by Philip Nikolayev

You thought the postmodernist deconstruction
of reason by methods of critical garbage chat
was no big deal, a progressive development
or perhaps a harmless academic occupation?
Political correctness has focused on many valid issues
of justice (women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights,
equality of opportunity, the list goes on).  Unfortunately,
it has also replaced thinking and truth with itself
as the driving standard of progressive discourse.
Previously, it was possible to achieve social progress
without having to rely on armies of
logically damaged talking robots.  Today
it is impossible.  Today, buying into wholesale
prepackaged political worldviews is the social default,
and any antiquated discerning curmudgeon still capable
of nuanced observation, of fine distinctions,
or indeed of proceeding from premises to conclusions,
is flagged as suspect, lacking credibility, a neo-Nazi.
Outside of hard science and engineering,
reason no longer carries any authority
and is violently rejected by most interested parties.
There are hollow twittering sockpuppets all along
every network of life.  Because if the meme
is right and there is nothing outside the text
and if everything is merely and always about text,
about what’s going on in text, then power
is sliced in favor of whoever generates
the most text, the most viral text, the most
textual virus.  Any transformation of society’s
fundamental values and power structures
inevitably brings about a gigantic power grab,
and a power grab is by its definition shameless,
ignoble, it relies on the implicit (complicit) tacit
acceptance that the will to power is OK,
is the norm, nothing to apologize about.
It is what the cool, the smart, do.  I remember
coming to these transatlantic shores in the 90s,
roaming the H university campus (I dabbled
in the humanities back then) and thinking
naïf Russki poet thoughts like “With all these
lunatic, increasingly shrill, iconoclastically incoherent,
postlogocentric discourses devoid of love and understanding
and with all these brazen nitwit careerisms
that are pervading office and academia and shaping
countless young minds never exposed
to deep selfless reasoning, how exactly are they hoping,
these professors and these students,
that things will not get thoroughly fucked
on a global scale and fast, should they succeed
in their project of banishing reason?”
And soon enough they succeed, and things were fucked.

by Philip Nikolayev

So I know full well that Father’s Day
was invented by the marketing industry
in a bid to separate us from more
of our long-suffering income.
Still, what do you suppose,
I wait all day like an idiot
for my 18-year-old to wake up,
anxious to see if she’ll remember.
Right, I am no better than any dad,
not superior to anyone.  I sit writing poetry,
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah,
and I wait, I wait, I wait. Then she wakes up,
I can hear her, and I’m like…  I mean, I’m thinking,
she’s up, she’s up, she’s up…
(Idiot me.)  And she does indeed remember,
sweetheart. She hugs me tight,
no “Happy Father’s Day,” no gift (which is best,
save the expense), she just says,
“I love you so much, even if I sometimes swear at you.”
“It happens,” I say, “It happens.  Thank you.”
Tears in stupid old eyes,
all four of them, till I can see nothing.
“It happens,” I say.  And thank you, marketing,
you are not all bad, I admit,
for exploiting our humanity for profit,
but in a way that we can be grateful for
to the point of tears.

by Marina Temkina

I do not know how it happened
That half of the world population is now younger than me.
I was just growing up, maturing, developing,
Even started to enjoy the process, and yesterday,
As if specially, at the gallery opening a friend asked me,
“How do you preserve your beauty?”
As if I am a mummy, a mammoth, an extinct species.

by Marina Temkina

When I become an American
I will eat half of a grapefruit for breakfast
knowing its sour bitterness
is good for my aging veins.

When I become an American
I’ll think about buying a flag
to feel appropriately enthusiastic
at the beginning of every war.

When I become an American
I will think about my retirement,
real estate prices, life insurances, stocks,
they aren’t yet my primary interests.

When I become an American
I won’t remain lighthearted,
superfluous, un-pragmatic,
missing the point as a genuine misfit-poet.