PIOTR PRZYBYŁA
and most often i’m thinking of fatherhood
and i’m thinking of fatherhood most often, when i’m eating smoked flounder and the universe’s center of gravity shifts to the smoked flounder. i then hunger for your lips full of prayer for unborn children, including our daughter – let’s simply call her Mississippi, which flows in the veins of every furry little animal, in analgesic, but who is not with us on the Baltic Sea (somewhere right nearby, as if nothing has happened, the miracle of birth affects flounders, simply like that);
and i ask: Baltic Sea, where do you have your source? Wall Street? and the Baltic Sea is silent, that is, it murmurs: plop, plop, plop.
and a nursing mother that’s enslavement
and a nursing mother that’s enslavement, or is it loneliness that shows up in a little while (just running on double A batteries). confess. not your PIN, ETC., ET AL., but what you need this knowledge for, of what is beyond the horizon of a bike parts factory. tell me, which satellite, since you’re taking meds against cuddling forte towels, and in commercials it was guaranteed that normally after doing so one returns to the empty house, feeling at home, under a Kurt Cobain poster. you remember from metaphysics? and the word became flesh. no mention of bushes or Nirvana, not even a peep about it.
in other words: my wife is swelling with an autistic child. i feed her. i’m changing diapers. i’m listening to “Nevermind” and i’m a lonely mother. female friends from paper cutouts come to me in the form of a fax, to coil nonsense into thick skin for our kids. my breasts flow with milk, honey and with Klub 27’s complete playlist. i’m waiting for the word: mom. and she’s just salivating. drip, drop, drip to the heart of the problem.
(on all such Wednesdays i would like to leave motherhood up to her. to go for a kebab, in India).
and i’m building a beach instead of a nuclear bomb shelter
and i’m building a beach instead of a bomb shelter, because i’m no good at origami, seriously: i’m no good (nor am i commissioned to make something memorable), i’m just a weed cut off from the reaper, bland (despite the bar code);
and i’m building an ideal city with a billboard, “call and they’ll set up an air conditioner in your tears”, with a street worker whom no one needs, whom i kindly ask: hey, i’m kindly asking you to name this concrete mixer, where there are hallucinations about fat, even if what results is a rebus which i’ll never understand, fatherland;
and i’m building a simple sentence: Ola is going to preschool in Oklahoma; and a complex sentence: i would like it if you became my daughter, whom I would usher through the world of computer games, who’s capricious (itsy-bitsy).
and i’m running from loneliness
and i’m running from loneliness along the S7 expressway (although apparently stillness occasions only everything), and the Roman Catholic Church speaks to me on a weekday: pick bird cherries; because i’m lonely even on a Sunday, like everybody else (and i say: that makes the two of us, discounting popcorn of course);
and i’m running to a juke box, currently out of order, which reminds me of chewing gum, left behind among the mint, in the nettles – unnaturally and impolitely, against civilization and nature – i know: there is no unity, harmony is not a harvest of apples, each apple is picked separately (and nothing about this matter will change on account of mr. Rick’s GMOs, because telescopes are also worth mentioning);
and i’m running by myself, because there will always be the two of us, nothing in between, nothing more, nothing, not even an atom.
PIOTR PRZYBYŁA (born 1985) is an author of plays and poems. He published a collection of alphabetical letters titled wspólny [shared] (2020) and a collection of words titled Apokalipsa. After party [Apocalypse: Afterparty] (2015). He lives in Poland.
IGNACY CZWARTOS (born 1966) studied at Adam Mickiewicz University's Department of Art Education in Kalisz. He obtained his diploma in 1993 in the studio of Tadeusz Wolański. In 1995, he co-founded the OTWARTA PRACOWNIA [Open Workshop] Association and Gallery. Since January 2006, he has been the president of its board of management. Apart from painting, he draws illustrations for books and periodicals. In 2019, he was awarded the Silver Medal for Merit to Culture - Gloria Artis. He lives and works in Krakow.
