TWITTLER

AMERICAN AND IRANIAN POETS DO NOT WANT WAR!

I am proud to be translated in Farsi by Iranian poets Mohammad Mostaghimi and Mersad Mostaghimi - poets do not want war! A translation of a SLY BANG poem, Vow:
Vow
We will love like dogwood
Kiss like cranes
Die like moths
I promise

©2007, Larissa Shmailo

لاريسا شمايلو 2007

پيمان بهار

ما عشق خواهيم ورزيد

مثل زغال اخته

بوسه خواهيم زد

مثل درناها

خواهيم مرد

مثل پروانگان

من نويد مي‌دهم

گزاشتار: محمّد مستقيمي(راهي)

BLOOMSDAY - FATHERS DAY SYZYGY!

"I am not your insect" in Noon Anthology

Delighted that my poem "I am not your insect" is included in Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press of Tokyo and London) edited by Philip Rowland. The text of the poem, which appears in my collection #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books 2014) follows below.

I am not your insect
Your underfoot, your exterminated, your bug. My unabashedly hairy legs, whose gymnopédies twitch like a chorus for a fatal Sharon Stone, delight in ces mouvements qui déplace les lignes, in the motion, the quiver, le mort, the catch. Mother Kali, you have made me what I am: feminine, brilliant, entirely without fear. Like my mother, I watch and pray for prey – that it be there, that it give gore, that I feel it die, that there be more.

Anna Karenina: #MeToo (recently published in KGBBarLit)

Note: Dmitry Merezhkovsky was a Russian thinker and critic.

Ah, Merezhkovsky: to you I was a mare
ridden badly by a man; and because of him,
his error, I had to be destroyed. And Lev, my dear:
You never gave me my own voice, you didn’t dare.
What did I talk about when I did talk, after all:
Abortion with Dolly? Every damn thing
Vronsky did, that I did better? The problem
was not that I was sexual (men, you
count on that). The problem was that
I was smart. But sexual women must be killed;
All the books attest to that.

Merezhkovsky permeates the consciousness
of Slavic scholars, is the Anna story, still,
but I fault you most, Lev. You knew, soon
that the problem was not one woman
and one man; it was all women, all men. You had
Vronsky climb in society, while I—damn, I even
knew more about horses than him!—I was
the scarlet woman, though our offence was the same.
Did I abandon my child? Or did a martinet
bar me from him? Ah, she holds Vronsky back!
Ah, the guilt!

Oh, there is no talking to you.
You sent me the dream
that haunted your ruling-class sleep,
a peasant with an iron,
the proletariat that said, fuck you
and your landlord’s way of life.
You killed me with the railroad that they built
for you. Because you “had to.”
Where was your Resurrection then?
You repudiated Karenina, it’s true,
but you abandoned me to my fate.
And so, Lev, I still struggle,
a century and a half later,
to have my story told.

POEM FROM SLY BANG: SCHWEINEREI

A poem "by" Nora Volkhonsky, the protagonist of SLY BANG, for D-Day.

SCHWEINERIE

Get up, schweinerei, my father says, waking us late.

And at dinner, my dyadya, talking drunk and loud,

says that he and my dedushka guarded railroads

in the war. For the Germans. The railroads are old,

but this country is new: not the Soviet Union, I ask?,

not wanting to know. Barely breathing: the world,

hard, atrocious, and cruel, falls into place.

And Babushka? Babushka worked at the railroad, too.

(I feel her hard hands braiding my hair, the stern lips

mouthing: zhid). I remember my mother, seeking salvation

at her grave, saying (but lying): “I once opened a gate.”

The world falls into place. What was on those rails? Who?

And what did their guards do? Somehow I knew, I always knew.

Tonight, I hear my mother’s reedy voice simper, singing,

Nach jeden Dezember ihr kommt ein Mai. Her home of

gemutlichkeit,comfort without joy. My mother’s love

for the German tongue; how often she said “There were

good Germans, too.” As Ukrainians, save the martyred few,

they were kapos, collaborators, too. Did they have a choice?

Starvation in the kolkhoz, bodies lying, dying in the streets,

and only the Germans, said mother, protested Stalin’s rape

and collectivization of the Ukraine. How much victim?

How much volunteer? Did my mama, my papa, my dyadya,

my baba, my dyedushka commit atrocities in the war?

In Kalinivka, the mass graves; my family was there.

In Prymsl, deported Jews; my family was there.

In the Harz Mountains, Northhausen and Dora-Mittelbau;

my family was there. What other families? Who survived,

and why? (There was no crematorium in Dora, my mother

lied.) In the face of starvation, of death, of Stalin’s camps,

tell me, you, well-fed and safe, judging me and mine: is there

complicity when there is no choice? (Was there choice?)

The stories, the lacunae, the lies. Now I know why I always felt

like a Jew. O, Adonai, why? Why these origins for me, why no

orisons for me? The dead are dead, but not within me, my

holocaust today, forever my bread.

Four Translations and a Poem of My Own in KGBBarLit

Thrilled to have four translations of Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Blok, and Tarkovsky, and a poem of my own, "Anna Karenina #metoo" in this brilliant KGB Lit issue, "Writing across Eastern Europe." Thanks to editor Olena Jennings for the pub!

FOUR TRANSLATIONS AND A POEM