The Voice Over

Here, nothing is as he would’ve liked,

The one who wanted to lie here.

Here, nothing is as I would’ve liked

Where I would want to lie,

And nevertheless an obvious sense of rightness, which wasn’t mine,

Extended both time and space like a festive table.

2.

Doctors, lectors and actors, young widows

Leave their photos-and-cards,

Leave their bottles-and-hearts,

All their hurried confessions on the window-

Sill of love’s limit, the utmost, the upmost rung,

The final address—the gravestone,^* but beyond

The gravestone, there is nothing, not a bond.

There is no more. Just money on your tongue.

America (his place of death), Europa

(The one he stole and bedded, his affair)

And native land (with hand outstretched elsewhere,

Her features covered up and bottom bare)—

The three perform a primavera ring,

Their heads together, in an ancient vein.

But every tombstone is the edge of things.

And trees—like walking canes.

Take this bouquet: transparent paper mates,

The bodies living off the ink they spend,

Amid the fictions, little clouds and shades

Over the fate you hoped to circumvent:

That of a god, one of so many gods:

Vertumnus joins Priapus, you’re the third,

In light and shade, your marbled vision blurred,

A faceless patron of the written word.

—

^*Author’s note: The gravestone that interested us distinguished itself among the neighboring ones with a folder, all swollen with rainwater, full of business cards, notes, photocopies of poems and articles, a little bottle of vodka, and a toy plastic bucket full of non-refillable pens.

This tiny island bears all that passed.

The size of an Archangel’s palm, this oven

Bakes everything until it’s interwoven,

A pie where single lines try hard to last,

Just numbers, rarely letters, to be seen,

And rarer still with my tongue in accord

That darkens for me, humid as a board,

Which you’ve wiped clean.

Translated by Alexandra Berlina and Irina Shevelenko

The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness

Nothing in common but warmth and fleece,

Lonesame keys and nine orifices,

Filled with what? moisture, pleasure, shit;

Covered by a mouth; closed by sleep.

Baking up: blood, tears, kids and wax.

Surrounding: their essence or another’s flesh.

Of my own nine, I enter, sat to remove.

I stood to be. And head to the pool.

Pink and yellow, big like babies,

Nakie-nude, towels to the neck—

Crossing the floor are flocks of girltrees.

Each to the shower, languidly leaning its trunk.

Like types of wine and species of aves

They must be classi- or curiosified:

Here’s collarbone plates; there: sails of shoulder blades.

We must catalogue each footarch height.

Soon these ones won’t be. Soon they’ll be replaced.

Here’ll be wound in velvet, there: the stage refaced.

Visitors will stare amazed, not hiding tears,

At the combos of bones, skin, and black braided hair.

Some pretty boy on hand

Or baddie good’un

Plays in the kiddy garden:

Touching your plum,

Partaking of your pear,

Gathering, in his mouth, water:

Then winter will come into it, bejeweled and cut up time,

And the brother go unknown by the animal of mind.

This pillar of water might turn to ice,

Reason to a poison, air to gas,

Sweetie-pies will march and stride

In closed ranks through shops and shacks.

And the door that led out to the swimming cube

Will open just a tad, like a zipper on a boot.

And we’ll step out of slippers, nails and crowns,

From watches, juxtaposed rags, our voices’ sounds.

And into nostrils, ears and mouths, like out a kettle spout,

En masse they’ll surge and spill, souls

Who broke the lock.

But like in forest school: the noisy surplus

Of creams, muscles, hair, armpits and lips.

Self-tanner and shame, as vixens from their bores,

Look at our bodies’ surface through the lenses of our pores.

But like in cattle cars, with cramped and vulgar mutter,

Squares of steam and lengthy howls roam-wander,

Unbreachable, the sky becomes a brother.

And someone sings in the shower room.

In summer camps, in July’s blue shorts,

First hanging back, then straightening spine and neck,

My first I, scowling like a bullet,

Makes its very first step.

And furrowing the landscape, like crushing paper in the hand,

I look at it as almost with the sky. And will then

Lie down, like ball lightning does in fields:

With a single revolution of the wheel.

Translated by Zachary Murphy King

Sarah on the Barricades

1.

The year nineteen-oh-five.

In the cradles sleep no more.

Tiny hands unshod, open eyes,

Toothless mouths yawn wide,

Packed in the train like Guidon in his barrel,^*

Oh, no, like sardines packed in a tin,

Rattling off to distant steppes.

Over them in Tambov and Yeysk

In the sackcloth of drapes gone feral

They sigh, those misty Jewish mamas

(German Russian Polish or …)

And the list of children’s surnames

Like a roster of those lost in war.

Their future lady-loves, their girlies,

Come spilling from grandfathers’ loins,

And peer into the eyes of needles,

That lead far into unknown wombs.

(The funny grove around the funny shame

Is curly as a picture-frame.

Above it twirl the scents of procreation,