ANTIPOET

I don't read anything, I don't write poems
I'm picking up the bodies of starved mice

knotting them together by their tails, twirling them in air
I'm the hardened snob, the face I show, arrogance

I toss into the air the corpse-copter of boy-mice
and am left behind, virgin among flax

so tall, sky is in them 
as in a cornfield, I'm lost in the flax

I'll die here without a sign that I've lived
that I dangled by their tails my only child

just the rumbling rotor of the dead wreath 
the mice flying over the broad fields

Translated by J. C. Todd


NIGHT INSECT, THE ONE WHO CANNOT BURN

The Prodigy: "Music for the Jilted Generation." At 4 a.m.

      Brown guy – he can't read – on the keyboard (oh, if only it were a piano) creeps 
from the keys' squared mountains toward the programmable chips. (I obey blindly,
pushing the keys he has tapped.)
      A nation of shepherds has walked out of Egypt. One giant, pursuing, has pricked 
the sole of his foot on a pyramid's tip. Into the footprint he tramped, the Red Sea drips.
      To die. But for the insect, there is no hope of death.
      When the sheep herders stopped to rest at the end of the dark, a column of fire, 
colossal, shot up from the night-blackened sand.
      The wings of night's insect cannot be singed although he rests, respectful, against 
the screen, flogging himself and flaming in reading's cool passion.

Translated by J. C. Todd

Giedrė Kazlauskaitė was born in Vilkaviškis, Lithuania. As a youth, she studied art in Vilnius at the M. K. Čiurlionis National School of Art (1991-1995). She is currently attending Vilnius University studying Lithuanian philology. Her honors include the 2000 Poetry Spring prize for the best debut in poetry and publication of her first novel, Farewell, School in 2001.