by Natalka Marynchak
Translated from Ukrainian by Lada Kolomiyets
everyone will have their own story
of broken paths and breathlessness
everyone will have their own defended territory
of roaring and laughing
I now have a heart
of reinforced concrete
it knows neither pity
nor comfort
by Dan Sociu
Translated from Romanian by Monica Cure
I had been in anguish, in anguish, in the light,
from where I had been sent
back into the world, I went into the old dream
where everything was different now though somehow the same
though other
or I was someone else
by Doina Ioanid
Translated from Romanian by Monica Cure
To be exposed to the harsh air, saturated and heavy with those who came before you. To come into the world as fog takes big bites out of the bark of birch trees and foxes hop around drunk.
by Krista Szöcs
Translated from Romanian by Monica Cure
they say love will save me from the distances I can’t cross
the distance from here to many meters away measured in footsteps
love will also save me from tiresome fantasies
that inflate my ego and self-confidence
where is my ego and self-confidence?
by Vasyl Stus
Translated from the Ukrainian by Bohdan Tokarsky and Julius Kochan
If people carry on writing books
for another couple of centuries
then what will our descendants do?
What taught people to sharpen knives
was screams.
by Munawwar Abdulla
Elect a baby as king, why don’t you? I am
played in, loved in, traded in, not
fenced in. Nor do walls protect me.
Perhaps the desert does.
by Sarah Peecher
Where is god
in the hollow
the waxy shell of an old man
who isn’t there anymore?
In the room of his dying –
by Karuna Ezara Parikh
She tells me and my college friend from London
– Diana, ‘like the princess!’ Aunty says –
that ‘nowadays it’s only for marriage,
like we are Khatri, we want Karan also to marry Khatri.’
Diana asks why, as I dip Pure Magic in chai,
but Karan comes in, bringing with him hot-hot air,
‘Bhenchod’ he says, and tells us how the ‘bloody driver’ has been unfair.
by S.T. Bryant
Othello teaches, contra Descartes, that we are perpetually,
to our precarious doom, unaware of that deepest in our hearts.
We are planetary, too planetary, orbital, to be so singular.
Always susceptible to annihilative ruminations, motives.
Our happiest times, our Monism, prey us to destruction.
by Iryna Starovoyt
Translated from the Ukrainian by Grace Mahoney
New tenants will sit on my couch, cuddle each other.
The woman is beautiful, pregnant.
They will drink tea from my cups, will light my candles.
Only Ursa Major, the Great Mama Bear, asks:
Who’s been sleeping in my bed? Something’s not right,
what’s gone wrong here…?
by Yuliya Musakovska
Translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and the author
The war that you've been carrying
in your shirt pocket
gnawed a hole in you as if it were a fox.
Your heart keeps falling out.
I am sewing the hole shut,
firmly holding the edges together
with my numb, unbending fingers.
by Dvir Skotnyj
In Kyiv, we first lived off a street of ice,
in a brick walkup of Khrushchev’s design:
the apartment – small, the neighbors – loud,
the heating and water – often out.
by Iryna Shuvalova
translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps
if I am not being killed
do I have the right
to talk with those who are being killed
as an equal
do I have the right to hurt
if I’m not wounded
by Edwin Fagel
Translated from the Dutch by Claudette Sherlock
You lie tied & blindfolded
& all the men are chanting
sanctus sanctus
they all share the same name
& all walk as I do
by Tomaž Šalamun
Translated from the Slovenian by Matthew Moore
To open the faucets, Anastasia,
will bring you to naught
nowhere. We watched the heat.
A figure is a face, a part,
motif. Sulfur on a barrel.
by Lauren Davis
Neither I
nor the seasons
forget
what was before.
Only each of us make
a joyous rebirth
of what ourselves have figured out.
by Vasyl Stus
Translated from the Ukrainian by Bohdan Tokarskyi and Uilleam Blacker
I wandered around the city of my youth,
vainly searching, in the new blocks,
for yesterday’s buildings, parks, and paths,
for familiar patterns on pediments,
geography is lost.
by Ekaterina Simonova
Translated from the Russian by Robin Munby
writing about a city
in which you’ve never set foot
is like trying to have a conversation
with someone who no longer loves you
so much pain lies between you
that language collapses into incomprehensible fragments
by Mary Birnbaum
Atavistic we palm the mist
at the window, hoarding our safe
close shadow. We peer into
the uncertain freedom that once
unfolded monstrous birds
with narrow wings and jagged beaks
like storm waves, like the bite
of mountain range and clouds
nesting hailstones.
by Jessica Kim
Someone will parcel memories into the cardboard box and leave them on my doorstep. I will not be not home. Today, I no longer live in this body, fingers unhooking from the discolored sky, feet angling towards the heavens, aimless.
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