SAY FIRE
No one writes home
These days a thorn bush
hums in my throat and I tend to it
with seawater. No other news.
The landscape is still the same
tired thing: paper
pressed flat, and a crumpled pulse.
Sometimes,
I go down to the coast to watch a wave
retract its gesture. How we consume
ourselves. How the wave
erases nothing but its own longing.
Once, I wanted to return,
but already a sky lay withered
in the window, so I set off
to where the body is a net
lowered into the wind.
If I ever arrive, if I ever
forget, maybe the world
will become a surge of oleander,
and I a floating thing.
With love,
No one writes home
These days a thorn bush
hums in my throat and I tend to it
with seawater. No other news.
The landscape is still the same
tired thing: paper
pressed flat, and a crumpled pulse.
Sometimes,
I go down to the coast to watch a wave
retract its gesture. How we consume
ourselves. How the wave
erases nothing but its own longing.
Once, I wanted to return,
but already a sky lay withered
in the window, so I set off
to where the body is a net
lowered into the wind.
If I ever arrive, if I ever
forget, maybe the world
will become a surge of oleander,
and I a floating thing.
With love,
A Lover learns my tongue
No open field or house
made of windows. In this language you kneel,
you scrape with your voice tar
from the walls until it silts
the roof of your mouth.
The way the sun enters
through the curtains, pawing
the unknown face on the bed,
you too enter on tiptoe—
against you everything
that won’t let me go,
against you armies and sirens bleating red,
why is every language a funeral?
Above our bodies pulped to dark
mustachioed verbs collapse
their batons.
Lay down
your arms. Pretend dead.
When they come closer kiss me
with all of god’s holy names.
(Owls, ℅ Ningiukulu Teevee, © 2025.)
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Selma Asotić—a Sarajevo-born, bilingual writer—earned dual BA degrees in English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Sarajevo, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she worked closely with Robert Pinsky. She’s interested in poetry and revolution. She’s taught writing to undergraduates at BU and NYU, and ESL to adult learners at community-based organisations in Sarajevo and New York. She’s also worked as a translator and interpreter. Her first book of poetry was published in both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 2022 and was awarded the Stjepan Gulin Prize in 2022 and the Štefica Cvek Prize in 2023.
Archipelago here.
Selma Asotić—a Sarajevo-born, bilingual writer—earned dual BA degrees in English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Sarajevo, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she worked closely with Robert Pinsky. She’s interested in poetry and revolution. She’s taught writing to undergraduates at BU and NYU, and ESL to adult learners at community-based organisations in Sarajevo and New York. She’s also worked as a translator and interpreter. Her first book of poetry was published in both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 2022 and was awarded the Stjepan Gulin Prize in 2022 and the Štefica Cvek Prize in 2023.
‘Translation is an essential part of my writing practice. It’s not external to it as a secondary process that comes after the act of writing. It also seldom moves in one direction, from source to target text, because, for me, there is no such thing as the original and the translated text. The book Say Fire exists in multiple languages and none of its versions can be described as an “original.” They are all products of translation, or transcreation, which is the term best suited to describe how I write.’
S.A.
