According to Index.

Lleshanaku, Luljeta

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

 Days were never this long before. Their whiteness a lactose
too difficult to dissolve. He dozes wherever he can. Gets upset only
when lunch is not ready on time. Speaks a little less each day and moves
from one sentence to the other without arguments as within a house
without corridors between rooms. Yet, sometimes he asks questions like:
"What did God have in mind when he made man?" Don't
answer: it's a rhetorical question.
 He falls asleep like a book that drops from a hand. It is said that the
most ordinary among us is a written book so huge, so high above that
human eyesight cannot capture it. That's where everything is
recorded, what we've done, said, thought, felt, even what
hasn't happened yet. Who could imagine that in a body's few
square centimeters only one cell could contain so much space for
history?
He understands other people even less, including his wife that book with
which he has lived, cover to cover, written in two different languages
placed by chance on the shelf according to index.
We need a third language to communicate. A language whose idioms and
innuendos we don't recognize. A camouflage of color to blend in
with the surroundings of tone to conceal weakness and of temperature to
shield against those that hurt us most (some preys are exposed by their
own warmth).
Now he is a closed book. No time to add or revise anything. All that
remains is touch, the touch between the leather covers the feeling he
gets on elbows, knees, hair the laughter when his arms cross over her
neck in a summer cinema while watching a movie under an open sky. 

Translations from the Albanian By Ani Gjika

Visit the WLT website to hear the author read "History Class" in Albanian and to read "Negative Space," an additional poem.

Winner of the Albanian National Silver Pen Prize in 2000 and the International Kristal Vilenica Prize in 2009, Luljeta Lleshanaku is the author of six poetry books in Albanian and three in English: Fresco: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2002), Child of Nature (New Directions, 2010), and Haywire: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a finalist for the 2013 Popescu Prize.

An Albanian American poet and translator, Ani Gjika is author of Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013). Her work appears in AGNI Online, Seneca Review, Salamander, Fishousepoems .org, and elsewhere.