by Anton Yakovlev

There was always a hint of that classic Nutcracker number
in my saunter down Tchaikovsky Street
from my job as a taste-tester at the candy factory Red October
to my second job at the candy factory Bolshevik.
I kept waiting for you to notice that hint.

When you received that genuine Wedgwood bowl
from all those Olympic teams you had led to gold,
did you think of my ballet school diploma,
or my triumphant reports on deluxe dark chocolate bars?

You see, you were never floored by the color
of my hair, you were never floored by the way
I checked my dress in the mirror.  You were never floored
by my day-to-day choreography,
by the abandon with which I pounced on the lower octaves
of your candelabraed upright piano.

I knew we would miss our 50-year anniversary.
And I know we won’t live to see our 75th.

Still, on that Leningrad white night,
hanging out with your track-and-field team, you tried
to hold on to the chestnut scarf I had dropped,
and though I snatched it from you,
I knew we’d end up together.

Now, after your third stroke,
I could dangle all the scarves I have ever owned
in front of you, and you wouldn’t know they were mine.

I could ask you questions to make you figure it out,
make you Sherlock your way to the only reasonable conclusion,
but still it wouldn’t click,
just like the description

of a chocolate bar’s shape and taste
doesn’t make someone blind from birth
understand the color brown.

Sometimes I rush to change your bed sheets,
go down to the laundromat,
come back to hug you,
comb your beard.
Sometimes I go to the store.
You smile: “Don’t go!”
I fear those words will be the last I hear,

so I always hurry back home
down Lenin Avenue
with a loaf of bread.

Originally published in Ordinary Impalers, Kelsay Books, 2017

by Andrey Gritsman

In a progressive Italian café, Regina,
in Gorham, New Hampshire, over Moretti, lasagna,
double espresso, having a cigarette.
The sky’s swollen with new snowfall.
Slow arrows of snowflakes scatter
over a gray, blurry watercolor
of the world printed on the window.
Five-axle truck with Maine plates
slows down, breathing asthmatically,
and curves itself into a cloudy vortex,
speeds away.

A man in the truck
can’t think of his eternal soul,
steering clear of life
along Main Street, passing
white eternity of runway ramp
just outside of town.

I walk out of the café,
get into a framed watercolor
of the street with “Joe’s” across,
drive away, thinking
of other souls as we
pass each other like flickering lights
on the highway until
snow blizzard,
caused by the truck
roaring in the opposite direction,
makes me forget about immortality
as I enter the curve, downshift,
accelerate, and disappear
inside a long, white train of snow,
leaving town behind,
perhaps forever.

by Andrey Gritsman

I turned on Channel 20
in the faceless, plastic hotel room.
Real-time story, documentary,
Johns bust,
soliciting, you know . . .

Curvy, drop-dead Latina female officer
posed as a hooker:
miniskirt, long boots, big bust,
patrolled the corner
by the pharmacy as
the GM SUV stopped,
window opened.

She leaned, exposed her
barely-hidden treasure,
and they got him!
He slowly stepped out, limping.
Walking with a cane, bald head,
older man, face invisible,
legally-required digital spot
blurred his face
on the TV screen.

Three muscular cops holding him
had a hard time putting on the cuffs:
the cane, probably bad back.
He could not bend backward
and twist his arms.

He was led away
into the police van for booking.
Gorgeous Latina added lipstick

to her plump lips.
The back-up crew took position
behind the Wal-Mart truck,
watching their bait.

I switched to the History Channel
and watched for a while
American GIs advancing in the jungle,
and Captain Franklin P. Eller
talking on the field phone
held by the South Vietnamese serviceman
during the Tet Offensive.

Then I fell asleep
before tomorrow’s early meeting,
before the quick omelet in the coffee shop downstairs
with unforgettable sunny Polish waitress Renata,
who has not passed her exams yet
and was stuck in the joint,
hopefully not for long.

by Alexei Parshchikov
translated by Wayne Chambliss 

from  Oil
Part 2: The Valley of Transit

A jackal and a crow.  Blood neither shed nor shared
between them.  The dynamite, nearby, is armed.
They are barely contours, prepared
to escape the kernel of blackness and assume a rudimentary form.

Above them, thought balloons are floating.  The cartoon repaginates
the seashore, windy, dry as bone.
When the rain falls, it becomes clear the photographer, buried to
his waist, was welded of
bronze and focused on no one.

I’ve hidden the weapon away, disconnected the leads, and will
make my way into the Valley
of Transit.  Farewell, the comic shore!  I know not what I hoped to
find there.
Altdorfer won’t say a word.  Nor Darius.  Hobbled, the crow has
been pecked
by the jackal, looming in the side view mirror.

Between the mountains, the valley blisters, as if with osculatory
pauses.  A bee below the
cliff.  Beneath it, the ludi of the gladiators.
Glinting substations, conduits, conic strata
where mercury slips at the feet of oil riggers, on concrete, driving
rebar.

Like two electric vortices, chasing each other’s tails,
the crow and, a femtosecond later,
the jackal.  Like electrons, entangled, erasing the details . . .  The
valley reverses its field,
untwists, and resembles a lariat.

Its every sector has been precisely fixed
on the chart.  This one is empty.  Empty enough to put one in
mind of a die, always coming

up six,
as if the other five sides existed only in the imagination.

Spans of concrete, corridors, towers partly retract
from the lip of quarry, from open shafts in which a horn
sounds underground.  And a god descends out of orbit,
snatching men from the earth, into the truck, never again to be
found.

An oracle stands at the door, clutching what’s left of her bottle.
With a trembling finger she
traces
a rhizome of flight paths, of undersea cables.
Her awareness drifts in a boozy stasis.
“We await the oil,” she tells me, describing pyramids with her
hands.  “Some dwell with the
rusting fleet, and will hear
the drums in the dreaming tankers.  Come to the Valley of Transit,

they will squirm in hot pitch, hang themselves in a year.

Others will live as nomads, only rarely to appear except in those
sublimes instances when,
with white shirts starched, they will vie to target a suspension
bridge at its plexus and topple the arch.”

Abandoned at an atmosphere as yet too premature
to pull the chute; at that lethargic height
from which the valley appears to square its curves
and resembles a solar zeppelin, its propeller stirred by light,

with geological endurance, arms and legs flailing,
an hysteria barely contained, as the whole grid ignites — the
dematerialized image of a circuit
board failing —
and the valley is plunged into oil; or, more precisely, gets capsized.

By then, I realized my task as an historian and astronomer was false.
“The oil,” I would write, “was not worth winning.
A buried memory, eluding shape or response,
as when, by the order of his son, Ulugbek, was put to death for
erasing the beginning.”