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.
​

---

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.