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Recent Work
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.
Battle Cake
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.
Deadbeat Gods
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.
(Published in the Southern Review)
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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