THE OTHER SISTER

It’s good to have a sister. A sister blooms early,

before plants, before the moon

and feathered creatures.

She is the first worldly light under your roof,

a lucid light bulb, the straight and sturdy surface

of a dining room table.

And when people ask me about my family,

nothing is hard to explain

except for that fine golden dust, that falls gently

from a beautiful primrose somewhere in space.

A lovely flower that once had the role of a light bulb,

but with time purposes surrender.

A sister is the likeness of fingers,

the space between one’s eyes is a measure of happiness,

in short, a sister is a very simple thing,

a carton of black milk.

And especially, a glass that tips over

on the dining room table

and it’s a must to tuck a primrose in, behind the ear.

It’s good to be the other sister,

illiterately scribbling with a green crayon

across the handwriting of a school assignment,

sucking on the tendrils of young ABCs

and seeing that in the stem used to climb into the bud

someone has already built fragile but useful stairs.

The other sister sleeps in the basin, drinks from the basin

and slips her foot into the basin, trying it on.

When the stems split into two

thundering trees, the other sister will despair

and look up at the moon like a wolf.

The other sister is part wolf,

part market of treasures. She doesn’t let go,

she watches over.

Translated from Croatian by Chelsea Sanders

Ana Brnardić was born in Zagreb, Croatia. She holds a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature and the Croatian Language and Literature from the University of Zagreb, as well as a Master’s Degree in Music (violin) from the Music Academy in Zagreb. She has published five collections of poems. Her debut collection of poems, Some Sage’s Pen (1998), garnered her critical acclaim and two prestigious awards: the Goran Award for Young Poets and the Slavic Award from the Croatian Writer’s Association for the best debut poetry collection. Her collection of poems Waltzing Snakes (2005), received the Kvirin Award for Young Poets. Her other poetry collections are Genesis of Birds (2009), Uphill (2015) and A Wolf and a Birch (2019). Selected poems from Brnardić were translated into Romanian in the book Hotel cu muzicieni (transl. by Dumitru M. Ion) in 2009. And Genesis of Birds was translated into Swedish (Fåglarnas tillblivelse transl. by Đorđe Žarković) in 2016. She takes part in European Poetry platform “Versopolis”. Her poems are translated into fifteen languages and included in anthologies, in Croatia and abroad. Aside from writing poetry and, occasionally, book reviews, Brnardić also works with with poet and translator Adrian Oproiu to translate contemporary Romanian literature into Croatian. She also serves as the General Secretary for the Croatian Writers’ Society (h,d,p,).