by Vladimir Gandelsman
 translated by Anna Halberstadt

And what remains from love
Is only a handful of ashes,
just enough to fill a small thimble.
No, the soul no longer fears
to be unloved.

Here, hold a pair of mittens,
a workman’s quilted jacket,
a 40-watt electric bulb,
a cup of cold water and a mouse
guarding the doors.
Whose are you now?  No one’s.

You will live, warming the darkness
with your two-legged two-handed
heat, you’ve owed your happiness
to just a few, and you will—
to no one,

This is what should make you happy…
but still, also fear at last,
that even then God will
be less precious to you,
than the ashes, the thimble and dust.

by Maria Stepanova
     translated by Jamie Olson

The last songs are gathering,
warriors on an invisible front:
they are leaving the area,
escaping a few lines at a time
to meet at the rendezvous point,
where they glance around warily.

They’ve become so dried out,
you can’t soften them with water!
They’ve become so wild,
they no longer speak Russian.
But with their old and nimble hands,
they pass around bullets.
In the dark, with their knowing fingers,
they sort through AK-47s.
They sigh and tug gently at letters
lodged in a wound.  Towards morning,
steering clear of the guard post,
they move out into the sleepless city.

And keep silent while the cannons thunder.
And keep silent while the muses thunder.

by Maria Stepanova
translated by Zachary Murphy King 

Nothing in common but warmth and fleece,
Lonesome keys and nine orifices,
Filled with what? moisture, pleasure, shit;
Covered by a mouth; closed by sleep.
Baking up: blood, tears, kids and wax.
Surrounding: their being or another’s flesh.
I enter, sit, from the nine of mine to
Remove. I stood to be.  And head to the pool.

Pink and yellow, big like babies,
Nakie-nude, towels to the neck—
Crossing the floor are flocks of girltrees.
Each to the shower, languidly leaning its trunk.
Like types of wine and species of aves
They must be classi-or curiosified:
Here’s collarbone plates; there: sails of shoulder blades.
We must catalogue each footarch height.

Soon these ones won’t be.  Soon they’ll be replaced.
Here’ll be wound in velvet, there: the stage refaced.
Visitors will stare amazed, not hiding tears,
At the combos of bones, skin, and black braided hair.

Some pretty boy on hand
Or baddie good’un
Plays in the kiddy garden:
Touching your plum,
Partaking of a pear,
Gathering, in his mouth, water:
Bequeathed to carved and jumbled wintertime,
The animal won’t recognize his brother’s mind.

This water pole might become ice,
Reason—an infection, air—gas,
Love-Doves will go and stride
In closed ranks through shooting stands.
And the door that opened on the swimming cube
Will open just a tad, like a zipper on a boot.
And we step out of slippers, nails and crowns,
From watches, juxtaposed rags, our voices’ sounds.

And into nostrils, mouths and ears, like kettle steam, out
En masse we pile, souls
Who broke the lock.

But like in forest school: the noisy surplus
Of creams, muscles, hair, armpits and lips.
Self-tanner and shame, as from vixens’ bores,
Look at our body surfaces to the lenses of pores.
But like in cattle cars, where squares of steam and
lengthy howls In narrowness and lusterlack roam-wander,
Unreachable, the sky becomes a brother.
And someone sings in the shower room.

In summer camps, in July’s blue shorts,
First hanging back, then straightening spine and neck,
My first I, scowling like a bullet,
Makes its very first step.
And furrowing the landscape, like crushing paper in the hand,
I look at it as almost through the sky.  And lie
Down, like ball lightning does in fields:
With a single revolution of the wheel.

by Maria Stepanova
translated by Dmitri Manin

Saturday and Sunday burn like stars.
Elder trees foam and fizz.
By the railroad crossing’s striped bars
A communal wall hovers.
Past it are slabs, like canvases, dank in the dark,
And the moon cherry
And tiny tightly-packed crosses, a darned
Sock or a cross-stitch embroidery.
Yellow dogs pass here at an easy trot,
And grandmas come to comb sand,
Giant women grind their temples into the rock
Wailing and thrashing to no end.
But these are times, indistinguishable like stumps,
Like my pair of knees:
At the sun one stares, in the shade the other one slumps,
Both are dust and ashes
But these are nights when the nettle-folk stands guard
Among the pickets here,
And the gentle May enters his peaceful orchard
Raining a tear.
And between hand and hand, between day and night
There is unpersonal, brightly burning, eternal
Quiet.