Monumentality
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.
Sasha Burshteyn
Sasha Burshteyn was born in Russia and raised in both Brooklyn, New York, and Donbas, Ukraine. She holds degrees from Amherst College and New York University, where she was a Goldwater Writing Workshop Fellow.
Burshteyn’s poetry has appeared in The Baffler, The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the translations editor at Four Way Review and is a visiting scholar at the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.