history

by Sophie Gertrude Strohmeier

A brief encounter in Brussels at Christmas, then the flight eastwards: a housewife and a shopgirl caught up in an amour fou that will lose itself, unresolved, in a criss crossing of limbs and European landscapes, finally coming to a standstill in Trieste, along the Slovenian border. At the edge of the Western world, one burning question: where do lovers go when all has been escaped from?

by Alisa Ganieva
Translated from the Russian by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

The three law enforcement men had already been clicking around the parquet of the downstairs rooms for quite a while, two citizens deputized to witness the search trudging along behind them, gaping at the fancy décor of the Lyamzin house.

by Oleksiy Chupa
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

These days no one would even remember who Gerhardt Frei was. Yet, some sixty-odd years ago, this name ended up at the center of most kitchen table conversations throughout the city. After the final rout of the Third Reich, he, along with thousands of other German POWs, was sent here, to our part of Eastern Ukraine, for construction work. Frei was taken prisoner all the way out in the suburbs of Berlin.

by Serhiy Zhadan
Translated from the Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

The story I’m about to tell could’ve only happened at Christmas time. It has all the traditional elements of a Christmas story: the Magi, the messengers, the angels singing in a pomegranate-red December sky, and a sense of mystery living inside every one of us. If you listen carefully, this story will, if anything, seem to imply that mystery in its pristine form always exists somewhere around us. All you have to do is stop acting like you’re above it all and try to feel its presence. 

by Andriy Lyubka
Translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

From the outside, his building looked absolutely ordinary. The old, two-story stone structure had been divided into four apartments. His was on the first floor of the right wing. The neighbors didn’t exactly know what he did all day. Perhaps they noticed that he only left the building on rare occasions and almost never in the morning, which meant he didn’t work or worked from home. 

by Maxym Dupeshko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

Katrina live at the foot of Berda. Berda is a mountain north of Chernivtsi, blanketed in woods as if by some sort of comforter. Having climbed out from under the comforter, not Berda’s now but her own, Katrina got dressed. Today she was going to the woods to pick mushrooms. It wasn’t that Katrina was such a diehard mushroom picker, but something needed to be canned for winter. 

by Tanja Maljartschuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

A certain man lived up to age 33 in peace and harmony. He had a job, he had a family, he had relatives and acquaintances. He had two good friends with whom he met up once a month. Together they would put back four mugs of beer each, they’d talk over their jobs, families, relatives and acquaintances, then would part ways, happy and tipsy, to their respective homes to sleep. 

by Kateryna Babkina
Translated from the Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv

I bought those photographs – the entire album – for 70 euros at Place du Jeu de Balle in Brussels. Roma always said I didn’t know the value of money, and he was probably right. I don’t like flea markets; I prefer new, nice stuff. Roma’s the complete opposite, though.

by Isabel Anreus

Eddy’s beat-up Converses are resting against the wheel of the car and his eyes are staring at the worn interior vinyl ceiling. The time on the dashboard reads 12:15 pm. He’s late, typical. The old priest wanted Eddy to pick him up at 12:00 pm sharp.

by Vasyl Makhno
Translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella

There was a time when the hills of Bazar were the highest and the greenest. And I carried the Dzhurynka River nestled in my shirt like a quail’s egg found in the grass. And the rains came to us like guests on the Intercession; and snow grazed on the banks of the Dzhurynka.

by Lyuba Yakimchuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

I sometimes do things that my friends never do.  As a matter of fact, I watch the local news of the occupied Ukrainian territories that these occupiers call "republics," and this looks like some kind of masochism, apparently.

by Andriy Tuzhykov
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan.

The Ukrainian People's House in Chernivtsi, where Anna works, is surrounded by three streets: Ukrainian street, Armenian street, and Yakob von Petrovich street, named after the Armenian mayor of Chernivtsi. Sometimes, they simply say Jakob Petrovich street without the prefix “von”, for it makes the democrats get too annoyed, so both versions are used in the various guides, web pages and street conversations. In front of the People's House there is an Armenian church which also serves as a concert hall. 

by Oleksandr Boichenko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

In the country of a constantly fierce, although predominantly contrived ideological struggle, Meridian professes the ideology of tolerance. In the country where Russian still remains the language of interethnic communication, Meridian speaks a dozen languages. In the country filled  up to the brim with vodka, Meridian promotes a culture of wine consumption.

by Oleksandr Boichenko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan and Zenia Tompkins

Since writers (Kundera, in particular, but long before him: Strindberg, Joyce or Celan, for example) have suggested to critics that a literary work can be composed in accordance with the laws of music, the latter – that is, the critics – began to use, where it was necessary and not, terms such as a "poem-fuga," "drama-sonata," "novel-symphony" and so on. 

by Kelsey Farish

With neither friends nor family to meet me at the airport, I stumbled out of a black cab and into central London. It was early September, and I was twenty-three. My two old suitcases had barely survived the transatlantic flight, and were refusing to stay still. They continually found themselves in someone else’s way as I navigated through Victoria Station. I was painfully aware of each inelegant fumble I made over cobblestoned pavement and my awkward hesitations at crosswalks, uncertain of which direction to look for oncoming traffic.

by Raffi Gostanian

Legend has it that Tunisia was founded in the ninth century BC by a woman. Her name was Elissar (also known as Elissa, or Alyssar). The legend goes roughly like this:According to the Greek historian Timaeus, King Belus of the Phoenician Empire of Tyre (modern-day Lebanon) nominated both his son Pygmalion and his daughter Elissar to be his heirs. Pygmalion, however, was a tyrant; he usurped the throne, killing his sister’s husband and forcing her to flee.

by Olga Morkova

In March of 2014, a few days after Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula, my mother called to warn me against returning home. A new border between Crimea and Ukraine had been established overnight, and tanks were rolling down the street outside of my parent’s house. As a human rights lawyer and pro-Ukrainian activist, she knew that I would be labeled an enemy of the Russian government. I am now a foreigner in my own home. Ukrainian phone lines stopped working in Crimea soon after, and I could no longer call my parents. 
 

by Sergey Lebedev
Translated from the Russian by Dmytro Kyyan

They could arrest the garden gnomes,
exterminate swallows and spiders,
roll a granite pavement in asphalt,
take out to the East
the porcelain figurines from a chest of drawers
that peeped through the window,
replace the human souls
with an overcoat cloth

by Selina Mahmood

show me then,
the pen you used
to incise my lands.
show me the shoes
you had worn,
the blackness of
their polish

by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

Meticulous Demeter’s revenge was slow but vicious;
she bred innumerable souls to choke the underworld
and laced them with her own ethos; her triumphs
sickened its entombed monarch, and soon he was impotent

by Snežana Žabić

There are life forms who slash the cheek
of a refugee, lay eggs like lizards, drown in their siestas.
Immigrants talk about papers, Dubai, Cambodia,
Singapore, migrate pleasure and work. 

by Khrystia Vengryniuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

When you make a shot where the snow lies now,
I have my veins twitch and I wake up.
I screw up my eyes.
I fly away. 
Imagining HOW you are standing there.

by Oksana Lutsyshyna
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

it seems they sleep on the ground, in the ground
he gets out of the ground in the morning
to say some words
but he forgot the words because they are too long

by Andriy Tuzhykov
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

the square
named after you
is made of pixels
is rendering
is in mitosis
with the square named after me

by Hilary Scheppers

It is early August and I am in New Jersey,
in this backyard, too green,
where my friend reads
a buzz poem called “Follow Him”