by Valery Chereshnya
     translated by Izabella Mizrachi
     for Mandelstam

Overgrown child of quiet games,
Extortionist of exact words,
Living tenderly, half-asleep,
Out of just a blanket, curling up,
You made yourself such a warm shelter
That for them it became foreign —
This calm airiness —
This world created by your breath.

Maybe, I won’t argue,
In a world of rules and punishments,
Where sternness nurses grief,
Your tender gift was odd.
It’s like that. The new quite often
Makes them more cruel,
So it could even end in blood.
At the end the blood was yours.

by Valery Chereshnya
     translated by Izabella Mizrachi

Just listen, I can’t describe it,
This tree, just listen, I can’t.
But when I suddenly turn
I can recall
That little town all the way to a station,
The dry dust, the sandy road,
The five-storey house where there was
Such silence, like a forest.
A buzzing fly in the half-dark room
Hitting the pillow
Where we were lying naked
Not only because of the stuffy air.
Then, later in the evening you,
Speaking on the narrow balcony.
The landscape was like Giorgione’s paintings
Wrapped in a bluish haze.
I could not fully feel and understand.
The guardian angel left,
The clouds came, it started to rain.

And it was then I saw a tree.

by Ivan Akhmetyev
     translated by J. Kates

* * *

trees are growing
beasts are alive
i think
God is

* * *

in my soul there is
a child and an old man

the old man needs rest

the child a caress

* * *

fake christmas trees are good
what a pity though
they don’t shed their needles

* * *

in winter you can’t tell
living trees
from dead ones

* * *

who does better at one thing
does worse at another

* * *

where we are hurried off to
nowhere we need to hurry
I never hurry

* * *

it’s in reality
we forget our dreams

and dreaming
we remember them all

wonderful!
all our dreams
are preserved

* * *

i am a master
of russian speech
(as much
as everyone)

* * *

that’s the way i write
there’s no other way i can
that’s the way i can
there’s no other way i write

* * *

don’t be afraid
it’s nothing at all but
a collision of words

* * *

my poems
are very simple
i have already
written many of them

* * *

“i write little
but unlike anyone else”
my mother said
“don’t boast
maybe you will write like others
but more”

* * *

good poems
don’t cancel out
other good poems

* * *

such poems
are contagious

you not only
remember them
but you start
to write your own

* * *

like Michelangelo
when i peel a potato
i remove what’s superfluous

* * *

Khlebnikov is our father
Kharms is our teacher
Christ our Savior

* * *

the avant-garde
is a garden of stones
only who hasn’t been throwing
his own pebble
into this one

* * *

don’t look at this
it’s for me

* * *

a new word
i can make use of
or not
but already there is nowhere
to get away from it

* * *

writing in the dark
i didn’t notice
the pen doesn’t work

by Anna Golubkova
translated by Anna Halberstadt

* * *

I have never experienced gender discrimination
she thought getting up at six a.m.
without setting up her alarm clock
organizing a mound of underwear on her table
to be ironed
what kind of word is this
what an idiotic concept
she was thinking at six forty-five
starting to prepare breakfast
how can one even differentiate people
based on gender
people are so different
she continued thinking at seven forty-five
getting her kids ready for school
and hanging on a hanger her husband’s
well ironed shirt
she continued thinking of gender discrimination
standing by the sink and washing the dishes
left from breakfast
she continued thinking of gender discrimination
putting her makeup on
in a quick experienced manner
putting on transparent pantyhose
a tight
difficult to wear skirt
high heels
she was still thinking
squeezing into a crowded bus
and taking a position with her back to the wall
so that no one could grab her ass
and covering herself from the front
with a heavy briefcase
to protect herself from
the passengers trying
to get too close to her
with their sweaty morning bodies
and then
when behind the window
one could see the usual grey cityscapes
flashing by
and people around her relaxed
in some kind of sleepy lethargy
she finally came to a conclusion
that she had never
in her entire life
had encountered (and the word itself is so funny)
and couldn’t have
any of this gender discrimination

* * *

As I was passing through the Bolshoi Stone bridge
to my surprise, I felt  so alive.
There was only the sky around me,
plenty of sky, much more, than a regular average
person would need.
I walked through the Bolshoi Stone bridge
and thought of how long ago it had been
that I felt  just like a person
without any particle of gender
age or social class mixed in.
And above my head there were floating
enormous blue-grey clouds . . .

* * *

I’ll live a quiet life
Spend evenings at home
Touch dry roses
with tips of wet fingers
petals smell like the sea
like dry rustling seaweed
they were thrown out from
mom’s uterus
and they can’t exist outside
the salty wetness
roses were born to dry out
water in this city is poisonous
roses never die
they stand for years on my bookshelves
and look like books that nobody needs
sometimes I reach for them
and touch dead flowers
with my live fingers
that had just stopped typing
these very lines