Though the Sky is Embroidered by a Zigzagging Bat by Olga Stehlíková

the golden revolutionary song

My plate holds the gold standard,
investment-wise,
I cover and console myself with it, 
as my ɒksɪdʒ(ə)n runs out.
I write because no-one listens to me
when I’m silent.
Heya hey, friends, are you snacking?

 

Should I get bored, I put on entertaining                                                                             programmes
on the dishwasher,
I shut no one in the dishwasher, the grimy one,
I put a tablet into the dishwasher,
no one is blissfully circumfused inside the

                                                        dishwasher.
When I’m bored, I read in eyes.
When I’m bored, I force myself
into golden activities,
saintly chores. 

 

*

 

a look

I’ll keep stroking the back of your neck
for so long till it grows a little stalk
the magic bean of our love 

 

I’ll squeeze you in your tightest spot 
as if you really had one 
I’ll drown you in my shallows 
like a mouse 

 

at the slightest touch I’ll spill out like the blossom of

                                                                an aged peony 
I’ll keep staring into your eyes for so long
you won’t be able to tell a look 
from the daub we’ve made together

 

there’ll be a large vaccination check
and then we’ll make new better children
less akin to torrential rains

 

think twice about turning me down
think hard
 

Olga Stehlíková works as a freelance writer, book editor and critic with a focus on contemporary Czech literature. She has edited dozens of books of poetry and prose for various Czech publishing houses and her poems have appeared in many Czech and foreign literary magazines. Her debut book of poetry, Týdny (Weeks, Dauphin 2014), won the Magnesia Litera Book Prize for poetry, the premier Czech poetry prize. Her second collection of short poems Vejce/Eggs was published in 2017 in a unique edition, together with an LP album with music by Tomáš Braun. Her third collection was An Exclamation Point as High as a Pole (2018). Her fourth collection, The Siren’s Song, was published in 2022. She also published separately a single poem What a Mother Speaks of When She is Silent, in 2021. Olga’s poems have been translated into seventeen languages. She has also published six award-winning children’s books and was awarded the first Critic of the Year Award in 2018. Though the Sky Is Embroidered by a Zigzagging Bat is the first comprehensive selection of Olga Stehlíková’s poems to be published as a book in English translation.

 

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David Vichnar is senior lecturer at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University, Prague. He is also active as an editor, publisher and translator. His publications include Joyce Against Theory (2010), Subtexts: Essays on Fiction (2015) and The Avant-Postman Experiment in Anglophone and Francophone Fiction in the Wake of James Joyce (2023). He has translated into English H by Philippe Sollers (from French), Melchior Vischer’s Second through Brain (from German), and also Louis Armand’s Snídaně o půlnoci from English to Czech. He has been programme director of the annual Prague Microfestival and manages Litteraria Pragensia Books and Equus Press. He was the editor-in-chief (2006 – 2016) of Hypermedia Joyce Studies, the first online journal of Joyce scholarship. His articles on contemporary experimental writers as well as translations of contemporary poetry and fiction – Czech, German, French and Anglophone – have appeared in numerous journals and magazines.