Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses
Fiction by Karen Fastrup
Translated from the Danish by Tara Chase

Copenhagen is a collection of eleven short stories that map the city of København through subtle intertextuality. Each story takes place in a different location within the urban landscape, and these sites become a network through which its citizens move, their lives brushing up against each other but without ever connecting.

Not a wind
is there something
threatening behind
all that stands still
only the gaze shifts
seeking signs
while darkness un
noticeably encroaches
in things
a cold makes itself
felt in the flesh the vast language and nothing
stands still

A DOG FIGHT

A fragrance of wild mint
beneath the twilight ladder
there must be a language one can use
to say things as they are
neither more or less
there must be a hole in the lid
of the body so it can rain
into the heart
an evening of granite of nothing.
The dogs are fighting. Goodbye sugar
sprinkles onto the bittersweet fax.
We must have many housed
so death can lose itself.
Everything is here a little while longer yet
and the horseradish is in flower.

EPIGRAM

You can spend an entire life
in the company of words
not ever finding
the right one.

Just like a wretched fish
wrapped in Hungarian
newspapers.
For one thing it is dead,
for another it doesn’t understand
Hungarian.