Cat in the window
examines the snowflakes that float—
marks of art in the winter dark
It’s a Christmas Eve in my homeland
the things to come
waiting to be unwrapped
By YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA
Translated from the Ukrainian by OLENA JENNINGS and YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA
If their history together hadn’t begun this way,
they both would have been left alone, each with their war.
August—hellish, the bathhouse filled with bodies.
She squeezes the familiar palm and comes to life again.
Everything that has happened and didn’t happen to them,
is established, set in stone, unforgettable,
April Is Poetry Month: New Poems By Our Contributors
MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN, DAVID LEHMAN, and YULIYA MUSAKOVSKA (translated by the author and OLENA JENNINGS)
Table of Contents:
Mark Anthony Cayanan
—Ecstasy Facsimile (These days I ask god…)
David Lehman
—The Remedy
—A Postcard from the Future
—Last Day in the City
Yuliya Musakovska (translated by the author and Olena Jennings)
—Angel of Maydan
—The Sorceress’ Oath
New poems by our contributors TINA CANE, MYRONN HARDY, and MARC VINCENZ
Table of Contents:
Tina Cane
—You Are Now Interacting as Yourself
—The Subject Line
Myronn Hardy
—Among Asters
Marc Vincenz
—An Empire in the Ground
You Are Now Interacting As Yourself
By TINA CANE
Sheila had IHOP delivered to her apartment in El Alto, NY
on January 6th so she could kick back self-proclaimed terrorist
that she is and eat pancakes while watching white supremacists
storm the Capital on T.V. a coup
Yalta, Ukraine
The minibus stops in the middle of the road and the driver opens the door, he says something in Russian which I take to mean I need to get off. I begin to walk on a red dirt road that meanders down, and in front of me, the vastness of the Crimean terrain opens up, splotches of yellow overgrown grass, young bushes and wildflowers, the quiet dark sea in the distance.
I ask
Half-awake
Is poetry possible
At the moment history stirs
Once its steps
Reverberate through every heart?
— From “Can there be poetry after” by Anastasia Afanasieva, translated by Kevin Vaughn and Maria Khotimsky
With the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, we at The Common have been reflecting on the powerful words of many Ukrainian poets who have appeared in our pages. In recent years their work has been rooted in conflict, as the country struggled first with self-determination and later with the Russian annexation of Crimea and, since 2014, with a Russian-incited war in the East. This focus lends a feeling of prescience and timeliness to their work now, even though most of these poems are not new. We hope you’ll make time to read and reflect on the work of these poets, as we all keep Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in our thoughts.
Translated by the author and JESSICA ZYCHOWICZ
Hudson, NY
I feel greedy, I have a frog in my throat because of this
expensive beer. I start to ask around, like a detective,
and immediately get some info
from the writer sitting at our table nearby,
whom I got to know just now.
The house of Ashbery has likely mahogany doors facing
the square, probably where city hall is.
I don’t even think about visiting without letting
someone know first. I stop and read a few poems in a bookshop.
You won’t repeat the jokes, I say,
you’ll go around to all the apartments on Halloween
with pumpkins, like I used to do
in my childhood, but then the main thing was trick or treat,
not to force someone for an interview or a photograph.
This month we offer you selections from New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City, edited by TC contributor, Ostap Kin, forthcoming from Academic Studies Press.
Ukrainian poets have long connected themselves to the powerful myth of New York, offering various takes on its aura of urban modernity, its problematic vitality. New York Elegies demonstrates how evocations of New York City are connected to various stylistic modes and topical questions urgent to Ukrainian poetry throughout the past hundred years.
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