Articles Available Online

[Untitled] “if you close your eyes”   if you close your eyes you can hear the sea whether Black or Azov you can’t tell immediately   a triumph of sound the off season naked beaches we breathe it in hold it in our lungs without speaking afraid to sing out of key   unleashing note after note in perfect waves the poplars swim away a little further from heaven from poetry’s idyll   nuts falling to the ground smack their heads and cry bitterly     [breakfast]   the bread you broke in two speaks in a human voice one half in the voice of your mother affirming she loves you the dead love of a dead mother loves you the dead love you dead mothers love you   you sit silent and hiccup you find the corpse of Yuri Gagarin in your pocket you light a cigarette   the other half speaks in the voice of the girl you raped affirming she’ll never, no way, ever love you she wishes you dead and your mother your fucking mother the girl you fucked says hello to your fucking dead mother  every morning on the radio   you sit silent and hiccup you find the corpse of Gherman Titov in your pocket you light a cigarette   await the prosecutor’s summation     [Untitled] “you stand in the middle of a completely foreign city”   you stand in the middle of a completely foreign city in the middle of its most famous cemetery you read the inscriptions in Polish you hear the voices of Polish tourists tombstone tombstone tombstone they’re seeking someone’s death in Polish you’re seeking someone’s death in Ukrainian your relatives might’ve been buried here if they hadn’t been forced to become echoes to wander Donbas seeking death in Russian so that all the while on the other side of Ukraine a girl with long black hair moves her lips translating the language of death seeks inscriptions about your family in the cemetery     Ilya  (from “People of Donbas”)   Why did you orchestrate a war at home and run away to more normal cities— the neighbors’ sticky-fingered spoons clap their hands and pull hair after hair from my head   you’re guilty of everything—and I think—what if they come to kill me while I’m lying naked in the boat of this summer without water electricity any kind of connection   no one will know what she died of standing in the kitchen—and falling backwards like sugar in a cup of paper wrath   and the uproarious sea of love throbbing in my