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a woman
emerges
fully
formed
from the head
of Lenin
abandoned
no body
his nose
carved off
the woman’s
lipstick
immaculate
I too
have made
in my head
a room
for the future
limestone
clean
and dark
Copyright © 2023 Sasha Burshteyn. Originally published in Bat City Review, Issue 19, Spring 2023. Used with the permission of the author.
Everybody’s got their roaches of the mind
is my mother’s best saying.
Yes, and if we’re crazy,
history is responsible.
On the border,
my passport holds our progress in stasis.
The border guards gather—
vested, with drug-sniffing
cocker spaniels, loupes,
and scanners—to examine
my customs stamps: Boryspil,
Boryspil, Boryspil, Donetsk.
Our train lingers
in the fields between nations.
Later, an American businessman tells me
the ’90s were a fun time to be in Ukraine.
All the deals to be had! In those years
The bison are in heat—
one pisses in another’s mouth
and the other laps it up.
We are so close we see
their matted fur,
their gleaming noses.
Ivan Grigoriyevich yells
through the single lens of a binocular
my beauties, I love you!
to horses the color of roasted wheat.
They see him; they love him;
they run our way. They would eat
anything from his hand.
He recites Marx and Lenin
from memory. The high steppe grass
thrills at his touch.
Men refill an artificial lake,
and one of them
hands Ivan Grigoriyevich
an injured falcon,
Night falls and Klava can’t find sleep.
Fourteen again, war over,
she harvests hay with Old Semyon.
They hitch the wagon to the cows and ride
behind the combine. Klava above,
Semyon below. He tosses hay,
she tamps it down under her feet.
One of the cows must be her cow,
survivor of the occupation
almost slaughtered by the liberating army.
A famous village cow,
in that she was good. And when
the army boys took her, to turn her
into meat, Klava’s mother ran
to the commanding general
and insisted on the cow’s return.