Carmen Firan
	Real Estate I have a house for sale in a quiet neighborhood only a couple of steps from hell —location is everything— the dead body always exits feet first and is tempted to run downhill while the soul gets yanked free through a window by a well-intentioned grandmother who sacrificed her day to show off the banquet high in the heavens   I have a house for sale with new roof and triple-glazed windows, it comes down to predicting the future the dead will want perfect isolation high ceilings to keep cool in the summer and to give the impression of open space, the sky a stone’s throw away, the city the third stop on the express line, the best yeshiva just around the corner   for quite a while now I’ve tried to sell the house roof walls and me, the timing’s bad, my Chinese neighbors suggest suspicious of the grapevine which throws black grapes over their fence mimicking my childhood transplanted into a foreign body, people are no longer in a rush to buy, the planet keeps getting warmer, everything’s growing, enlarging, swelling we’ll pop like a balloon, spread throughout the universe and create other utopias   OK, but in the here and now I have an old brick house for sale motionless on the threshold I’m waiting for buyers from other planets— please hurry, it’s not even my house   Where colors still have sounds I’m writing to tell you: keep away from death   she’ll come again anyway wrapping her egg in a nest of bright wires run as far as you can every evening around nine when her finger weighs down the hand of the alarm clock another dead weight this old man a bit to the right, that woman even farther, a row of birds on the window ledge pecking at my heart   she guards your threshold like a trusty watchdog lest you lavish too much of yourself on this world that needs no more than your name on a sheet of paper   I snap her spine and flee as far as I can where colors still have sounds blind—she helps me cross the street she knows me by sight   on the other side a silent black dog sits and waits -translated by Adam J. Sorkin