Country Song (Memory of Rain)

Sofija Popovska
Translated from the Macedonian by Sofija Popovska

Eyes are difficult because they’re teeth;
Sometimes rich and gleaming, gliding through a gilded feast,
Wrapped in violent red velvet, and luxurious dead ends;
(But I love the) murky, melancholic, playing matted music, looking over barren fields—
Fields are difficult because they’re hands
Knots and rivers laying over eyes.
Blue smell of rain and dirt—veins smell like the skies split open, like the road behind slipping into the past.
Fingertips smell like a promise—
Ten thousand graves sigh at once;
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
Bruises disappear into the past and a promise draws near.
An open grave plays the memory of rain when handled gently. The earth smells like fingertips on eyelids—a homeland rough and transient.
Heathens love the rain like I love the shadow of your eyelashes over freckles and undiscovered celestial bodies.
The sky splits open and veins cascade down nostalgically.
The road behind disappears into bruised earth, into ten thousand graves. I come to you, bringing a memory of rain.

What Keeps Us

Poems to Read in Community

Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Sofija Popovska’s “Country Song (Memory of Rain),” translated from the Macedonian by Sofija Popovska, as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself. 

Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers hereRead poems by selecting below.

What Keeps

Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

Read >

This Era

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

Read >

Talisman

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

Read >

Rewind

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Read >

Rationale

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

Read >

Pupusas

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

Read >

Psalm III

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

Read >

Night Song

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

Read >

Handfuls

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

Read >

Eurydice

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Read >

December

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

Read >

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Headshot of ofija Popovska

Sofija Popovska is a poet, translator, and essayist currently based in Germany. She works as an editor-at-large at Asymptote Journal and her other work can be found at Context: Review for Comparative Literature and Cultural Research, Tint Journal, GROTTO Journal, and Farewell Transmission, among others.

Cover for Grotto Journal

Issue 2

New York, New York

Cofounding Editor
PJ Lombardo

Cofounding Editor
Maxwell Rabb

Grotto is a journal of surrealist-grotesque poetics. 

Human life on this planet is monstrous (inseparable from both beauty and horror). Grotto exists against the demands of shame: which degrades art-life and sabotages the sincerity required to render heaven on earth. 

Living with metamorphic garbage is the only peace. 

The surrealist-grotesque is a horizon. When land and air meet, a brink derives, where birds fire their softest songs. What we mean is: we want anything that flies. 

This is a poetry journal; however, we will consider narrative-leaning-prose-poems, lyric micro-essays, apophatic flash, etc. as long as the surreal and the grotesque are evernear. 

Love each other, throb in the flora, 
GROTTO 

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