In the morning we’re told to line up and waitOur turn to have the probe fastenedto our pregnant stomachsa centipede growing impatientin the bloodstream of the hospital wardWe listenThe brains of migrant birds calibrate their compasses,a cyclone engraves March into the backbone of January,outside the window the bird engineshum louder than the tiny heartsCan one live inside a heron and not disrupt its magneticsense?With the thawing wind the brain bark will loosen up,and tonight I’ll dream abouttwo, three of ushaving breakfast, togetherOur children resembling the kids in ads,smiles multiplied by jamWe listenOur wrists swell with anxieties,carcinomas slumberunder the unkind nurses’ tonguesThrough the antiseptic tunnelsthe steps of monitor machines and IV standsclank the loudestalways coming in pairs like procreationAs they’re walking throughour bodies grown for the occasion,we seem to feelgod’s hoovespattering against our skin
Preparing the Body
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“Preparing the Body” from CLOSED SEASON: by Monika Herceg.
Published by Sandorf Passage on October 7, 2025.
English Translation Copyright © 2025 by Marina Veverec.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Dirk Skiba
Monika Herceg, a Croatian poet, screenwriter, dramatist, editor, and activist, is the author of three poetry books: Početne koordinate (2018), Lovostaj (2019), and Vrijeme prije jezika (2020). She has received many prestigious national and international awards, including Goran za mlade pjesnike, Kvirin, Fran Galovic, Slavic, Mostovi Struge, Na vrh jezika, Biber, Zvonko Milkovic, Lapis Histriae, and European Poet of Freedom Award 2024. A physicist by profession, she spent her childhood in the village of Pecki near Petrinja. A mother of two, she lives and works in Zagreb.
Marina Veverec studied literary translation at the University of Zadar, Croatia, and is also an alumnus of the BCLT Summer School. Her English-language translations have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Exchanges, Poetry International Web, Asymptote, Harvard Review, LitHub, and others. She also translated Initial Coordinates (Sandorf Passage, 2022), Monika Herceg’s first book of poetry to appear in English. She serves as the translation editor at [sic] – Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation.
The poems gathered in this award-winning collection by Monika Herceg fuse physics with politics to create righteously angry and alarmingly memorable poems that explore new ways to express the horrors women the world over have been, and are continually, forced to deal with in a painfully patriarchal world.
“Monika Herceg’s poetry is like a wound through which the world shines—painful, true, saturated with memory and anger, but also with hope for new stories. Her poems, arising from the experience of war, exile, and violence, transcend the boundaries of time and geography to stand up for those who never had a voice. This is poetry that is not afraid to speak of responsibility—for Europe, for women, for those excluded by systems and ideologies. Herceg writes about a history that no longer belongs to the victors, and about beauty that cannot fit into the confines we previously knew.”
—Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel laureate
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