Our Daily Bread, Courtesy the artist Tino Perdić

The Devil is at the keyboards.—Blaise Cendrars

one hears a hymn to killing
a hymn to lead bullets
piercing through the human flesh
like angels
entering the plexuses of saints
like fast trains
drilling through the Sub-Atlantic tunnels
like nails driven through the wet boards
on the 37th floor of a high-rise
like a hooker’s smile
biting into your heart

 

Translated from the Croatian by

Tomica Bajsić

TOMICA BAJSIĆ is a poet, publicist, translator and editor, born in Zagreb. He has published several collections of poetry and won prestigious national awards. He is the president of the Croatian PEN Centre and the editor of his own publishing house Druga Priča.

Damir Šodan

DAMIR ŠODAN is a poet, playwright and translator, born in Split. He has published seven collections of poetry, three books of selected plays as well an anthology of Croatian neorealist poetry and the anthology of contemporary European poetry, Are There Any Poets in Monte Carlo (Croatian PEN, 2022).

Tino Perdić

Tino Perdić (b. 1977, Split, Croatia) is a self-taught visual artist and a member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists (HULU Split), a national body primarily comprising academically trained artists. His latest body of work, the Liberalism series, represents an expanded and logical continuation of his ongoing exploration of the post-religious world, placing humanity and its existential questions at the center. In a broad sense, his work functions as a form of thought experiment—an attempt to articulate the contemporary human condition and capture the unspoken, often overlooked spirit of the times. While his pieces may appear critical, they are intended as documentary in nature: observational rather than judgmental. Perdić approaches art as a means to catalog and interpret human experience, much like names describe objects without altering their essence. His work seeks to reveal what lies obscured beneath collective subjectivity, avoiding binary interpretations in favor of deeper, more nuanced insight.