The morning edition announces itself like a verdict.
The headline says the media are obsessed with hatred in public space,
yet every column is calibrated to keep that hatred softly simmering.
A commander speaks from a factory floor,
selling foreign currency out of an armored vehicle and at his home address,
promising stability on markets that no one in the queue will ever see.
Food shortages scroll by at the bottom of the screen,
a quiet banner under louder wars of opinion.
Analysts argue that leaders must charm the hesitant,
touring an unstable region with a suitcase of invitations
and a pocket full of sanctions.
Every visit is a test of loyalty to old allies,
to maps drawn by hands no one remembers
and borders that still bleed, quietly.
On the oldest map of the Balkans that survives in this archive,
Solomon’s temple stands where a city should be.
Next to each ruler stand two women,
one called Europe, the other Asia,
their dresses stitched from rivers and trade routes.
Between these two empires a territorial war of representation unfolds,
not for land, but for who gets to narrate the land.
The narrator is dead.
She tells us this in the first paragraph,
then guides us through fifteen years of her own afterlife,
folded into a city of gray courtyards and damp stairwells.
Her bones are described as lovely,
her absence as a kind of clarity.
Nothing arrives as a surprise, she says,
only as a reminder that it had already started.
In the margins of these maps, pigs grow fat and cheap.
Feed is expensive, buying prices are low,
and the animals eat the profit of several owners in advance.
Most of the farms belong to slaughterhouses anyway,
so the circle closes without suspense.
There is something like a congregation too,
a voluntary fire brigade without doors or windows,
half funded, half abandoned.
The authorities want everyone visible,
everyone on record.
In town, the intelligence office knows who belongs to which party,
who is forgiven, who is not,
who must report every morning to a ritual they call simply: attendance.
Agents move through weddings and village fairs dressed as peasants,
taking notes while the brass band plays.
Denunciation is a local industry.
Graves keep their names and dates like quiet account books,
balanced in someone else’s favor.
Meanwhile, other experts speak in another channel.
They edit the genes of cockroaches by injecting adult females,
not embryos,
so that future offspring inherit precise little errors.
They watch how stem cells decide what they will become,
how a virus can sit for months in the intestine,
patient, unhurried, as if time belongs to it.
They tell volunteers not to eat fruit for four months,
then split them into two groups:
one drinks blueberry extracts, the other a harmless powder.
They measure risk of dementia along a curve of flavonoids and forgetting.
They drill into Mars with robot hands
and find that water stayed there longer than anyone thought,
trapped inside minerals older than our favorite catastrophes.
For conscious experience, they say,
signals must reach the cortex.
Yet in the base of the brainstem
there is a small wedge-shaped nucleus
that seems to choose which signals enter the stage at all.
Minimal equipment, two components,
and suddenly the entire world is either foreground or removed.
Everywhere, technique multiplies stimuli.
Every moment we are exposed to more than we can sort,
so we invent filters,
and filters invent us back.
The financial report for the slaughterhouse region
is read in the same calm voice as the bulletin on cyber threats.
Anonymous bomb scares travel through hundreds of thousands of servers,
parents are advised to stay calm and speak to their children,
a priest is sentenced for abusing a minor,
a murderer on a scooter is said to have followed his victim,
shot him in the back,
then vanished into ordinary traffic.
In another alphabet, commentators speak of mature ghost topics,
of explosions and gunfire,
a black limousine full of suspicious spirits,
a mechanical heart pulsing under a heavy suit.
They mention Venus and Apollo,
space missions, official seals withdrawn from circulation,
and yet they insist they are hopeful, and very good.
This is the power of the law of the Lord of Lords, they say.
It is a good place to stay,
a fine place to live.
They ask whether love and respect still have a sign,
or if the priestly voice has simply learned to imitate seriousness,
gazing at the counter as if numbers were sacred relics.
The Middle Ages, we are told,
borrowed their apocalypses from the end of the world
and discovered that systems of fire
can produce poetic images without being epic.
Chroniclers, Byzantine and Berber alike,
annotate victories and defeats around chapels for invalids,
where relics of soldiers and sovereigns
congeal into marble and gilded domes.
In one of those buildings,
under a curved ceiling painted with clouds,
a fountain murmurs like an excuse
for exploratory voyages and academic sessions.
Dates pile up: 1674, 1687, 1694,
lines of water and gunpowder crossing in footnotes.
On another page, Ptolemy appears.
His Quadripartitum, also called Tetrabiblos,
circulates through medieval Islamic astrology,
through Latin commentaries,
through backrooms where charts spread like contraband.
Some say the title is fictional,
a mask for an older book that will not give its true name.
Analysis, he writes,
is divided into predictions of two kinds.
First, the essential genetic qualities of a birth,
those pre-natal influences that inscribe temperament,
aptitude, and inclination.
Second, the natural qualities that become visible over time,
through disease, marriage, wealth, poverty,
the slow unfolding of character under pressure.
Philosophy, he reminds us from some distant chapter,
does not need to be abandoned
just because some who mimic it are obvious villains.
Between all these pages, an amphibian rests in a shallow dish of water,
its skin recording the laboratory’s light like a mute logbook.
A dog drinks, then curls up under a desk,
unimpressed by empires and ephemerides.
Someone writes in the margin:
the oldest thing pulls away from the whole,
leaving only a switch, a key, a trace,
a button, another key, a lock.
Nothing is only there by accident,
nothing entirely belongs to the alternation either.
Hector, Attalus, an emperor, an adopted brother,
a city called Aqua that may or may not still exist,
an interface named 169.
The dead narrator watches all of this from her late summer field,
aware that the book knows it is arriving too late,
into a world overmapped and underread.
Newsprint, scientific reports, liturgical architecture,
trade routes of pigs and planets,
martyrs and market indices,
viruses and servers,
all pressed together on the same thin paper,
folded once, then again,
and left on a doorstep at dawn.

darko vukic 26 nov 2025