yes! porridge makes me strong
and filling it with butter won’t kill me either
every other morning I am faced with the grueling task
of tackling with my bare hands

a lingonberry cloudberry gooseberry
cherry or plum jam jar’s lid
a challenge to my mouse-gnawn wrist
if I don’t grab for some kind of weapon

but right now golden potatoes are crackling in a pan
they crave a discrete stir while frying
still I am able to snatch at least a minute
for meditation

and unlike potatoes I do not want
to be stirred.

Kalju Kruusa (b. 1973) is an Estonian poet and translator. The poem “gut feeling” is from his third collection of poems, Pilvedgi mindgi liigutavadgi (I Am Carried Away By The Clouds, 2008), which was awarded the Gustav Suits Prize for philosophically profound poetry. He translates primarily from English, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese into Estonian.

Brandon Lussier’s poems and translations have been published or are forthcoming in the Harvard Review, The Columbia Review, Circumference, and elsewhere. His translation work has been anthologized in New European Poets and A Sharp Cut: Contemporary Estonian Poetry, and was reviewed in the Boston Review. He has spoken about literary translation at Princeton University and the American Literary Translators Association and is a former creative writing Fulbright Scholar. He was a semifinalist for the 2011 “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize for Poetry.

Homepage photograph via Flickr by Vermario