Magnet
i
Illustration by Joanna Grochocka
Experiences

Magnet

Krystyna Dąbrowska
Reading
time 2 minutes

They didn’t live together, which meant
they had two fridges for their growing collection
of magnets. The prettiest lived on his.
Twin face of a woman: the moon part
looking at us, half-hidden behind the sun.
Playful battles ensued over that magnet,
his favorite: she stole it on the sly,
he grabbed her by the hand
to return that temporary plunder
to its central place
on the pantheon of the fridge.
Now, a half-year since their breakup,
they meet up in her courtyard
to exchange keys and books,
the first she’s seen him since that time.
Will he finally explain? “You look nice in that jacket.”
At home, like a robot, she hangs up the keys,
retrieves her books from the paper bag.
At the very bottom, she finds the magnet.

 

Information

Breaking news! This is the last of your five free articles this month. You can get unlimited access to all our articles and audio content with our digital subscription.

Subscribe

Author’s commentary:

Stanisław Barańczak divided poets into two categories: ‘framers’ and ‘extenders’. An extender is one who throughout her entire life writes a single long poem in fragments. Her poems tend not to have titles to underscore the open-ended nature of the whole project. A framer, by contrast, titles her texts, treating every poem like a distinct entity. I consider myself a framer. But here I resolved to adopt more of an extender’s way of writing – part of a series of poems about the story of two people and the end of their relationship. It’s possible to read “Magnet” as a separate poem, but it’s also part of an extended cycle on the same theme.

 

Also read:

Confession
i
Drawing from Przekrój's archives
Experiences

Confession

Krystyna Dąbrowska

Three of us pretend to be priests
during the long break after gym.
In the changing room girls jostle in lines,
flushed from basketball or dodgeball.
They shriek and compete
for who has the most sins.
The chairs become confessionals,
and we kneel before the backrests.
Boys drop in from the locker room next door,
followed by kids from other grades.
The whole school erupts
in a frenzy of false confessions instead
of confessing falsehoods to that stranger
behind the screen in a dark booth.
Our penance: chewing bitter
rowan-berries—
a few or a fistful depending
on the seriousness of the sin,
the liveliness of the yarns, pieced together
from adults’ conversations, laughter, the onslaught
of images during drowsy lessons, the fears
when you wake at night and gaze
between buildings up at heaven.

How many such days: sprinting on the playground,
tossing a medicine ball in gym, and just beyond the wall
this contest of stories, improvised
or artistically arranged in advance.
Till they caught us. It ended with a reprimand
from the principal and the priest thundering,
“You’ll have to confess that confession!”

Continue reading