These poems, which are supposed to make you laugh, pierce you through and through. Indeed, they do double-duty. A consternation arises, which sensitises and teaches something.

Smiling through tears, laughing at one’s own suffering – these are the first slogans that come to the mind of the reader of Justyna Bargielska’s new collection of verse, entitled A Selection of Stand-ups. One comes away with the sensation of the poem being treated as a gag, a cabaret monologue, and it’s actually therapy, a manner of dealing with depression. The word “selection” also indicates that the author has chosen a particular strategy to speak of herself and the world, a manner of taking advantage of poetry in the ongoing process of the illness of life. In this sense, poetry helps her to endure while at the same time offering a pattern of endurance to others, showing how one can “bravely” deal with suffering, abandonment, loneliness. Most frequently, the lonely woman can’t handle things – and this constitutes the strength and truth of these poems. The reader soon begins to take her side, as he or she also sometimes feels helpless in the face of the unknown powers that decide his or her fate. Bargielska is familiar with that most oppressive power: the lack of love. With humour, she speaks of what it’s like when someone ceases to love you, refuses to acknowledge the time spent together, refuses to recognise children had together. And so such poems would never have arisen if not for the shock, the experience of abandonment. The narrative voice in these poems is disoriented, struggling to reorganise her life, to create some system that would bind together its senses and significances. The narrator laughs, and at the same time weeps. She reaches for psychotropic medicines, seeks healing through psychiatry, but even that is not capable of returning to her a sense of security. One reads this book with a lump in the throat, even though one’s lips again and again burst wide in laughter.

Karol Maliszewski

Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski

Justyna Bargielska

THE TOES OF MY SHOES

Ever since I’ve stopped desiring you, life,

the clearing jeers at the fire, songs

turn off by themselves, but you must know

that I still adore this season of the year.

It still stays light long, but there’s no swelter.

The clearing jeers at the fire, the sun

slips over the surface, and the water

is cold, flies are no longer caught

in the spider silk of Indian summer, as it’s no

longer about enduring, the thing now is

to look or at least glance outside, but still

I adore this season of the year, ’cos what else remains for me.

Although, you know what, no.

Ever since I’ve stopped desiring you, life,

I can gather everything into a parenthesis, and then

polish it ad infinitum, so it will look

like a bowl on which one serves

the heads of prophets, and not like a parenthesis.

That’s what I do and this too I adore, I adore.

THE BLUE DANUBE

Quite simply we made love,

on the tenth floor. Someone down below was playing “The Blue Danube”.

We ought to toss him a coin – I said.

We went out onto the balcony, naked, trying to hit the man with the squeezebox,

now with a fiver, now two złoty, a fiver again and a tenner in a kerchief

weighted with a stone.

You got bored quickly throwing coins at the artist.

But for a long time thereafter, when you already cared less, I kept throwing,

and throwing.

WHAT’S NEW

It’s Saturday. This past week I pronounced thirteen words.

Hello, thanks, goodbye – to the delivery boy from the market.

I can’t look at you – to the mirror.

Why can’t you love me – to you.

Only the delivery boy replied. Hello and goodbye.

WHERE TO REPORT THIS

He said he doesn’t know me, and we’ve had a child together.

How could I have had his child

if he doesn’t know me? We were sitting in the car

deep in the snow, and I was holding that child in my arms,

and he said he’d introduce me to Edyta and Luiza,

if only I admit that I belong to him –

So I admitted it, and now he says he doesn’t know me.

So I remind him of the apple festival, the first outing

we took our child to.

I remind him of the sacrifice of the man, who was to be macerated

in a tub full of apple cider vinegar until he vanished.

It’s more than true, it’s logical really,

and still he can’t remember. You don’t remember – I ask –

how your son saved that man with the lasers of his eyes

from an unnecessary barbaric martyrdom,

though killing, it’s true, everyone else there?

So you don’t remember. The main thing is I do

and I’ll tell it to everyone who deigns to listen to me.

Translated by Charles S. Kraszewski