Recent Work​  ​

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War. Day 294 

 

December. In Odesa,

power stations, shelled.

Your father’s friend

shivers in his apartment

crammed with rare books, oil paintings.

His daughter texts:

Dad put on all his clothes.

He looks like a polar explorer.

You are thousands of miles away,

next to them.

 

You want to send

a generator. Anya sends

bitterly giggling emojis.

Technology makes sure

a disaster is instant,

shareable, and ideal.

Now you can all sit simultaneously,

homeless. Timeless.

Defenseless. In love.

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(Published in Poetry)

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Battle Cake

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What was in it, but apples and air,

that cake all the Odesa moms baked 

at their dachas? Apple slices, flirting 

on magical doughy mattresses. 

 

Ukrainian or not, we are all made 

with a tinge of sweetness. Our memories 

cannot imagine war. It begins anyway— 

explosions, more real than any kitchen. 

 

People ask you: What was that recipe for living? 

My mom says: Sometimes there were cherries 

instead of apples. Yes, children’s glossy eyes 

begging the grownups: When is it cake time? 

 

But what alchemy invites sugar and flour 

to cohere into honeyed warmth? What 

undoes the protective layers? Was war 

mixed into our recipe from the beginning? 

 

You had to run. You stuffed the mute idea 

of the cake into your emergency bag. Only 

apples and air, but now it weighs like a life, 

and grownups are asking: Where do you think 

 

you are going with that cake? 

 

Immortal friend, stranger, 

don’t answer them. 

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(Published in SWWIM)

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Deadbeat Gods

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A few Holocaust survivors die

and go to heaven. So goes the joke.

They sit together, laughing, and reminisce

about Auschwitz… God is surprised:

“What could possibly be so funny?”

The Jews say: “Oh, you wouldn’t understand –

you weren’t there!”

 

I like this joke. Through its lens,

I understand Aleppo, Kharkiv, Bucha,

Never Again becoming No–look!

See our God the Father walking into our lives,

then immediately walking out. He forgets alimony

and texts potty jokes to his ex-chosen people.

See God the Son walk out of the tragedy

 

after the first act. It did not follow the Aristotelian

graceful narrative curve, did not rise and fall

like a dying swan. See the Holy Spirit – or look

in the mirror: we are the deadbeat parents of the world:

our genocides, frequent, our language lacking

in empathy. Only in despair do we stutter:

Brother, why hast thou forsaken me?

 

But the heavenly Jews sit together, 

drinking their well-earned Manischewitz. 

Together, they transform hell into language. 

And in Lviv my teacher sends me a meme: 

Ukrainians Do Not Get Depression.

Fuzzy cat faces express various feelings: 

Angerrr? Meowlancholy? Grrrief?

 

Humor may be humanity’s only gift.

In Odesa, my friend wakes up at four a.m. 

because her dog wants water, her cat wants love. 

A little scratched and nibbled, she falls back

to sleep, writing: What a good life, what

a funny life. This is how it should be.  

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(Published in the Southern Review)

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From “I Was Part Child”

 

Boygirl. Bodyunfold. The sticky

origami of organs, following the course 

 

of our animal’ evolution.

Everyone starts out the same in the womb:

 

a little beast with no sex. We visited the child 

in a drab office building, brought my body to listen 

 

to their sloshing, the small heart

beating like a star. I imagined the baby 

 

pulling on their cord, like on the woven rope 

that opens a stage curtain. The play . . .  

 

that was the thing. I learned to like the disguise.

Our delicate masquerade. The child shielding 

 

my world. My quiet inward pull. 

Hiding the baby in my body, I

 

felt hidden. In the mornings, they were suspended 

in me—I, in mostly dark. Chamomile tea 

 

before each trip to icy work. Every step on frozen earth,

the tip of a flower. 

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(Published in AGNI)