by Galina Rymbu
translated by Anna Halberstadt

Your clock is an alphabet
How much did it cost?
Why am I not allowed to touch it?
Does it exist?

I love your writing,
that does not take me into account.  I like the fact,
that in your text there is no window
for you to take a look at me.
My window must be in the panel,
the Sun of the steppe is shining there, and I sweat,
water evaporates from me
as if from a potted plant.  Holly Ghost!

In the evening I stuffed myself with cheap pasta and cucumbers.
I did not read your stuff.  Barely.
I could have written: you know, my friend,
in his mouth a rosehip blooms.
But instead I will write: his mouth is spiked.
You can’t kiss him.  Can’t put your tongue inside.
Not into one of the holes.
Everything inside him seems bricked up.
That’s my friend.

My son calls himself “Black”
I like this image: black Sun.
I like to vegetate in the dark with beer.
What do you think, a letter — is it a box with bones?

My belly expands like a balloon from beer,
Girls should not be this way.
Is letter a rotten music box?
A playing field?  For golf?
All of this is dated.

Now a change of affect, instead
of affects themselves.

My friend is completely closed off.
I am here, silent.

Lying with my cat in the dark.
Chasing thoughts with my tongue.
A sitting after a sitting.
If one could finish this in five minutes . . .

by Galina Rymbu
translated by Anna Halberstadt

* * *

All will end soon.  summer will end.  time is suspended
on the tip of the sleeping wild animal’s tail.  We’ll enter the
woods and come back
empty-handed.
We don’t need anything from the woods.

in the evening
you’ll bring a package with cheap food and a rainbow of
vegetables from the grocery store,
put it down on icy dew in the garden.  I will chop up plenty of
onions for supper.

We’ll smoke in the bathroom (it’s already chilly on the terrace)
And watch: everyone’s posting photos of their summer.
it’s not ours.
But in the end of the summer it seems closer.
you say: the river of my glance has dried out for you,
and I say, I decided to re-read Gilgamesh and Dante:
love finds its way.

summer is almost over.  screens have gone dark.
A wood-goblin has gotten into our old garden
and he caresses himself in the crooked summer-house of vines,
and warm evening wind on your face
is more polyamorous, as ever.
I will get up to drink and will stare for a while
on how coffee stains on the table have changed.

August has moved ahead abruptly, and stamped its foot on the
rusty Cola can.
Our son will soon build Milky Way from rotting apples.
August has closed our eyes with its wide palm, and its girlfriend,
young, like my mom, stands at the head of the bed in an old
nightgown,
and her hands smell of chamomile cream,
and her hair shines quietly on her shoulders.
Somewhere our friends are popping pills
and watch a soap opera on a video panel,
in Zelenograd Lena drinks tea and reads the news on ovd.info}
site,
and the tram without a driver cuts through the red body of
Moscow,
the hunter-August in the black lava of frozen helmet,
peels its skin, and nearby a fawn with a student pass
runs around, covered in droplets of blood.

summer is the swarm of time, fall — hyperventilation
in internal phone booths: imagine how Carpathian villages
smoke and cling to the feet of the mountains,
how in the heavy rotting mounds of leaves
a new language delicately swarms.

summer will end. not a metaphor: but a drilling dance of last
bees.
heat licks the screen of the icebox, like a child licks a fruit
popsicle.
It will end, and all I have to do, is to
read a new message in the dark and mentally walk you to the
nearby Polyanka metro stop.

by Elena Mikhailik
translated by Catherine Ciepiela, Sibelan Forrester, and
     Val Vinokur, with Elena Mikhailik

I’ll reply to the Outer Sea that it should
have no significance — as a given, it would
Be of no account, — eternal and unchanging,
Inessential — hence preordained, pre-understood.

Transient birds, a chattering brook, and grass,
Live only within nonbeing, yet, while they last
Their entirely static sum of moments
Comprise the time in which I come to pass.

Autumn crossed out by a slant speckled wing,
The burning bush tests the road, that it might cling,
And smoke over the roof won’t cancel summer
The chimney spreading heat doesn’t change a thing.

And never mind how often your eye blinks just before
That second when light goes out above the shore —
Misreadings, obstacles, tiny details, distortions —
That is what ultimately gives us our forms.

There where the Outer Sea herds its humpbacked waves,
Where bars of sunlight bind the shore like staves
I shall reply that this rarified creation
Offers a chance to live outside of fate.

Neither the knowledge of good and evil, nor hope,
But a slight push of the oar, the oarlock’s loop,
It won’t be my soul that the waters come to encompas
Only a diary entry of everyday scope.

A roll of thunder, the usual end of the line,
And the catch of the day falls back to primordial brine.
It won’t be my soul that the waters come to swallow,
Since eternity has no use for this clotting of time.

by Elena Mikhailik
translated by Polina Barskova, Sibelan Forrester,
     Kevin M. F. Platt, and Boris Wolfson, with Elena Mikhailik

The tuatara lizard inhabits the same lair
As two stormy-petrel nestlings, both parents enemies of the
people.
She hasn’t hibernated for a long while, in the times that reign
outside
She has only one joy left — literary translations.

The nestlings spread yellow beaks wide, the stove’s maw is already
dark,
Food, firewood, residence permit, living space, and they have to
go to school, too.
And all around, no surprise, it’s plague and war once again,
And in this city in particular — plague, war and the blockade.

A prehistoric, shuffling gait suits the streets these days — ’tis that
kind of season,
You can sense danger from above quicker than hearing or reason
can grasp:
To the sky, there, with its aerostats, flak, and searchlights,
The tuatara lizard looks with a third eye, on top of her head.

She squints, unblinking, at the intermittent light,
The distance to the stars is ever longer, the road strange, dark,
and deserted.
The tuatara won’t die out today — she got double rations in the
mess hall,
A completely acceptable soup and a kasha of casein whey.

At home she feeds it to the nestlings, notes everything down
earnestly and with care —
The prices of bread, the living and dead, vibrations of the world
ether —
But she just can’t recall: was it freezing like this at night
Back in the days when the tuatara’s cousins ruled this earth.