by Polina Barskova
translated by Anna Halberstadt

When it’s cool and it rains in June
The whole room in a pioneer camp
Develops incontinence at night.
In the morning sheets are being hanged
To shame us all
(and you say—Rothko!)
Behind the leader’s memorial.
Next to a lilac bush,
That reigns like a tsar
With every branch bitt
en and stretched out
Like a night dream
About the mean counselor
Who has not once glanced at me
For the whole three months,
Like an unsent/desperate letter to parents
Lost by the mail, that spirits use,
Entangled in the incomprehensible past,
That turned out to be entirelyfinished.

When I talk to me daughter about this,
It becomes clear, nothing’s translatable:

Not the baby Ulyanov in golden locks
Nor the words like
Time, passed through the irony sieve
Reaches the new ones like cool light: not clear, not precise.

Exactly: Victorian pictures of spirits,—
Quackery, or, maybe, a plain message, like the letter to parents:
“For God’s sake, take me away from here!”
The ghost in the picture shrinks like a branch swollen
By what’s falling from the sky.
A miracle neither acknowledged, nor denied.

• —canteen                 —a cheer

Lev Rubinstein
translated by Philip Nikolayev

Pigeon post?  What’s that?  What’s it regarding?  Not some anecdote
about how the left sleeve of my mother’s coat once got shat on by
a pigeon?
Is it not about how I have for the rest of my life remembered
every button, every fiber of that
terracotta coat?
Is it not about how I will always remember that coat even after
death, as if it were part and parcel of
my religion?

What was the message that that dratted pigeon wanted to convey
to my mother by pigeon post?
Was it a joyful piece of tidings or some unspeakable outrage?
Was it not the kind of news that my mother feared the most,
That I would fall under the troublemaking spell of Sasha Tselikov,
the boy who smoked behind the
garage?

Yes, it’s all true, mom, I’m not going to lie: I’ll come under the
influence of
Questionable types behind the garage, behind the shed and in
faraway foreign lands—if
Only so that I may continue, from time to time, to receive
These greetings from our incomprehensible life that drop on
sleeves.

by Alexei Tsvetkov

i am a lonely boltzmann brain
stuck in a vacuum night
forever doomed to twitch in vain
in search for wrong and right

no sky above no solid ground
on which to grow a tree
no matter how i turn around
there is no one but me

and yet i have two feet all right
two arms to throw a ball
admit i may be not too bright
but human after all

life looms and floats but for all that
it seems well spun and true
and in the street i meet a cat
whom i address as you

yet physics is a cruel god
strained through its brutal sieve
the sky i craved the earth i trod
was strictly make-believe

i have been taken for a ride
my dream was thinly spread
and all i saw was the inside
of my imagined head

that spectral head will be laid low
in some black hole or worse
a mighty cosmic wind will blow
my person to disperse

by Alexei Tsvetkov

myrtle our neighbor on the left side had
a headache with her ron the vietnam vet
fading from parkinson’s connie whose house
bulged into our backyard was a nurse who spent
her summer days sun-bathing in the nude
stirring my blood up in my swallow’s nest
and on the right was spencer the attorney
at law with dawn his nitwit of a wife
as i had one of mine with whom i was
in love then

in my waking hours i wondered
whether the town and all these people were
for real since once asleep i felt i was
the same old rascal with his bevy of
hard-drinking pals as i once was in russia
the only oddity was all of them
were speaking english in my dreams i felt
my new persona being a ruse or worse
a snake who’d swallowed my past life and sported
my memories as if they were his by right

like some d’artagnan when twenty years after
i visited the place there was no ron
to speak of myrtle joined him in his vale
of inexistence spencer the attorney
at law moved on after his wife had been
pinned to a wall by a delivery truck
connie the source of the sad news looked like
a wasted hag with her brown elephant skin
we are the only ones still hale she said
good grief i thought who are the fucking we

when i am done for and the primal darkness
fills up my eye-holes clogs my nostrils jams
the mandibles i will still have the last
question to ask of it who was this person
that lived my life which of the two was i
speak so that one may mourn the other have
mercy on us oh please dear darkness speak