soaked walls
—Tereza Riedlbauchová (from Paris Notebook, 2013)
Už tu bydlím jenom s holuby
v domě který všichni opustili
a který opouštím i já
lze se teď procházet v útrobách bytů
a na kusech nábytku pozorovat otisky bývalých sousedů
ráno vycházím na pavlač mezi štěrk a holubince
takový je můj život
zastřená okna k minulosti
a u promoklých zdí nánosy snů
—Tereza Riedlbauchová (from Paris Notebook, 2013)
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Tereza Riedlbauchová is a poet, publisher and the deputy director of the Museum of Czech Literature. She is the founder of Literární salon, a publishing house which focuses on the work of beginning poets and has produced twenty-two titles since 2007. Her publications include the poetry collections Blue Apples (2000), Great Biskupov Night (2005), Don Vitor Playing and Other Poems (2009), Paris Notebook (2013) and the lyric poem The Image of the Weeping Virgin (2002). A translation of Great Biskupov Night was published in Bulgaria in 2011. Her poems have appeared – in French, Spanish, English, Bulgarian and Polish – in many magazines and anthologies in the Czech Republic and abroad. She has taken part in international festivals of poetry in Canada, France, Bulgaria and Slovakia.
Stephan Delbos is a New England-born writer who lives in Prague, where he teaches at Anglo-American University and Charles University and edits the web journal B O D Y. His poetry, essays and translations have appeared most recently in Agni Online, Atlanta Review, BlazeVOX, Fourteen Hills, The Istanbul Review, New Letters, and Zoland Poetry. He is the editor of From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011). His play “Chetty’s Lullaby,” about the life of trumpet legend Chet Baker, has been produced in New York and San Francisco. He is currently translating the collection The Absolute Gravedigger, by Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval, which is scheduled for publication by Twisted Spoon Press in 2015.