Drawing by Vidha Saumya

Yanita Georgieva is a Bulgarian poet and journalist. In 2022, she received the Out-Spoken Prize for Page Poetry and was shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize. She is a member of the Southbank New Poets Collective and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. You can find her work in The London Magazine, Waxwing, bath magg, The Cardiff Review, and elsewhere. Her debut pamphlet, Small Undetectable Thefts, is coming out with Broken Sleep in March 2024.

Please don’t talk
physics to me.


The people are tired
and money is made off emotion.


Another day, day, day,
then a sliver of time.


Good luck figuring out
whether to drown or


swim in it. You are free,
of course,


to use it up as you please. Or
save it. Scarcity principle.


Better have ten days
in the proverbial sack than


an afternoon of enjoyment.
And what does that entail


exactly? Due to a fault
of communication, I couldn’t work out


what I wanted. Really
wanted.


Hello? I said, and when no one
answered back, I said


yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,
yes, until


repetition stripped the word of meaning
and left only sound.

Yanita Georgieva - Swiss Cheese