Petya Dubarova

You grew up in Burgas. I grew up in Port Elizabeth.By the sea buzzing with bluebottles every January. This is a kind of lamentation for thunder, manifestos, and my father the king-man, the Parisian rooftops of Picasso and Modigliani, Rilke, Hemingway and Salinger. Petya Dubarova, I say your name like we’re friends, or, something. The only thing that we have in common is that we are two female poets via Bulgaria and Africa. Like we went to school together, had sleepovers. Stuff. Shared our poetry with each other like homework instructions. I have known the experience of death in the asylum. Family pain. Philosophy poured out into verse. The exquisite fire-red lipstick of my sister. Dream and poetry. I was an actor on stage. The vanishing curve of my hip, hint of a smile on my lips I warmed to the audience. The words of Abigail George are words oblivious to empty love.

The other truth. Diary of a poet. I am a misfit. My fragile mental health, how those words ring inside my head like the tune of a roman wedding. Women poets meet the light and the darkness. Poetry will never feed you, but it fed the plays of Sarah Kane. Giorgio Manganelli, Salvatore Quasimodo and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Alda Merini. And, me. My love, sexual desire, pain, torture both physical and psychological and death. Crave psychosis. That hand to God. Love me or kill me. The voice is all. The lonely victory. I say to it, come on out and join the dance. Grotesque and curious is the spider’s web. My childhood was a web too. Isolated, the business enterprise of impoverished loneliness. I have a secret brain disease. It is known as manic depression, or, the schizoid personality disordered female brain in society. There is no male nor female mind. No dominant sex when it comes to the poets.

I think of Petya Dubarova’s Burgas. Behind the walls of the big house, you will find the sea and me. Both deceived by youth and forgiveness, sleep and memory. The sea and me have known all restoration through psychoanalysis and therapists. The gold dust of lithium therapy. Gone am I with the rainy season, domesticity, sketches in pen scratches, liberty, elders, and the ill/un-well poetess. My father uses a walker. My mother drives the car. I have had two relapses this year already. April and October. I go to the sea. Walk on the beach amongst the black ghosts dressed in the costume of breaking code. Think of being kissed by the sea. I see normal people. They see me. My sister is a normal girl. My mother was a normal girl. I am anti-normal. Anti-muse. I think of Brighton. Think of every female poet who has ever thought of committing suicide. Think of my four attempts now. Of how it felt the first time, then the second, then the third, then the fourth.

This kind of fragility in me. In imperfect and random me you will find the things you love. Flowers and roots and stems and sap. I am the sap you spat out. I am replaced by other women’s daughters. The magic salt (lithium) saved my life. Afrikaner psychiatrists. There’s something wrong with me. Guess everyone can tell. There’s something wrong with me inside. Guess my heart is broken from all of those years of trauma. Trauma, syndrome, perspective, mental cruelty. Guess they are all just plain words for all to rhyme, see and hear. You love me. Then you don’t. You accept me. Then you don’t. I think of desire. Then I don’t. I write. That’s what I have always done. Like it is a form of revenge or something. They say like father like daughter. That I am just as madness as him. Just as lunatic. Just as a black sheep. Just as burnt out from life. If I could smoke my life away, believe me I would. If I could drink my life away, believe me I would if I could, if I was so inclined. I am poet gone mad. You’re all of me, dad, and I’m all of what you are. I think I know what I am.

The psychosocial action of the black vein in a leaf. The dynamic that exists between mother and daughter. Winner standing in the milieu of the gap and her miserable daughter at being a failure at having no children and spouse. I’ll turn into an island, you’ll see.I think of you mother as I do of the flowers in your garden. How like them you are. How filled with focus and concentration you are knee-deep in your work. You’re rather something special, made of vital poetic substance,I wish you could love me the way that I love you, be proud of me the way that I am proud of you instead of you thinking of me as your mentally ill daughter. I’ll turn into a bird, you’ll see. I’m ink catching a fish catching a genius, and the owl screams while the bat twitches and the mole snitches, and the moonlight is zen. Zen.

Tonight, I’m thinking of my paternal grandfather. I’m thinking of his smarts, his tattoos, his children, his alcoholism, his baptism, his restoration, and how I flesh him out now in words. How he spoke the language of the Second World War. How he was a cold sea, a waking child in the middle of the night. How much I loved him. How much I’ll always love him in the big night’s dark grasses, and mountain air. The valley of it all razed with guns and bullets. All the people I have loved are gone, or, are dead. Flung all over the world. Never to return again to me. America, Berlin, Swaziland, Johannesburg. They all tell me how difficult it is to love me, my madness-life from the glass ceiling to the chandeliers. It is difficult to love someone like me, they say. Grandfather, I’m a cold sea too. I’m Bulgaria. I’m Africa. I live within a hemisphere of social isolation, and fear and anxiety, and stars like fireworks inside the cellular network of every nerve fibre of my brain. You’re perfect grandfather. I’m rebellious. Your other grand-daughter had a Berlin Christmas. I’ve turned into an island, you see. You’re abundant, grandfather. In everything I do, I see,I know, I acknowledge, I write. You’re still attached to me like a wishbone. You stand in solemn-mode armed with a bayonet. Then, saint, you’re home with five mouths to feed. I never went to university.

You never went to university. I never finished school. All I ever wanted to be was a poet and an editor like Ezra Pound. An admirer of Pound’s Alba and Sappho, Antigone and Joan of Arc. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. And the island’s name is Saint Helena. If you’re a flower mother, then so am I. If you’re summer good-looking, then I am wintertime’s bulbs stuck in gravity and earth. I am third eye wiser. I am the wheel, the spark.I am loneliness. I am both alone and lonely in this world ofours. With one light on, I know you are home mother. With one foot upon the stair, wind in your hair, you’re simply put an angelic flame. You, like my grandfather are a saint. You’re the axis, the planets, the stars, the sunlight. You’re the riot of the phantom thread, the golden thread of this planet, the rollercoaster machinery of Monkey Island, the theme park of Africa, the aloof poetess of Bulgaria. I am mulatto (of mixed-race descent). You, Petya, as pale as milk. Hair as thick as molasses. The colour of honey. In photographs I did not smile either when I was your age. Even in death, frozen in time you bloom at specific will. With the focus, growth-process, the speed of a flower. Like a wildflower. Like all wildflowers.

Abigail George
Abigail George
Abigail George is an author, a screenwriter and an award winning poet. She is a Pushcart Prize, two-time Best of the Net nominated, Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Prize longlisted, Writing Ukraine Prize shortlisted, Identity Theory's Editor's Choice, Ink Sweat Tears Pick of the Month poet/writer, and 2023 Winner of the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Award. She is a two-time recipient of grants from the National Arts Council, one from the Centre of the Book and another from ECPACC. She won a national high school writing competition in her teens. She was interviewed by BBC Radio 4, and for AOL.com, the USA Today Network and The Tennessean. Follow her on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram @abigailgeorgepoet.