Lana Rakhman
You Say Maelstrom, I Hear:
can it be just a pretty poem
lost in translation –
does it need the apocalypse
in your mouth
asking me to look
away, the nakedness
pulsating into an algorithm
for how to quantify
a distance between
where you have been & where
you are going?
Distractions,
retractions with mulch:
write something beyond
sound,
or sit in the back
row and count down
the minutes.
lost in translation –
does it need the apocalypse
in your mouth
asking me to look
away, the nakedness
pulsating into an algorithm
for how to quantify
a distance between
where you have been & where
you are going?
Distractions,
retractions with mulch:
write something beyond
sound,
or sit in the back
row and count down
the minutes.
In Lieu of Song
She never spoke except in
low tones, split skull,
loosened in a sandstorm,
or a wind tunnel,
or maybe by a swarm
of crickets, humming the pieces apart,
because she believed that there was something
broken inside her head and
floating loose there
unwinding cochlea from lumbar,
coccyx from retina.
In her head cottonwood trees peel
kites into soft sirocco –
no – not
white, but in her own house –
which she might displace by talking too loud.
In a kitchen
knuckled by women,
molded by wolves that leave
prints in nothing,
her voice swells
into morning, luminous
and yawning,
getting louder
in her throat but losing
its tongue: a respite, then quiet.
“ Once,”
she mouths, “I lost an entire language
in my hair.”
De Retour [Returning Back]
Ukrainian/American, but neither
really. A woman/omen.
When I was little/stupid they
told me my mother
went away on a trip/
died when the earth
shifted off its axis to turn
away from sun/moon,
take a drag of its cigarette/
joint and close its eyes for
just a second, a stillness
without noise/time.
Women, I hear, are irrational/
fractions. I’ve never seen the
mother my city comes from.
Understand, this is only
sad to me. I can now
speak/read the language
I was born into/out of, but
feelings of trespass
haven’t gone far/far enough.
A blessing/curse, that I
think the words “Я тебя люблю”
in Russian, yet when I
speak/sing the
waves that come
out of my mouth
sound like English
is my only
country/
--
Lana Rakhman was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and currently lives in Chicago. She has poems published, or forthcoming, in Psychic Meatloaf, Jet Fuel Review, Poetry South, Grey Sparrow Journal, Main Street Rag, Juked, Rougarou, and others. She is the poetry editor for the literary journal TriQuarterly Online, and has an MFA from Northwestern University.