The Girl @theParisReview Says Uncool

The idiot girl @theParisReview says uncool:
that, to critique, the phrase, the trappings of,
is used by “100% pretentious hacks.” And
the editor @PoetryFound retweets her crap,
and an article on pooping, besides. I was
going to tweet a Baudelaire, from “Beauty,” line,
line by displaced line:
I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone
But thought better of it (a proscribed phrase?)
—an unpretentious #Stalinist might
tell me not to translate, or Baudelaire not to write.
(But what does this mean:
Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes?
Is the idiot girl @ParisCool right?) No, she is
an idiot, disliking a history without her part,
as I dislike the way the young are heartless, mean,
calling it honest (and I was different @18?)

This poem originally appeared in Gargoyle.

An excerpt from "Mirror, or a Flash in the Pan"

An excerpt from "Mirror, or a Flash in the Pan," from my new collection #specialcharacters, available from Amazon and Unlikely Books.

$ $ $

Ritar dislikes children, but is writing a story, to be illustrated, about an adorable and precocious little girl who plans to visit “Parrots,” France. She starts drinking again after long sobriety during the process, downing large tumblers of cheap gin, until she tears the pages up and sets them on fire in the sink. She sobers up long enough to send out her sex genre piece, recycled from the last rejection.

Proposal 1, Mass Market: The Cult
A retired vice cop receives a letter from Hetera, a call girl he was obsessed with in the ‘70s. In her urgent correspondence, she writes to him of a complicated conspiracy to gaslight her. The conspirators are mobsters, rock stars, aristocrats, Park Avenue psychiatrists, Nazis, and a who’s who of writers and artists. As he follows her story, it will take him through the secret lives of the rich and famous; to sordid vaults of porn and prostitution; to the heyday of Studio 54 and Plato’s Retreat and Salvador Dali’s sex parties for artists and the poor; Warhol’s Factory; and down to the last chance A.A. meetings on the old Bowery. Is this the madness, mania, and mayhem of a professional party girl—or is Hetera the victim of a real cult?

. . . the papers, her eternal poet's rustling of papers . . . holding them in his hand, Henry had a palpable moment of remembering her in his hand, under his command, when the most important thing in the world was to be inside her. He shook it off. As a young policeman, a detective on vice still hoping to write the definitive novel, she was his muse, the Whore of Mensa, mad but gorgeous and brilliant, maniacally oversexed, and obsessed, at least for a few months, with him. The sex, he remembered, getting an erection from the memory, the constant sex, and the writing, page after page of poems and stories and the first full novel, raw, flawed, but energetic, alive, so alive . . . then her cure, her overweight, her depression; he was relieved when she married another. And he forgot her among more conventional women, went to law school and lived a solid upper-middle class life, but he never forgot what was possible in intensity between two people.

We will love like dogwood.
Kiss like cranes.
Die like moths,
I promise . . .

Ritar drinks another tumbler of gin, and writes another proposal.

$ $ $

New Life 5 (Mistranslation of Joseph Brodsky)

Imagine twilight in the new life: Clouds formed here
are better than sunlight in the old. Cicadas sing a
sonorous “ch,” and now that the tanks are gone,
a classical perspective reigns, although things remain
vulnerable. And the thoughts of things, how easily one
can forget them! And the thoughts as well that beget them.

Imagine people coming out of rooms, faint, important
only to themselves, where chairs stand, like the letters
“b”and “d,” and save them from falling. They have that
attachment to place, characteristic of Penelope, despite
the white walls with their tidy trim of maize, despite
the old divan, the bare parquet, the yellow Chinese vase.

You’ve been saved: Local Pomonas and Venuses don’t
seduce you, and now, having looked Cyclops in the eye,
you don’t suffer much from indifference. You don’t hide
your trumps, or play your cards close to your vest. The crow
sings “kr”at dawn. And you, like him, sing a pastoral song
with no especial fear or love or need to belong.

Imagine the radio is playing an old hymn, weaving
music from the alphabet, now “Betsy.”now “Abraham,”
now “Sam.” The airs hold influences: statues, rules of
multiplication, stamps. In the end, our curiosity about the
boundaries of these places, these once blank spaces, is
a kind of art. Twilight, crepuscule, the last sun’s ray:
In the new life, they don’t tell the moment: Stay.

Autobio, for Robin Williams

1968 Quebec get drunk 1st time in public 12 years old drink cider smoke a Cuban cigar get sick pass out fall down cheek on the floor hear my girlfriends rank me out they think that I can’t hear

1971 1st suicide attempt age 15 1st psych ward Gracie Square

1972 Smoke pot in the Waldorf bathrooms I say rich kids don’t get busted am right think about jumping in front of the 7 or out the window at school go home watch Star Trek instead

1973 Switzerland drink grappa in Lugano 17 & very cute suicide attempts: 1 slashing wrists 1 pills overdose check into cheap hotel with an orange and some gin take synthetic morphine & write a long note morphine like acid run naked hotel lobby punch a nun coma 3 days want to drink Calvados like Hemingway in Europe never do

1974 Providence University #1 take speed buy marijuana for $8 an oz cut classes play Monopoly with joints on free parking drink beer flunk out get a job as a waitress truck stop early shift take dexadrine my sister’s for clinical depression like speed

1975 New York City University 2 smoke pot drink coffee don’t eat save $ to drink drink as long as I have $ midnight start to drink my carfare sell my tokens to drink live in Queens walk home 2 fare zone age 19

1976 Flunk out go to Boston get a job in a bar Crème de Menthe in the morning nitrous oxide at night Kahlua in the morning scotch & water at night Godfathers for a quarter Amaretto ladies’ night come to hotel with a man I’ve never seen well hello on the Commons same hotel where I OD nice hotel

1977 Back to New York continue my education drinking Cutty by the Hudson boy falls into the river come to he is gone he is 20 he was 20 20 yrs old just like me goodbye
v 1978 I’m a hooker in a whorehouse in the kitchen there are bottles don’t like vodka I drink vodka hate gin but I drink gin smoke pot with dedication roll & smoke and go to work I can roll a joint with 1 hand I can roll a joint with no hands no one else rolls fucking fast enough I get so fucking pissed

1979 CBGB’s black and blue and I am bored I am tripping I am drinking I am popping I am bored a boy who looks like a grave painting asks me to leave outside of Phebe’s can't find the train station can’t find the street decide to go away

1979 The Yucatan take peyote dance with rattles my lover lets me drink a little beer black eyes & rib cage healed go to Cuernavaca dancing climb volcanoes every day till I see no human faces then I’m fine

1980 New York beautiful Bellevue locked ward scabies crab lice very bad little bugs jump on my elbows back and forth between my eyes bugs crawl on my skin and under in my armpits & my crotch have DTs but bugs are real have DTs very bad

1981 Fat depressed & unemployed live with parents treat me okay like the dog okay sleep all day drink Papa’s vodka watch TV until the dawn try to kill myself can’t do it this for 27 mos

1983 Antabuse & Lithium get a boyfriend get a job take both until I don’t

1985 Get married 3/19 & 3/26 he drowns fuck you God you fucking Nazi fuck you God you prick

1986 Prescriptions MDs give me lots of scripts Xanax Halcyon Lomotil Valium & Mellaril Xanax scripts in 7 drugstores uptown downtown & in Queens Xanax AM Xanax PM take a Xanax Dr. says

1989 West Side suicide why not no motherfucking reason not 300 pills and I don’t die brain is damaged but I don’t die why won’t I fucking die get a gun or jump the next time whisper: show me how to live or let me die

1990 Don’t die they say don’t die I listen & I don’t know why drop the bottle take their hands Lois Thurman Hans and Kate don’t die they say don’t die

1993 Glad to be alive almost not dead & I don’t mind maybe glad to be alive

2014 Look at me inside of me upon this edge there is a God inside I love her fiercely I love you (don’t die)

The Course of Grief

This sorrow trips your steps like stones on a path,
always loosening, always falling, preventing a climb.

You will not emerge from her stone chamber. You,
even if you could, would not forget her subterranean voice.

Her bright call will never return, nor will her eyes
open in their sockets. Alone with her gemstones you cry:

emerald, iolite, rings for fingers now ash, for an urn
turned and emptied in the sea, a will like yours.

Show me your tear-scarred eyes, show me your face:
say to me, I was robbed, the best was taken

because one thing was missing, because the time
was a moment too short. Did I lose her I loved

because someone was dull or for no reason at all?
Because some fate failed did I lose my child?

I give you keening, silence, my hands for tears;
I, too, know that stone voice and the chasm of these years.

100 Thousand Poets for Change day is September 27!

Izdubar (ekphrastic on Carl Jung's Red Book image)

Be careful, you who straddle
science and inner sooth:
giants collapse, learning
that we cannot reach the sun, and
scholars and sages are struck blind,
their heads spun full around; they
turn into prescient hermaphrodites
to plumb the Oedipal truths.

Can truth be done, without the sun?
Can you live without its light?
Can you blindly follow Apollo
with Tiresias through each doubt?
Can you live without your cherished truths,
can you learn to live without?

Profession

Love is an actor like Pitt, young and handsome and fuckishly fit;
Love flexes muscles so well, takes your breath away just like Denzel.
Seen on the screen by night, love's never paltry, but always delights.
It's Danny DeVito by day, though, when the curtain is taken away.

Love is an acrobat, jumps and juggles and passes the hat;
moves you in strange new ways as you're hypnotized under his sway.
Turning fast somersaults, Eros's gymnastics score 10 without fault,
But leave you with sprains and scars when, inevitably, you miss the bar.

Love is the rupture of heart; its sharp scalpel will cut mine apart.
Only a surgeon could see how to operate so well on me.
This is the intricate pain, come dissecting my frog hurt again.
Eros is clinically bold, and a professional, totally cold.

Exorcism (Found Poem)

Adapted from “Group Dynamics,” People of the Lie─The Hope for Healing Human Evil by M. Scott Peck, and “The Forging of the Malevolent Personality” in Speaking with the Devil by Carl Goldberg. From the CD Exorcism by Larissa Shmailo

I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground

Consecration: On the morning of March 16, 1968
Elements of Task Force Barker
Charlie Company Task Force Barker
Moved into a small group of hamlets
In the Quang Ngai province of South Vietnam
Collectively known as My Lai

It was a routine mission
To search and destroy
A typical mission
To search and destroy

The soldiers were poorly trained and hastily assembled
They were tired, poorly trained, and hastily assembled
They had sustained casualties from booby traps and mines
They had not engaged the enemy but sustained casualties
Had had no military success for over a month
The soldiers were poorly trained.

The soldiers were probably not aware of the Geneva Convention
Which states it is a war crime to kill a civilian
A punishable crime to kill a civilian
To kill a soldier or enemy who has surrendered
Who is wounded and has laid down his arms
To kill a noncombatant

They were probably not aware of the Law of Land Warfare
In the Army Field Manual, the U.S. Army Field Manual
Which specifies that orders in violation of the Geneva Convention
Any order in violation of the Geneva Convention
Is illegal and not to be obeyed

The soldiers were poorly trained

The written orders were ambiguous
The My Lai orders were ambiguous
Just waste the place, a Louie said
A Louie might have said

Though essentially all elements of Task Force Barker
Were involved in some way in the My Lai operation
The primary element of ground troop involved
Was C Company 1st Battalion of the 20th infantry
Of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade

When Charlie Company moved into the hamlets of My Lai
They found no combatants not a single combatant
Only old men and children, unarmed women, men, and children
All civilian and unarmed

The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred
The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred
The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred
Civilians on that day

The killings took a long time

The people were killed in a variety of ways
In some instances troops would simply stand at a hut
And spray it with fire or throw hand grenades
In other instances villagers including small children
Were shot as they attempted to escape

The killings took a long time

The most large scale killings occurred at My Lai 4
There the first platoon of Charlie Company
Commanded by Lieutenant Calley
Herded villagers into groups of twenty or more
Who were then shot down by rifle fire
Machine guns and hand grenades

The killings took a long time

The number of soldiers can only be estimated
Perhaps only fifty actually killed the civilians
Perhaps just two hundred watched them shoot the civilians
Only just some two hundred directly witnessed the killings
By the end of the massacre approximately 500
Knew of operation My Lai

None of them reported the crimes

A helicopter pilot in flyby to the mission
A warrant officer in air support in flyby to the mission
Could see from the air what was happening in the hamlets
He landed, tried to talk to the troops on the ground
Then went airborne and radioed headquarters from his copter
Told his superior officers what he saw at My Lai They did not seem concerned

The soldiers were poorly trained

When a panel was convened
Four years later to investigate
The events at My Lai
They inquired if this atrocity
Was similar or different
From other war crimes
Which had occurred
In this and other American wars

They noted that no study
Had ever been made
Of any war crimes or atrocities
Committed by Americans at war
And requested that a study
Of the subject might be made

The panel was told that the current administration
At the time would be embarrassed by the findings of the panel
And that further studies or embarrassment
That might ensue from such a study
Was inadvisable at the time

Lieutenant Calley was convicted
For his crimes at My Lai 4
But not his Captain Medina
His superior officer
Not Lieutenant Colonel Barker
Who Commanded Task Force Barker
Nor Lieutenant Barker’s com
Who said,
Boys let’s bring that coonskin home….

In Serbia a woman calls her youngest son now to her
She tells him to sit down she will now explain to him
Why his father has seemed cold harsh and cruel to him sometimes
She tells him of his life

When his father was a young boy at the time of the World War
He was captured by the Germans under guard at the railroad
He watched unarmed men and women emerge slowly from a boxcar
At the head of the ramp was a strong commanding figure
An SS man in the black uniform of the SS Medical Corp

He is singing Meistersinger as the people search for loved ones
For their children and their parents
German soldiers beat the people
As they run before the guns the SS officer shouts In a commanding baritone voice

“Freeze. Listen. Do as I say.”

One very old man perhaps eighty years old
A scholarly old man who has fallen to the ground
His clothes are caked with mud and his eyeglasses are askew
A woman crawls up next to him as if she knew him well
He turns to her and says, “God. . . .perhaps the man. . .
In the black uniform. . .the imposing man in the black uniform,
Maybe they sent him to save us?”

The officer is singing as he points to the left
To the right and the left
And the prisoners are herded to the gates of a camp
And the young Yugoslav watched the people as they marched
As they hurried to the camps where they would die

And the mother turned around and she said to her son
In a voice he’d never heard his mother use to him before
She said your father learned that day what I will tell you right now

“It is better to be a Nazi and survive
It is better to be a Nazi and survive
It is better to be a Nazi and survive
Than one of those people so helpless and naïve
That they have no choice but to pray to their God
That the Nazis will save them from harm.”

The boy he was well-trained.

In Iowa in ’66 a boy gets into trouble
Sells some pot and gets himself caught
And he gets himself in trouble
And the judge says join the Army
Or you’re going to do some hard time
The boy signs up for Nam

I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground I stand on holy ground I stand on holy ground I stand on holy ground

AWP 2015 Panel: Daughters of Baba Yaga

Very pleased to learn that Katia Kapovich, Irina Mashinski, Gloria Mindock, Annie Pluto and I have been given a place on the AWP Conference program in Minneapolis in 2015. We will be reading our poetry in a presentation called "Daughters of Baba Yaga: The Eastern European Woman Poet in the United States."

Kalinivka

Kalinivka, Kalinivka: The ground over the mass graves is hard, the soft grass grows. The Ukrainian Guard, boy and girl, make love, happy to be alive. In the Ukraine, collectivized, they walked on corpses. And the Germans alone protest, her father tells the girl. Siberia, purges. Like the Irish, their parents collaborate; Hitler fights the Russian and English masters of their rural lands. Now here, Kalinivka. The mass graves crack with green life. 1941 is forgotten in the summer of ’43. She is 19, pregnant soon.

Prymsl
By1943, the ghetto holds the few not deported, living in tunnels, basements, caves, the hiding ones, the ones who know. All the rest to camps in Poland, Germany, or dead. The boy no longer likes the girl, but through her, he got his Kapo job. Even his mother says, marry. Have a child. The female Kapo bears a boy through the camps, Prymsl, through the unknown tombs of Poland, the unmarked graves, the walls marked with Jewish blood, the bloody broken nooses, the dark rain. She wants the boy to marry her, he makes excuses, says, the Germans won’t permit. That the child will die soon after the war, that she will beat her head upon the grave until it bleeds, that sorrow is unknown. The death of the Jewish children is unseen. Poland is always green.

Dora
Germany, Harz Mountains. The Germans turn now, now SS. The war is failing. Fewer the slaves to command, the girl, heavy with child, translates, working, starving, carried in rail carts for miles to build the V-2s. A rachitic Jewess cleans the barracks, the boy’s eye turns, with pity, with lust; he gives her bread. From Erfurt to the extension camp, Buchenwald’s new Dora, Northausen. Here they spare the rope to hang. All are hungry, the Germans too. The Allies bomb the industrial camp. Liberation. Rows of corpses, the eternal rows, line Northausen. The Germans are forced to respect the dead. Kalinivka, Prymsl, the unseen dead, now here in respectful symmetry, no longer piled in heaps, but rectangular, marked. The flowers grow, the burghers sing, “After every December, there comes a new spring."

GAZA

Last night, last for many,
children were killed as they slept
on the floor of a classroom in Gaza,
three impacts from artillery, they suspect.
3,300 people had sought refuge
at the Jabalia Elementary Girls school;
civilian, not military, casualties of those
displaced by a war without rules.

Revision of Poem in Iambic Pentameter ("The More You Leave")

The more you leave, the more I want you back.
When you return, our love life seems to lack.
Believing you are unassailable
I yearn for you to be available.
And then you come; I cannot be more bored:
I like your leave, but not your coming toward.
Your distance charms, disarms my eager heart.
But close, I wish we were again apart.
Do stay away, and I'm forever rapt,
but close, you leave me empty, dull, and sapped.
So go away; I'll love you as before.
Love's ebb and flow is tricky as a whore.

A poem in dactyllic hexameter ("This is the rupture of heart . . . "):

This is the rupture of heart; love's sharp scalpel will cut mine apart.
Only a surgeon could see how to operate so well on me.
This is the intricate pain, come dissecting my frog hurt again
Eros is clinically bold, and a professional, totally cold.

Aleksandr Blok (November 28, 1880 – August 7, 1921), the great Symbolist poet of Russia's Silver Age ("Night, avenue . . .")

Night, avenue, street lamp, the drug store,
Irrational and dusky light;
Live another decade, two more—
It stays the same; there's no way out.

You'll die, then start again, beginning
And everything repeats as planned:
Night, the cold canal's icy ripple,
The drug store, avenue, and lamp.
Tr. L. Shmailo

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.
Живи еще хоть четверть века -
Все будет так. Исхода нет.

Умрешь - начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.

METRICAL EXERCISE: IAMBIC PENTAMETER ("The More You Leave")

The more you leave, the more I want you back.
And then you come and only give me flack.
Believing you will never come again
I pine and yearn, and prize you above men.
And then you come; I cannot be more bored:
I like your leave, but not your coming toward.
The dance of love taps fire when you're away,
and trips and falls when you return to stay.
Do stay away, and I'm forever rapt,
but close, you leave me empty, dull, and sapped.
So go away; I'll love you all the more;
Love's ebb and flow is tricky as a whore.

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (June 6, 1799 – February 10, 1837): I loved you once . . .

I loved you once, and this love still, it may be,
Is not extinguished fully in my soul;
But let’s no longer have this love dismay you:
To trouble you is not my wish at all.
I loved you once quite wordlessly, without hope,
Tortured shyness, jealous rage I bore.
I loved you once so gently and sincerely:
God grant you to be loved this way once more.

Tr. L. Shmailo

Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может,
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.
Я вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим;
Я вас любил так искренно, так нежно,
Как дай вам бог любимой быть другим.

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin
(1829)

Vladimir Mayakovsky's Last Poem

Vladimir Mayakovsky's (July 19,1893 – April 14, 1930) final poem before his suicide. The Oka mentioned is a tributary of the Volga.

It's after one. You've likely gone to sleep.
The Milky Way streams silver, an Oka through the night.
I don't hurry, I don't need to wake you
Or bother you with lightning telegrams.
Like they say, the incident is closed.
Love's little boat has crashed on daily life.
We're even, you and I. No need to account
For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs.
Look: How quiet the world is.
Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.
At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak
To history, eternity, and all creation.

Tr. L. Shmailo

***

Уже второй. Должно быть, ты легла.
В ночи Млечпуть серебряной Окою.
Я не спешу, и молниями телеграмм
мне незачем тебя будить и беспокоить.
Как говорят, инцидент исперчен.
Любовная лодка разбилась о быт.
С тобой мы в расчете. И не к чему перечень
взаимных болей, бед и обид.
Ты посмотри, какая в мире тишь.
Ночь обложила небо звездной данью.
В такие вот часы встаешь и говоришь
векам, истории и мирозданью.

Formal Exercise: Sestina: Live, Not Die; Live Not, Die

Sestina words: monkey, parenthesis, punctuated, question, Shakespeare's, angels

Now, how shall it continue, bright primate? How shall this be punctuated?
An Oxfordian series, cursive, moving ever on, entailing every monkey,
all keyboards in existence, black and white, and all of Shakespeare's
work? Therein lies a tail. Is my silly, hoping life, then, the parentheses
in the mind of a savage, loving god, or a twitching, rapid question
in the tick-tock of the void? Comma or coma? Which is it to be? Angels,

you decide. Faster: My hope today, a ferocious hankering monkey,
wrestles with Thanatos in my psyche's mud, a bout observed by angels,
and, truly, always about you; my demons, who intone Shakespeare's
verse like a Polonius behind a curtain, his platitudes punctuated
by doubt, growing like a semicolon in my gut, close these parentheses
without fortitude or Fortinbras, a Hamlet dangling on his question.

Come, ask me if I dare, beloved, before I go, to ask the question:
Would you say, turning me aside, as an afterthought, in parentheses,
"That is not what I meant at all," leaving me, a grinning, groping monkey,
to chase distant mermaids in the sea spray, those soggy singing angels
who sing to drowning women like me? I am not brave, not Shakespeare's
heroine, and will not declaim mercy for men in a speech punctuated

by all wisdom, warm, maternal, eternal, I am, rather, a rattled, tangled monkey,
fur matted, teeth sharp, staring down my death in a showdown punctuated
by words, words, words, words, words, words; and those in parentheses
whisper with epithets of my end; here I sit, periodic, asking the angels,
how long a sentence I will have, and will I ever write one as good as Shakespeare's?
"Two bees, and not two bees, and they're soon extinct, too;" begging the question,

petitio principii: assuming the initial point, how shall I get to the final, punctuated
by logical fallacies, tautologies, circular, as raw as the tail ass of a monkey;
me, to persuade you, had we words enough for time, there could be no question,
no crime, in assuming infinity, in basking in eternity like seraphim, bright angels
whose divine lust could last a trillion biers and years, through a million Shakespeare's
lines; but our lives are slashed by a Ginzo knife through the tail, trapped in parentheses.

To the period's point now, signaled by a capital flourish and punctuated
with the Oxfordian serial clause (I should have been a pair of claws instead of monkey
balls): given infinity, when my molecules scatter, on some infinite star populated by angels,
might they not reassemble as me, my primate self, with you, a man as fine as Shakespeare's
best, again, to dance together, coupled, contained in divine parentheses)?
For the thought of you, whom I love, I trouble the divine to ask this question.

My monkey question is not eloquent, nor metaphysical as angels:
It stands in parentheses, rolls not from the tongue as Shakespeare's,
but loves you, period, whichever is punctuated, in eternity or extinction.

Metrical exercise: Anapest: Waiting for MRI poem #3

'Twas the night before brain scan; my dear Facebook friends
share their love and their kind thoughts in notes that they send.
I am touched, truly moved by this loving support;
May God bless you, dear creatures, you mad, rad cohort.

Hospital

Jaded and exhausted nurses walk the wards
repeating curses; dying patients call for mother,
crying for a glass of water. Greedy doctors
buy stock options, sell us meds containing toxins;
leeches would be more effective than these MDs'
best directives. People tired and sick, emergent,
can't get help though help is urgent. Here a man is
screaming, bleeding, here a woman's life's receding .
Richer folk may think they’re served well, wind up
in the same prescribed hell. Hear me, patients, for
your welfare, this is not the place for healthcare

Metrical Exercise: Trochaic Tetrameter (Waiting for MRI poem series)

MRI won't be till Thursday;
waiting is a practiced sense;
anyone can face life's dangers—
takes the strong to bear suspense.

MRI with contrast or not,
little magnets map the brain.
Soon I'll feel my body changing,
entering another plane.

All I am is quarks and gluons,
energy and impulse-filled;
There is no material realm here,
and these quanta can't be killed.

So I wait without much straining;
courage comes from quanta, too.
I'm the field of every being;
parts of me are parts of you.

Don't look toward a grave to see me;
my old soul has other plans;
All of me will dance with helium,
I'll be sun, and leaves, and grass.

BETWEEN ECLIPSES*

A razor cuts your wrists, but
what cut you off from me?
Is true love quart'red below?

When (blew) an azure sky
separates the chambered clouds,
which Earth will you then save,
which elements recycle?

These eclipses should portend,
but I would always be
the bastard that I am,
had the maidlienest, brightest star
eclipsed upon this gesture.

Fin.

* To Harrow Marrow: Whatever these eclipses portend, what saves you is not salvation with its grace, but the grace of no salvation.

I AM NOT YOUR INSECT

Your underfoot, your exterminated, your bug. My unabashedly hairy legs, whose gymnopèdes 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.

I have lost your fingers

You are as thick as molasses, brown as oak, and your ears are crêpes suzettes; your cheerful legs are also thick. The pupils of your eyes are small bridges to disaster (after). Your cheekbones cut the cumulus clouds, and your toes are decimal wonders; your pancreas is a mighty fortress to our God. I remember your kidneys, plumlike, and shaped like violas. All your orifices tell of wonders; surely your ass is a wiry insect that I feel but cannot see (woe is me). Your breasts dance; your aureoles are gazelles that sleep in meadows more blue than green. Your vulva is an apple already peeled, as wet as fresh moraine, alive as snow.

I have lost your fingers and must find them again.

I am the new poetry editor for MadHat Annual!

Dear friends, I am pleased to be joining the MadHat team as poetry editor for the amazing MadHat Annual. Thanks to editor-in-chief Marc Vincenz and team MadHat Alex Cigale, Jonathan Penton, and Clare L. Martin. More anon!

Happy Bloomsday!

Last year, I erased Ulysses to create 18 found poems, one for each episode. Here is "Calypso:"

Thick giblet soup, fried hencod's roes,
grilled mutton kidneys, a fine
tang of urine.

Gelid light and air in the kitchen;
out of doors gentle summer morning
everywhere.

The coals reddening.
A slice of bread and butter
Cup of tea.

O-Cat-Mkgnao!
Warmbubbled milk on a
saucer.
Gurgh.

Ham and eggs, no.
Better a pork kidney.
Still perhaps: once.

Her prime sausages.
To catch up and walk
behind her, behind
her moving hams.

Bread and butter,
sugar, spoon,
her cream
Yes.

Daddy's Elusive Love

I spent my whole life seeking it,
wrecking, reeking, eking it,
in hydra-headed phalluses;
in aliases & pal-louses;
in papapapapaMedusas;
in mirrors & seducers.

I looked for it in boxers,
in the dumps of ten detoxes,
in the roll of rundown rockers,
in anal & banal boys.

I slept with legions
in every single region;
I made love to none;
loved only one.

But it all goes back to Daddy:
Daddy, I'm your caddy;
I know you wanted a laddy;
sorry I wasn't a lady.

Family history
is largely hysterical mystery.
This old cold sold hold blow on me
is moldy geneaology.

Mersad Mostaghimi's Translation of "Your Probability Amplitude" into Farsi

I am delighted that Mersad Mostaghimi, a physics student, has translated my poem "Your Probability Amplitude" into Persian for his Iranian classmates. My gratitude also to Mohammad Mostaghimi, who has translated so many of my poems into Farsi for his blog.

(این هم یک ترجمه از خودم از این شعر که البته نمیدونم با سواد اندک من هم از زبان انگلیسی و هم از شعر و ادبیات فارسی آیا ترجمه خوبی هست یا خیر امید که بپسندید.)

دامنه احتمال تو

من به اوج میرسم
و بوزونی که میدرخشد در دیدگان.


آن سان که یک نیروی ضعیف در واپاشی رادیویی.

جاذبه موقعیتی

مغناطشی:

من مشاهده میکنم و حواس من باز میگردانند ذرات را به نیرو ره میگیرند در رد پایشان هوا و هوس درون امواج را

Your Probability Amplitude

I glance and
a boson blinks
into view.

A strong interaction
beckons

even as
a weak force
radios decay.

The gravity
of the situation

the magnetism:

I observe and
my attention

turns particles into power
tracks into trails
whims into waves.

Your Probability Amplitude

I glance and
a boson blinks
into view.

A strong interaction
beckons

even as
a weak force
radios decay.

The gravity
of the situation

the magnetism:

I observe and
my attention

turns particles into power
tracks into trails
whims into waves.

Mikhail Niziaev's beautiful Russian translation of my poem "Mapping":

Here is Mikhail Niziaev's (Низяев Михаил) beautiful Russian translation of my poem "Mapping":

Голуби летят в скорописи стаи, изящные дуги,
Кроме этого, шедшие впереди или позади, в срочном самостоятельный полет.
Ниже ивы наклоняется, тонкие и редкие, глядя на искры,
Как наркоман в утренней торговли людьми улице.
Такой человек, как вы, протягивает мне мочи кубок, и спит.

Я вам уже говорил, здесь, в дверях тыс.
Несчастная домов: есть нечто большее место
Чем время и пространство в одиночестве.
Приходите, неохотно тратить
День: посмотрите на несвязанных звезды, несобранные огни
Без имени или дома или в созвездии свои собственные,
И представьте себе использовать со мной, все, что не поместилось.

Mapping

The pigeons fly in cursive flocks, graceful arcs,
Except this one, gone ahead or left behind, in urgent solo flight.
Below a willow leans, thin and sparse, looking for sparks,
Like an addict in the morning’s trafficked street.
A man like you hands me a urine cup, and sleeps.

I have told you before, here at the doorway of a thousand
Unhappy homes: there is something more of place
Than time or space in loneliness. Come, reluctantly spend
The day: Look at the unconnected stars, the uncollected lights
Without name or home or constellation of their own,
And imagine a use with me for all that doesn’t fit.

Mapping

The pigeons fly in cursive flocks, graceful arcs,
Except this one, gone ahead or left behind, in urgent solo flight.
Below a willow leans, thin and sparse, looking for sparks,
Like an addict in the morning’s trafficked street.
A man like you hands me a urine cup, and sleeps.

I have told you before, here at the doorway of a thousand
Unhappy homes: there is something more of place
Than time or space in loneliness. Come, reluctantly spend
The day: Look at the unconnected stars, the uncollected lights
Without name or home or constellation of their own,
And imagine a use with me for all that doesn’t fit.

Saturn series June 9 to feature Larissa Shmailo, plus open mic

Saturn Poetry - Monday June 9, 2014
Featuring Larissa Shmailo, Priscilla Galligan and Robert Masterson
at Shades of Green Pub & Restaurant
125 E. 15th Street, between 3rd Ave & Irving Place, near all Union Square subways
8:00 pm to 10:30 pm, Sign up at 7:45.
Open mike surrounds features
$3. donation requested plus a drink or two to support this great venue

About Larissa Shmailo...
Larissa Shmailo's newest collection of poetry is #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books). Larissa is the editor of the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and founder of The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses. She translated Victory over the Sun for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's landmark restaging of the multimedia opera and has been a translator on the Bible in Russia for the American Bible Society. Her other books of poetry are In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), the chapbook, A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press), and the e-book, Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks); her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism (SongCrew), for which she received the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award.
About Larissa Shmailo https://www.facebook.com/LarissaShmailoPoetryandProse
About #specialcharacters http://www.unlikelystories.org/unlikely_books/specialcharacters.shtml

About Priscilla Galligan...
Priscilla Galligan (@cillagalligan) is a researcher, grant and freelance writer/poet.while poems and flash fiction are currently published in several magazines online. She is currently working on an historical novel. She will be reading from her collection of 60 poems; Decibels , forthcoming in September 2014. Broadsides will be available.

About Robert Masterson...
Robert Masterson, professor of English at the City University of New York's Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City, has authored Artificial Rats & Electric Cats, Trial by Water, and Garnish Trouble. His work appears in numerous publications and he holds degrees from the University of New Mexico, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado; and Shaanxi Normal University, the People's Republic of China.

A Sop for Cerberus

He needed me. Alone at the gates of Hell,
He looked at me, his six rheumy eyes
Fixing me imploringly. So I fed him meat
And with a leap, he jumped onto my back:
The animal musk and the weight of him,
The great paws, the salivating jaw,
The hot muzzle and demon-bloody wounds,
Startling. But I found I could carry him,
And brought him home to keep:
The dead do not play; the dead do not speak.

Poem in Random House Anthology

My poem, "In Paran," will appear in the new Random House anthology of metrical verse edited by Annie Finch. I learned this yesterday, on my birthday. I know it was your beautiful birthday wishes that materialized this gift for me (yes, I believe in magic). Thank you!

New Life: Variations on a Theme by Joseph Brodsky et al.

Imagine that the war is over, that peace has reigned,
That you can look at your face in the mirror again.
That magpies, not bombs, whistle down upon your head
That outside the city, homes are not destroyed—instead
A baroque burst of laurels, palms, magnolia, pine;
In scented shadows a white hot Venus shines
That war’s cast-iron swamp is gone and then
The boredom is over: Life has to start again.

Imagine that all of this is true. Imagine, that you speak
Of yourself, speaking of others, that now you can seek
The irrelevant, the unneeded, the luxuries, the toys.
Life begins anew exactly thus: with noise
With erupting volcanoes. and such catastrophes
A sloop lost below, friends lost beneath the seas.
Look straight at these tragedies, with the feeling they engender,
That you alone can see them; with the tender
Feeling that, any minute now, you will turn away
To home, to the safe moment, to ask it to stay.

Imagine that the epoch ends in an idyll. The words that came
In monologues are rain dialogues now. And the flame,
That consumed others better than you, greedily, like logs,
In you it saw little use or warmth, and, like the dogs,
That’s why you were spared, why shrapnel cut only your fear.
Imagine that the more honest the voice, the less it has tears.
And when any Polyphemus asks you who it is that speaks.
Say, "Who, me? No one,” like Odysseus the Greek.

Alexander Skidan, translated by Larissa Shmailo and the author

It's like a rain wall
or a wall of news
when you crumble like chalk
as if the world lurched
and it could still be saved
only in this way

crumbling

but the world is precisely this wall of news
in which your chalk is embedded

это как стена дождя
или стена новостей
когда ты мелом крошась
как если б мир покачнулся
и его еще можно было спасти
только таким образом

крошась

но мир – это и есть стена новостей
в которую вмурован твой мел

Fish

Fish: fishy mermaid in a taco: tuna taco
Fish: Jonah-belly in a quandary: Jewish taco
Fish: Papa Ernest in a marlin: senior taco
Fish: jaws crunch Spielberg in his femur: cinétaco Fish: killing dolphins by Japan-folk: save-the-taco
Fish: kill a dumpster make a landfill: gangster taco
Fish: look for bodies kill the bodies: war-fun taco
Fish: Forget the invertebrates and especially the plants that process your air and eat your fat exhaust gases; don’t even think about those algal blooms of your phosphorescence, or the carbon-binding organisms, the coccolithophores; forget them, I tell you. Start with the fish, start your consciousness, no! no, start your R-core reptile brain with fish, and big fish at that. Go fish. And hook, knit and purl a new piscine axis of evil, with German pike, Japanese carp, Iranian bluegill, Iraqi crappie, Korean stickleback, and (did I mention that the United States cutthroat trout consumes over a quarter of the world’s energy, contributing a massive percentage of the international carbon footprint while the Africa burbot (in its entirety) contributes 1 percent, did I mention we were pissing some Bonneville whitefish off while we griped and grappled with bonytail beyond our control, looking for ordered pairs of lota lota, or some net to hang our hats from). And.

Bloomfish : (in a lavender tuxedo jacket and grey and pink spats; eats fish and chips; farts). Boom. (Reflecting, opening a copy of The Fins of Sin as he masturbates beneath the baldachin of St. Sister We-Hardly-Knew-Ye’s broad and capacious ichtus altar) Taco.

Mrs. Marion Bloomfish (in Miss Havisham’s wedding dress) Carp. Carp. Carpe diem. Ctenopharyngodon idella. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

Bloomfish: Tuna taco.

What People Are Saying about #specialcharacters

At one point in #specialcharacters, Larissa Shmailo declares: “Mother Kali, you have made me what I am: feminine, brilliant, entirely without fear” — and the rest of the poems in this collection prove this true. They run the gamut from being outspoken to outrageous, irreverent to downright heretical, taking gleeful pride in knowing exactly how far is too far – and then going even further. I see this work as a continuum in a long tradition of radical writing practices from Futurism, to Dada, to Oulipo, to Pussy Riot. Read it when you wish to be empowered. Read it when you wish to be entertained. Read it to rid yourself of the precious and polite.
—Elaine Equi

This is a thrilling book of femininity and magic. When it comes to capturing the intimacy of pain, Larissa Shmailo is among the most daring poets of her generation. When speaking of human rights, she is a human flame. She is subtle and provocative, fresh and out of bounds. You will fall in love here, and you will be loved right back.
—Philip Nikolayev

With #specialcharacters where even the title is special Shmailo has managed to split language into its common & least common denominators/principles: sound, meaning, symbol, feeling (text/ure) as well as providing us with a range of voices from child to adult & male to female within a range of styles & mannerisms from the ultra-experimental to quirky “innocent” rhymes like her sexy riff on “the 12 days of Christmas” in her classic “The Other Woman’s Cunt.” Her knowledge of the “WORD” & how to use it extends from darkly humorous to warm, lyrical, tender & painful . . . This is a major work by a major poet.
—Steve Dalachinsky

The opening piece catches the first 12 Fibonacci numbers and finesses them into giddy remembrances of an octogenarian's most significant birthdays. Then, the pages of poetry spiral with the 89 year old, ever outwards, or perhaps inwards, toward her infinity. Stream of consciousness narration, witty footnoted asides, plays with parentheses and fonts . . . Shmailo's poetry sucked me into/out of its golden spiral.
—Moira Richards, Cape Times (South Africa)

I thought this was going to be all poetry, but it is much more experimental than that, ending with a wonderful piece about a woman who is close to the end of the line with aging, mental illness, and poverty. It's called "MIRROR, or a Flash in the Pan." It is very close to fiction, although it certainly has passages of poetry. It's an excellent piece, crystal clear and shockingly honest. The collection also includes what is rightfully maybe Shmailo's most famous (popular?) poem . . . "The Other Woman's Cunt". This one is angry, raunchy, vicious and — by the way! — hilarious. There is a fair amount of typographical experimentation and deep connections to literature and mythology, but at its heart, as a whole, the book has the remarkable quality of being extremely moving even when you aren't sure what's going on.
—Meredith Sue Willis, Books for Readers

Writing Across Borders: National Writers Union Conference on Immigration 5/18

The National Writers Union Conference on immigration, "Writing Across Borders," is this Sunday! Alexander Cigale, Irina Mashinski, and I will be reading at 4:00 pm at the "Immigrant Cocktail Hour" and I'll be participating in the panel "The Language of Migration" with Claudia Serea! It will be a brilliant day of literature and journalism. Join us!

Review of #specialcharacters in the Cape Times, Cape Town, South Africa

Are you a #specialcharacter?

For Victory Day (the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union): How My Family Survived the Camps

Was micht nicht umbringt, macht mich starker:
What does not kill me makes me stronger.
Nietzsche said this about other things
Not this.

How did my family survive the camps?
Were they smarter, stronger than the rest?
Were they lucky?
Did luck exist in Dora-Nordhausen,
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen?

How did my family survive?
They were young, my mother and father, in 1943
Twenty years old when taken as slaves.
No one knew my father was a soldier, a communist
So he was not shot
Or taken to be gassed.
My grandmother said quickly to the Germans
He is a mechanic; they needed mechanics
My grandmother, Soviet businesswoman
Begged and bribed the Ukrainian kapos
Begged and bribed the Germans, not SS
They took my father, son of a commissar
And shot the other men.

How did my family survive?
They offered no resistance
Did they collaborate?
Is complicity possible without choice?

They marched to Germany, working
Following the German army
Following the front
Digging trenches, carrying metal
These were the good camps, Kalinovka, Peremeshl
There was still food:
My mother recalls eating an entire vat of potatoes
Fouled by kerosene, discarded by the Germans, not SS
The treatment was not cruel, comparatively, not cruel:
In 1944, the Germans
Were as afraid of the Russian front
As the prisoners were of Germany
And of the other camps.
Where they went nonetheless
Where they were sent nonetheless.

How did they survive Erfurt, the selection?
My mother spoke good German
I see her now at the staging camp
Her keen wit dancing around the SS
Like her young Slavic feet
She was young and good-looking
Thin but good-looking
And the SS liked the Ukrainian Frauen.
On the cattle car to Dora
To the chimneys of that camp
My mother rode with her family intact
Thinner but intact
And ready for work.

How did my family survive?
Was it luck?
In Dora-Nordhausen
Where the air smelled of shit and gas
Where the sun rose but never shone
Was there luck?

The boxcar stopped
At the Nordhausen factory
The way out through the crematorium chimney in Dora
Here, my grandmother learned language
Wstavach, Stoi, Ren, schwein, Halt.
In Dora, where not to understand an order meant death
My grandmother learned six languages; after six months
My family could work, hide and ask for bread
In all the languages of Europe.
They learned English the same way.


How did my family survive?
When the Americans came, with chocolate and blankets
My father, six foot one
Was one hundred and twenty pounds
And still we were rich, my mother interjects,
Rich compared to the Jews.
A few months longer, though, a few months longer
We would not have been alive.

How did my family survive?
My grandfather, a teacher
Told this story:
When the Americans came and saw the camp
They invited the people to loot the nearby towns
Take anything, the well-fed soldiers said
My grandfather stood and spoke: We are not animals, he said
But we were, my father interrupts, we were.

How did my family survive?
Survive is not the right word.
I'm alive, my father would say, alive
Alive because I did not die; others died.


Keep breathing, he encouraged me in difficult times
Keep breathing.

Skin

My tongue is bruised
My nude is creaky
Like a cabbage I sit and wait for you
I stutter like an old gun:
Take me
Know
The fast love of my hair.

Your beady little eyes transfix me
Like rats at the foot of my bed
Your limp pendant wrists still hang on my door
You snicker, get a grip.

Your skin is a labyrinth
I follow like a duct
I follow the duct of your eyes like a skein
To the comminatory bull
Eyes forward, now toward, where I leap for the horns;
Won’t you come in, he sighs.

You own too big a piece of me
Your eyes say spare some change and I
Don’t want to I
Take and give no quarter and I’ve
Already cut my hair.

Skin is just sausage we call home.
Skin is just sausage we call home.

Dalachinsky, King, Kolm, Nikolayev, Penton, Shmailo, Vincenz 5/11

560 Brooke Avenue

The walls, barbed wire, barbed, next to a
drive-by window of Burger King: Dios,
is this your way? Electric doors, opened
one at a time, they make a sound, it maddens.
All the time the boys do time, all the time
they say, “Lunacy, this is crazy, crazy mad.”
It is. “Nigga, nigga,” one boy prays, farts as
the fat guard twists his hand: He tries to laugh,
he cries instead: porque? Scared, so scared,
his scarred voice cracks, 15. “Nigga, ay, I here
4 murder,” he lies. O child, perhaps so. My
Jesus of the got-nailed, my angel of the why,
& what could you have done yet, & why are
you here, porque, my God, & donde vamos,
u & I?

(Horizons is a maximum security juvenile prison in the Bronx.)

Just Announced: Pussy Riot at PEN Gala on May 5

Just announced: Members of Pussy Riot will join Toni Morrison and honorees Salman Rushdie and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at the PEN Gala at the American Museum of Natural History on May 5.

Never Challenge a Roth - My List of Words Never to Be Used in Poems Used in Toto

Of course, when I published my comic (but also more than comic) "List of Words Never to Be Used in Poems," people protested. Some sent me very good poems using some of the words from the list. But no one composed a work using all the words. That was up to my beloved friend of 45 years, Audrey Roth. Here are the original list and Audrey's beautiful composition. I love you, Audrey Roth!

List of Words Never to Be Used in Poems

Soul, being, essence, fire, dream, auburn, scent, inhumanity, starry, ripe, free, heaven, transcend, memory, butterfly, chrysalis, please, mad, ecology, teach, tear, lachrymose, cry, frown, smile, love, thought, potential, season, poetry, verse. Transubstantiate, transform, ascend, breathe, breath, usurp, sing, shudder, genius, antihero, thrush, lark, birdsong, exaltation, maid, woman, man, men, attempt, right, am, word, tresses, thrill. Form, character, said, desire, longing, elm, oak, tree, flame, yearn, burn, consume, new, human, bow, warrior, want, page, blank. And so far, you agree. Well, then…

Understanding, unique, déluge,manqué, mensch , wheelbarrow, manifest, palimpsest, avatar, sight, seer, samovar, light, ingredient, save, Oprah, Jerry, nothing, but, yet. The, a, loneliness, mélange, sea, lighthouse, tower, healing, light, use, underscore, trial, Kafka, yes, shop, radiant, garden, fore, yore, music, recollection, last, addiction, evolution. First, over, in, DNA, Darwinian, medicate, pharmacology, software, star, hardwired, stellar, bang. Relate, relationship, query, queer, think, survivor, mine, pain, sorrow, tragedy, woe, enter, laughing, mope. Still with me? How about…?

Life, live, living, hope, horror, help, one, singularity, Buddha, art, bomb, arms, lines, marital, Broadway, show, tell, ask, mission, missive, missile, realm, wonder, wander, know, knowledge, reify, epistemological, portent, magic, magical, many, omnipotent, avuncular, very, theme, adjective, parse, nun, father, mother, brother, we, our, us, I. Eye, omnibus, rarity, time, past, future, date, number, year, one, abstract, narrative, native, experiment, fusion, phrase, quote, café. Random (or mad), insight, learned, spirit, well, good, thanks, fine, good. You?

Audrey Roth's response (touché):

Homage to a Friend:
A Challenge

In the past, date uncertain (the year 1968 is my recollection), I met a girl – a genius, a mensch – unique, with radiant auburn tresses, a wonder for life. A character. A seer.

I could relate. Our relationship was Darwinian; it transformed us. Mine? Evolution from chrysalis to butterfly. Hers? Lachrymose to laughing. From blank slates to palimpsests – essence a memory, a scent, a dream – our magic was – well – magical, with potential to render us omnipotent. Addictions? Poetry. Kafka –antihero, warrior. Buddha. (Oprah and Jerry were yet to be – we could not quote them.) We wandered the streets, sang Broadway songs at top volume, and shop…(lifted).

We would transcend sorrow – pain; loneliness, tragedy; moping; man’s inhumanity to men (to say nothing of woman) – at a remove. Carry them off in a wheelbarrow, light them on fire, watch them burn, flames consuming, ascending to the starry night. She wrote a missive: “I yearn for healing,” she said, “from father, mother, brother – the mélange of many humans who have formed me with their experiments -- used, usurped, my love, entered my tower, attempting to deluge me with their narrative.” She frowned. “Woe is hardwired in me. Longing. I want to live, hope for a future where I can breathe, sing like the lark, its birdsong a balm to my being, a breath to medicate my soul. I am a maid manquée.”

“I think I know how to help.” I thought, along avuncular lines, of the necessary ingredients – no software supporting my search. I would season her tears with understanding; parse her fine phrases; find a fusion of music and art for her learned brain; evoke a different knowledge –of insight, epistemological energy. “Let me save you. Tell me, show me, more – please,” I asked. My desire to teach, reify her abstract realm, free her from random recollections of living in days of yore. “But how?” I queried. My mission – of manifestly mad singularity – cease her shudders, her cries, her horror. Sire a sea of smiles, a theme of thrills, a new spirit for this star, this stellar survivor. Launch the missiles, the bombs – not one, but many. BANG!! Turn the page over; change her very DNA; transubstantiate! An alternative avatar would fly to the fore, exaltation in its eye. Ineffable - no number of adjectives could capture it.

Within my sight, a thrush settled on an elm tree (or an oak?) in a garden outside the café where we sat. Samovars surrounded. We were a rarity of cultural ecology, so right together. (A portent of our current omnibus of pharmacology?) The time was ripe. She morphed to marital bliss, complete with dacha (first making a trial run as a nun), I toward being a good queer. We spoke our last words while reading “To the Lighthouse,” – hers in verse, underscoring her native tongue – bowed; and wrapped our arms around each other.

Heaven.
Yes.

Happy 450th, Will!

Gulielmus, filius Johannes Shakespeare, was baptized in Stratford on April 26,1564; April 23 is traditionally celebrated as his birthday. Here is my favorite sonnet, number XXXV.


No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authórizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are:
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense—
Thy adverse party is thy advocate—
And ‘gainst myself a lawful plea commence.
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
That I an áccessory needs must be
To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

Happy birthday, Vladimir Nabokov! Poem for Ada

désolé de ne pas être avec vous

mood: like a monarch’s genitalia
labeled under glass, I miss yo(u).
when did you stop being my brot-
(her), my lover, my tramp, my sc(
am)p? Best incest, this fraternal/
maternal. Royalty did this, scions.
Now we are husband, huffed, and
Hera-scarum-wife-and-strife. désolé
de ne pas être avec vous today and
as we were, hymn/her, heard.

Poem for Earth Day: revery about intoxicated turtles

the fruit has turned again
alcohol fragrant
smile at the thought of them
lolling on a beach
inverted and drunk and certain of
turning right side again
every wave an ally

tomorrow the eggs will hatch and the young will
race to the sea, Darwinically pursued
by rapacious winged predators
half will die the rest will find the sea
and live

The Traditional Russian Easter Greeting

Христос воскресe! (Khristos voskres)
(Christ has arisen! This is the traditional Russian Easter greeting.)

Воистину воскресе! (Voistinu voskrese)
(Indeed, He has arisen! This is the traditional response.)

Plus three kisses, one cheek, two cheek, and back again (the kisses are essential).

Happy Easter!

Guest blog on We Wanted to Be Writers

Thanks to Cheryl Olsen for asking me to share my favorite books. http://wewantedtobewriters.com/2014/04/books-by-larissa-shmailos-bed

First Review of #specialcharacters

Thanks to Meredith Sue Willis for her review of #specialcharacters in Books for Readers #169 (April 17). She writes:

I thought this was going to be all poetry, but it is much more experimental than that, ending with a wonderful piece about a woman who is close to the end of the line with aging, mental illness, and poverty. It's called "MIRROR, or a Flash in the Pan." It is very close to fiction, although it certainly has passages of poetry. It's an excellent piece, crystal clear and shockingly honest. The collection also includes what is rightfully maybe Shmailo's most famous (popular?) poem, available to read on line, "The Other Woman's Cunt". This one is angry, raunchy, vicious and -- by the way! -- hilarious.

There is a fair amount of typographical experimentation and deep connections to literature and mythology, but at its heart, as a whole, the book has the remarkable quality of being extremely moving even when you aren't sure what's going on.

That's a serious statement, too, because you have the feeling that things that look like games on the surface – for example, a short poem called " t(his), (he)re" – are in fact the only way Shmailo could have written what she wanted to write. This is highly recommended as both interesting experimental work and for its powerful emotional connections. .

http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/bfrarchive166-170.html#issue169

Between Eclipses

A razor cuts your wrists, but
what cut you off from me?
Is true love quart'red below?

When (blew) an azure sky
separates the chambered clouds,
which Earth will you then save,
which elements recycle?

These eclipses should portend,
but I would always be
the bastard that I am,
had the maidlienest, brightest star
eclipsed upon this gesture.

NYC Launch of #specialcharacters May 11!

The Girl @theParisReview Says Uncool

The idiot girl @theParisReview says uncool:
that, to critique, the phrase, the trappings of,
is used by “100% pretentious hacks.” And
the editor @PoetryFound retweets her crap,
and an article on pooping, besides. I was
going to tweet a Baudelaire, from “Beauty,” line,
line by displaced line:
I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone
But thought better of it (a proscribed phrase?)
—an unpretentious #Stalinist might
tell me not to translate, or Baudelaire not to write.
(But what does this mean:
Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes?
Is the idiot girl @ParisCool right?) No, she is
an idiot, disliking a history without her part,
as I dislike the way the young are heartless, mean,
calling it honest (and I was different @18?)

Happy World Poetry Day!

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Steven Wright

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.
Groucho Marx

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.
Bob Dylan

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Walt Whitman

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Carl Sandburg

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster

Every old poem is sacred.
Horace

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
Spike Milligan

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery

désolé de ne pas être avec vous (for Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada)*

mood: like a monarch’s genitalia
labeled under glass, I miss you (u).
when did you stop being my brot-
her (her), my lover, my tramp, my
scamp? Best incest, this fraternal/
maternal. Royalty did this, scions.
Now we are husband, huffed up,
and Hera-wife-strife. désolé de
ne pas être avec vous today and
as we once were, her/him, heard.

From #specialcharacters available now from Amazon and Unlikely Books.
*This poem appeared in MadHat 15: Eye on the World.

Phase Change

She rose from the floor like a stalagmite, an icicle staring crystals at me. I remembered every snowflake was unique, and that this coldness was only similar to the others that separated us, monoid fractals of intricate perimeter.

every happy family is warm.
every unhappy family is
cold in its own way.

Cold. That this frigidity was natural, not freon, made it hurt still more. I numbed and sank within myself. Alone, I fancied myself whole and warm. Heat rose from me like a Hawaiian island. I had become a geothermal vent, heating an artist’s garret, sparrows, and a topography of ferns. I soon became hydrogen, fusing to helium in the sun; I evaporated the infinite snow and the ice of her gaze. I was the water cycle, rising, condensing, immense as a hurricane, gentle as dew. I was salt, the origin of tears, the panacea of fear, and she was still cold.

From #specialcharacters, now available from Amazon and Unlikely Books.

Kimberly Rae Lorenz-Copeland interviews me about #specialcharacters

Unlikely micro-interview #2.

KR: In my world, Language Arts and Mathematics are on opposite ends of the cognitive spectrum. In fact, numbers have never really registered on my poetry radar at all. Yet, in your book, #specialcharacters, you gel the two together so well, it’s like milk and Pepsi all over again. What gives?

LS: Language is an indispensable part of mathematics, be it the word problem (which is what I call some of my poems) or the narrative behind the Big Bang. Also, math and language centers are quite close in the brain, and math, according to neurologists, requires cross-talk.

Jung loved numbers, and so do I. Like him, I romanticize them and give them mythic numerological symbolism. The opening poem of #specialcharacters, "Aging," is based on the Fibonacci sequence, which creates the whorls of sunflowers, spiral galaxies, and many other beloved objects. The final piece, "Mirror, or a Flash in the Pan," is about that dominant number in many lives, symbolized by the $. Everyone gets that number.

KR: Aside from Jung, what other non-poet(s) most greatly influenced this particularly compelling poetry compilation?

LS: The late, great, and underrated David Markson, for his poetical prose in single sentences, which I tried to emulate in "Mirror" (I could not approach his encyclopedic and wickedly detailed knowledge of literature and the arts). Joyce and Joyce and Joyce and Joyce; although he is also a poet, it was Ulysses to which I responded multiply-orgasmically when I first read it two years ago.

Others: The Canonical Gospels, Tolstoy, Old Church Slavonic, The Paris Review, the PBS program Nature, and Blade Runner. But the people who most informed this collection are all poets, in one way or another. As was Jung, for that matter. I especially thank the Otherstream Poetry group (see the great new Madhat anthology, Shadows of the Future) for inspiring some of the experimental poems in this book.

KR: Ah, the experimental poems; those for which #specialcharacters is named, those challenges of the form, those teeming with special characters, and those, I feel, to be the most captivating. Tell me, if you had to define yourself, as a person, a poet, a lover, a friend, using only one such symbol, which would it be and why?

LS: &: The ampersand, meaning "and"- I am an and person, inclusive. I invite Peter and Paul to the party, I like vanilla and chocolate, I work on six projects at a time. And the character looks female, hippy, a plus size like me. The symbol is a ligature of the Latin et, and I am an etcetera person; I sometimes have the quality of too-muchness, but l contain multitudes (Whitman and I share the same birthday).

Chimera

Father of a Ghost (after Stephen Dedalus's Theory of Hamlet in Ulysses)

James Joyce b. February 2
Hamnet Shakespeare baptized February 2

Father of a ghost, but from the charnel dead!
Truepenny called, but bid his one son read
A woeful bedtime tale. So list: if Hamnet were
A suicide (the rest, what is the rest?); if Shakespeare were
Behorned by Ann (and her way hath will, clear)
And asked the poor young Hamnet now to kill the ‘dulterous peer,
(Perhaps to pour the poison in the porches of his ear?)
Cert, he would read just like a crab, ass backward and in fear:
Hamlet (his twin), ou le Distrait, une Pièce de Père Shakespeare;
Ophelia-like, rosemary clad, made mad with that despair.
Or … if the canon ‘gainst self-slaughter held fast,
Would he be murdered with all murdered at last?
And, scarred by family the most,
Who would rise to be his ghost?

From #specialcharacters by Larissa Shmailo, available from Amazon and Unlikely Books.

A Night of Sirens: Benefit for Made by Survivors at the Bitter End 3/20

In honor of Women's History Month, I am excited to invite you to a special musical event to celebrate and empower women at the legendary Bitter End, 147 Bleecker Street (info: (212) 673-7030, info@bitterend.com) this Thursday, 3/20 at 9:00 pm.

A Night of Sirens is a concert featuring twenty singer-songwriters (and one poet, yours truly, backed by rock legend Lisa Bianco). The night will feature indie music, jazz, and good old fashioned rock 'n roll.

There will be performances by Arlene Gould | ארלין גולד, Becca Bernard, Chawa Lilith, Christina LaRocca, Dorothy Eagle, Dez Ismusic, Ellia Bisker, Erel Pilo, Ionie, Katie J Louchheim, Kjersti Kveli, Larissa Shmailo, Lisa Bianco, Lyndol Descant, Michael W McHugh, Nicole Lana Camacho, Peter Bliss, Rew AsteriCk, Sal Mastrocola & Erin Bagwell, and Stephanie Gandelman!

There is a $10 suggested donation which will benefit Made By Survivors, a non-profit charity dedicated to empowering women from around the world who are survivors of slavery, sex trafficking and other human rights abuses. Learn more about the great strides they are making here: http://www.madebysurvivors.com/

Please join us on the first day of spring to hear the song of the Sirens!

Jamas Volveré

To touch the sidereal limits with the hands—Otero

To see you is to see a warm brown bird
flash in a black night: I shudder.

Gone are the stars that are not the sun
that punctuate heights no longer heights,
heights become space. Things I will never know
with my proximity senses are gone, all gone:

I will never hear a star upon this earth,
but I feel the warm gusts your wings stir up.
If in the daytime I were to leave bread and fruit for you,
you might come again. I am not so different from
the mangrove swamp where you play.

Dedicated to the victims of the Park Avenue gas explosion in El Barrio.

Death of a Reader

What happens to a writer when her favorite reader dies?

The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin said that poets need readers like drunks need vodka. As a poet, I can attest to the truth of this statement. On December 27, 2013, the unthinkable happened—my sister, Tamara Shanahan, champion of my work and my favorite reader, died of complications from a mass on her gall bladder. I lost a sister that day, but also something more. The loss of my sibling is compounded by the loss of a nigh irreplaceable set of loving eyes on my work and a precious and intimate communication through words, not only written, but also appreciated.

I called my sister Tamara “Theo,” after the equally supportive brother of Vincent van Gogh, who cared for his brother, nurtured his talent, and more than once sent urgently needed funds to the artist. Tamara was always available to listen to a new poem, and perhaps, just perhaps, over-praised a few. She also bought my books and CDs by the dozens, handing them out to her friends and neighbors; everyone at her chiropractor’s office got a copy of my CD, The No-Net World, special to us because its cover is a vintage photo of my parents.

Her favorite poem was about older women:

Ladybug

Ladybug, the autumnal, menopausal forest is aflame,
Burning with your yearning and desire: go home.
No season of mists or mellow fruitfulness for you, only
The hot flash of Eros dying, growing old.

Fall now, the deep loam envelopes your breasts,
Dugs that hang low. The crimson leaves as
Veined as your hands, varices red and blue,
Glitter with last dew, the brilliance before death.

Can you, withered Phoenix, rise?
Female over fifty, do you have your music too?

But she also liked my bawdy “The Other Woman’s Cunt” and encouraged me to be bold and perform and publish it.

Tamara used to liken us to “city mouse and country mouse,” with me living in Manhattan and active in various artistic scenes, and my sister living quietly in Queens, enjoying her family and neighbors. We attributed adventurousness to me, always seeking the new, and conventionality to her. Yet what seemed unadventurous in her was perhaps the greatest adventure of all, in her thirty-year long committed relationship with another human being, David Rosen, whom she loved with every particle of her being and was loved by in return. And that love also shone on her late daughter, Irene, and, no matter how obnoxious I was, on me, too.

Part of the balcony at my readings will never light again, a page from my manuscripts will always be missing. My favorite reader has left the house, never to return, and with her, a part of my literary courage and inspiration.

Dedicated to the memory of Tamara Shanahan (August 7, 1948–December 27, 2013).

- See more at: http://indiereader.com/2014/03/death-reader/#sthash.EmGhcqi9.dpuf

Reactions to Larissa Shmailo's new poetry collection, "#specialcharacters"

This is a thrilling book of femininity and magic. When it comes to capturing the intimacy of pain, This Larissa Shmailo is among the most daring poets of her generation. When speaking of human rights, she is a human flame. She is subtle and provocative, fresh and out of bounds. You will fall in love here, and you will be loved right back.
—Philip Nikolayev

At one point in #specialcharacters, Larissa Shmailo declares: “Mother Kali, you have made me what I am: feminine, brilliant, entirely without fear” -- and the rest of the poems in this collection prove this true. They run the gamut from being outspoken to outrageous, irreverent to downright heretical, taking gleeful pride in knowing exactly how far is too far – and then going even further. I see this work as a continuum in a long tradition of radical writing practices from Futurism, to Dada, to Oulipo, to Pussy Riot. Read it when you wish to be empowered. Read it when you wish to be entertained. Read it to rid yourself of the precious and polite.
—Elaine Equi

With #specialcharacters where even the title is special Shmailo has managed to split language into its common & least common denominators/principles: sound, meaning, symbol, feeling (text/ure) as well as providing us with a range of voices from child to adult & male to female within a range of styles & mannerisms from the ultra-experimental to quirky “innocent” rhymes like her sexy riff on “the 12 days of Christmas” in her classic “The Other Woman’s Cunt.” Her knowledge of the “WORD” & how to use it extends from darkly humorous to warm, lyrical, tender & painful. She explores every facet of lives lived, be it endangered turtles, abused women or battered men. Her passion & compassion know no bounds. “Between cause & effect…choose this” BOOK, at times a “woeful bedtime tale” & “a light in the bedroom” or any room, any space anywhere in the world. It is a book of verse one should return to “again & again.” A book about “creation,” “alive as snow,” these poems “glisten like apples in the dying sun.” When Shmailo refers to “Steven’s old bones” this “unorthodox jew” can only think of the pleasure his old bones derive from reading these rejuvenating pages. This is a major work by a major poet.
—Steve Dalachinsky

Now available from Amazon and Unlikely Books.

Reading at Hot Pillow, Seattle AWP: The Other Woman's Cunt

Thanks to Joani Reese for throwing the hottest off-site party at Seattle AWP, Hot Pillow, and for inviting me to read my reticent and reflective (not) poem, "The Other Woman's Cunt." Please copy and paste link if you don't require PC poetry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQZLzy4JIgs

Boston launch of my new collection, #specialcharacters

Please join me for a reading in Cambridge launching my new collection, #specialcharacters featuring the Boston area's finest poets, editors, and publishers:

Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich, editors-in-chief, FULCRUM: an annual of poetry and aesthetics;
Gloria Mindock, publisher and editor, Červená Barva Press;
Ben Mazer, editor, The Battersea Review;
Zachary Bos, editor, Pen & Anvil Press;
Audrey Roth, esq., ConvergentGC,
and Annie Pluto, professor of literature and drama, Lesley Unversity.

And, of course, yours truly!

Wednesday, April 9, 7:00 pm
Sherrill Library
Lesley University
89 Brattle St
Cambridge, MA 02138

See you there!

My Foreword to Shadows of the Future: An Otherstream Anthology, edited by Marc Vincenz

Foreword and Forewarned

There is, as Bob Grumman termed it, the knownstream; then there is the otherstream, a raging subterranean river of literary lava. It bursts through to an unsuspecting public in Warholian, beat, and Dadaesque and Sadean eruptions— a few readers live to tell the tale and the rest never know what hit them.

Welcome to Shadows of the Future. Here you have Chris Mansel and his he/she serial killers, Marc Vincenz's Swiss-Chinese eyes, Sheila Murphy ripping zen a new one, C. Brannon Watts with blood in his mouth, mIEKAL aND's Unglish, Annie Pluto's words entwined like lovers, Camille Baco's spare music, Marie-Marcia Casoly's fleshy skeletons, John M. Bennett's muy orthography, Sarah Sarai's mellifluous light, and Joani Reese's evanescence. Carol Novack calls from from the other side and Jack Foley calls from any coast he wants. Jeffrey Side's words looks knowlingly upon the festivities, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's poems pulse like his recordings, and Susan Lewis's pivots the prose poetics at impossible new angles.

And there are more of us, of course, because Otherstream is more, even de trop, or monk minimalist, as it wants. Ask Jake Berry, who rules our online haunts like a happy Pluto handing out inheritances.

Yes, we are legion. Like it.

Otherstream is where every significant literature was born, midwifed by a writer who asked, looking at a new syntax and/or semantics, how can I write like that, never worrying about the may. Like all poets, but perhaps more extreme, we seek the new perspective, though our sense, sounds, and sentences, broken or not.

Ask me: May we write this way? Try to stop us

-Larissa Shmailo

National Translation Month - NTM: Polina Barskova translated by Catherine Ciepiela

1998

what matters is not at what place but what moment
the uncoupling decoupling
of movement outward begins:
in December precisely in Okhta probably
identical buildings of crap leatherette
on which scars of SovHousewares glow in the night
meat vegetables footwear - abstract metamatter.
filth flies as galoshes gallop across
the wasteland: so earnest, you know,
such candor and cha-harm in those nightly sessions!
where the elevator drops you Dante-like circle by circle
to the basement where a blind cat gnaws on a piece of glass
or the anemic grove at the edge of the well-fed park
where a musing imbecile pisses on a rotting mat of leaves
with casual dignity like a faun perched on
one of Peterhof's fountains.
the boudoir protocol of familiar and formal address
eight poets one more monstrous than the next in his
despairing artistic malice,
the burning bush of crude come-ons
flares predictably with goodbyes -
again the deus ex machina misses his cue.
Morning, December, river.
laminated stamped
approved for the shining hell of resurrection.

National Translation Month - NTM: Vladimir Gandelsman translated by Olga Zilberbourg

Egret

Threaded through itself,
needle and thread,
dry hermit thought,
scant layer,
gently interleaving the air,
a bookmark for its pages,
beak askew, -
it, like a steeple of order,
or an axis,
or a blade drawn from its sheath

and driven into a pond, where fish,
where golden
halos circumscribe the scales,
where fear
is more circular and silent than a target,
and where one female with a singular
gaze skywards,
sharp-angle-browed,
stiller than all
stands, barely swaying, stiller than a shadow.

Then, lingering at the start,
that arrow,
biting into the air, into the light,
two wings
spreading-laboriously, definitively,
and letting drops fall from its claws-
flies
above the pond,-and in the egret's beak,
as a fish's mouth,
world opens wide and gapes dumbfounded.

National Translation Month - NTM: Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) Translated from Russian by Alexander Cigale

As it may

The street collapsed like the nose of a syphilitic.
The river – sweet longing that spilled into spit.
Having shed their underwear down to the last leaf
the vulgar gardens have gone to seed in June.
I walked out onto the square
and put the desiccated neighborhood
on my head like an orange wig.
People terrified of me – out of my mouth
squirming with its feet an undigested scream.
But they won’t judge me, won’t bark at me.
As at a prophet, they will strew flowers in my wake.
All of them with collapsed noses know
I – am your poet.
As by tavern rot, I’m terrified of your terrible judgment.
The prostitutes will carry me alone in their hands
like a sacred relic through the burning buildings
and display me before God as their redemption.
And God will break down and whimper over my book!
Not words – shuddering, congealed into clumps;
he will race across the sky with my verses under his arm
and, all out of breath, recite them to his acquaintances.

From Back to Futurism, Alex Cigale 2012

National Translation Month - NTM: Sergei Sokolovskiy translated by Matvei Yankelevich

Island

"It's a lie!" we answered in unison, without arranging it.

"It's no secret that the image of an island counts among those I most despise. It seems to me that this image has accumulated exactly as much filth and falsity as is needed to form an island, blast it! What could be more natural than when, from all the trash (spiritual, cultural, and biological) poured in a heap, suddenly, as if by the wave of a conductor's wand, an isle appears? Here we cannot help but associate-by rhyme-our hot uninhabited isle with the awl, a sharp implement, and through it all sharp-tongued witticisms and pointed puns, the tools of rhetoric, even the sharp heat of island spices, and as a result we are lead to all the potential harm caused by the isle-awl: it all goes to the same place, into one heap, one atoll. The pun, as you can see, nauseates: I will be sick with all these endless islands, all seclusion, solitude and cosmic loneliness, I'll vomit them into the auditorium, were there an auditorium before me, or wherever, if it so happens by some inexplicable reason that the auditorium is absent. The inexplicable reason, by the way, can only be the following: that the auditorium is also an island, a diminutive isle of peace and calm in the stormy sea of modernity. And it's not possible that I would be sick into the very thing thing that makes me sick, isn't that true? I'm asking you: is it true?

Once more we replied: "It's a lie!

National Translation Month - NTM: Anya Logvinova: The Old Ladies Sighed

Translated by Larissa Shmailo

The old ladies sighed—-what is going to happen?
The old ladies sighed—how’s it all going to end?
And I understood: They’re grooming me for slaughter
By some feeling of monstrous proportions.

But now, I am astonishingly old,
And that feeling never, never comes.

And I know—there are women who, to the last,
Will all rise up, every one of them,
And say, “We—we like our husbands
Better than Jeremy Irons!”

But I never saw their husbands,
Never took off their ties, never kissed their necks.
And that’s why it’s possible that
I don’t like anyone.
Except, of course, Jeremy,
Jeremy Irons.

Бабушки охали — что же такое будет.
Бабушки охали — как же все это станется.
И я понимала — меня растят на убой
Какому-то чувству чудовищного размаха.

И вот — мне уже возмутительно много лет,
А чувства такого все нет и нет.

И я знаю — есть женщины, из которых все до одной
Могут встать стеной.
И сказать — что мол «наши мужья нам нравятся
Больше Джереми Айронса!!!

Но я никогда не видела их мужей,
Не снимала с них галстуков, не целовала их шей.
И возможно поэтому
Мне так никто и не нравится.
Кроме, конечно же, Джереми,
Джереми Айронса . . .

An earlier version of this translation appeared in the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry edited by James Tate.

National Translation Month - NTM: Vadim Mesyats Translated by Dana Golin

Dahin, Dahin
[Away, away; German]

I'll go where the snow,
Blue like the eyes of the Virgin,
Touched by an icy crust,
Palpable in relief,
Reigns in the fields of the night.

Where under the heavy conifer wings
Stands my abandoned house,
In which I no longer have faith,
It lives and ages with me,
Just like me, pleading for mercy.

Black boulders, cold foreheads exposed,
Are waiting for us to address them aloud,
As if they have found a solution
To the riddle of time immemorial.

It's terrifying when you realize,
That the trees, the lake, the snow, and the sky,
Holding the world in the grip of their workmen's gloves,
See through you, and are willing
To sell your soul for a song...

Yes, this - the only direction worth going in,
If one is to approach all that's mightier.
Encircling in love seems just as legitimate
As thirst for revenge, while to know
The name of another's God - is to win.

National Translation Month - NTM: In Memoriam: Boris Ryzhy (1974-2001) Translated by Philip Nikolayev

"Got neither cash nor wine..."
- Adamovich

Let's walk, my friend, along an empty street
where frozen clementines of streetlamps hover
and snow covers the distance like a sheet
and all the stores have shut their doors forever.
Show windows, neon glow, ditches and pipes.
"It's all so gruesome, hopeless, literal.
And what do you, my friend, expect from life?" -
"Sadness: it's in the nature of the beautiful!"


All that being quite so, we pass black walls.
"What do you figure will happen to us tomorrow?"
A monstrous and eternal mannequin follows
us with two perfect eyeballs free of sorrow.
"Suppose he knows that storefront rose is dead,
or his own ugliness, or the world's fears?" -
"He knows that there is happiness, my friend,
yet you and I can't see it for our tears.

For Six Months with You

For six months with you, I would
Quit my lover
Leave the city
Sell my books.

For six months with you, I would
Live in Kansas
Join a carpool
Shave my legs.

For six months with you, I would
Be an actress
Wait on tables
Burn this poem.

But what if it doesn’t work out?

If it doesn’t work out I’ll join a convent
If it doesn’t work out I’ll cut my hair
If it doesn’t work out I’ll leave the country
If it doesn’t work out I still don’t care. . . .

For six months with you, I would
Break the true law
Break my poor heart
Break my vow.


Now ask me what I’d do
For a year or two.

Happy Valentine's Day!

National Translation Month - NTM: Klaus Merz Translated from the German by Marc Vincenz

Pinacoteca*

Clouds roll
adamantly by and light
rain falls, falls.


One woman pours
milk, the other
combs her hair—for
three hundred years:


Not life, said
Malraux, but the statues,
will be our witnesses.


*From Out of the Dust.
This translation originally appeared in Asymptote.

National Translation Month - NTM: Katia Kapovich: In Nabokov's Memory

Translated by the author

Dead roses, plastic tulips, dry immortelles-
he hated them in the German hotels,
drinking coffee from cups whose shiny backs
had been designed with swastikas of cracks.


He never settled down to sink his roots
in any fathermotherland. Old bear,
he wore the same old-fashioned English suits
that had traveled so far during the war.


His wife, his alter echo, read him books
as he lay ill in bed, prepared to die.
He knew by name all foreign lakes and brooks
as they passed by.


A man forgets men rather than forgives.
Laugh, Mnemosyne, healing muse of those
whose heads are crowned, but not with laurel leaves-
with the whispering reeds of other shores.


From an interview between Adam Weiner, chair of Slavic at Wellesley, and myself about contemporary Russian poetry:

AW: In your anthology I immediately noticed a very fine poem by Katia Kapovich, "In Nabokov's Memory." This poem flows so easily that you miss the first time through how rich it is with meaning and humor. The way the poet remembers Nabokov's famous penchant for "hating" things and applies it—in the second line!—to the flowers of the first, the discovered secondary sense of hating "dry immortelles," the way she turns his autobiography, Speak, Memory, into Laugh, Mnemosyne, and many more happy turnings.

LS: I love Katia's poem, which gives understated voice to the life of a literary expatriate, who learns the names of foreign brooks and lakes, perhaps for her new American readership, and perhaps simply for the words. Brodsky was such a "crowned head," our poet laureate. Our émigré bilinguals in Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry write of these "other shores" in bittersweet memory of home.

National Translation Month - NTM: Nikolai Gumilev - Acrostic Poem (on the name of his wife, Anna Akhmatova)

Addis Ababa, city of roses.
Near the banks of transparent streams,
No earthly devas brought you here,
A diamond, amidst gloomy gorges.


Armidin garden … There a pilgrim
Keeps his oath of obscure love*
(Mind you, we all bow before him),
And the roses cloy, the roses red.


There, full of deceit and venom,
Ogles some gaze into the soul,
Via forests of tall sycamores,
And alleyways of dusky planes.


Tr. L Shmailo
*The Russian letter х is transliterated by kh (K-eeps h=is)

Акростих


Аддис-Абеба, город роз.
На берегу ручьёв прозрачных,
Небесный див тебя принес,
Алмазной, средь ущелий мрачных.


Армидин сад… Там пилигрим
Хранит обет любви неясной
(Мы все склоняемся пред ним),
А розы душны, розы красны
.

Там смотрит в душу чей-то взор,
Отравы полный и обманов,
В садах высоких сикомор,
Аллеях сумрачных платанов.

National Translation Month - NTM: Alexander Skidan

the grammarian distributes the semes
a fraction of seeds
sacrificial miniscule


a name is a gravestone
circumcision


and siva’s wool is dipped in a boiling column
of dancing flames


but the heart
heart in vain


Tr. L. Shmailo and the author