By ANNA MALIHON
Translated from the Ukrainian by OLENA JENNINGS
From Girl with a Bullet, forthcoming October 2025
Presented in Olena Jennings’ seamless translation, Anna Malihon’s new collection, Girl with a Bullet, is one of the most important books of the year for those with an interest in the fate of Ukraine, a gift to Anglophone readers.
—John Hennessy, poetry editor
Table of Contents:
[The girl with a bullet in her stomach]
[Don’t go into that home]
[Now the only thing that you can do for her, Christ,]
[Unfold and dive into me, to my very bone,]
*
The girl with a bullet in her stomach
runs across the highway to the forest
runs without saying goodbye
through the news, the noble mold of lofty speeches
through history, geography,
curfew, a day, a century
She is so young that the wind carries
her over the long boulevard between bridges
where Bishop Herman catches her
promises a good hospital
and promises not to grow airplanes
only tulips
the golden tulip lanterns of Saint Germaine
but she wails, “I lost my cat at the border!”
an angel has entered the empty carrier for animals
from the city’s fresco
and sleeps
The girl with the bullet in her stomach runs
up a hill
and sees herself with an ammonite embryo of the city
beneath her heart
The key to the city gates sheds its thousand-year-old rust
and it shines so brightly that she becomes afraid
The girl Zhenia with a bullet in her biography
runs to the Ukrainian forest
runs as if she is alive
*
Don’t go into that home
everything you didn’t have time to take
was like a ransom paid
for an incredibly fortunate life
for boisterous evenings and slow soft awakenings
for larger flower pots, for coffee on the sunny terrace
for the pines that still hold up the heavens
above charred ruins
You were still a little uncertain about whether you should take the old record player
and some of your favorite records
and mohair yarn that you bought on sale yesterday
But your small car was strained more and more by the resistance
As if it knew that in several hours it would become a riddled sieve
It is now tenderly rusting away somewhere on this side of spring
Don’t dwell on it either
with thoughts with texts with drawings
I cast a spell over you, leave them behind
Especially, the Home—
inside it, the lair of black foxes of grief
Rain pours over the skeleton of the piano
Old clothes, worn by shrapnel, still dream of fashionable outings
Dolls winter in string
nourished by coniferous milk
don’t pull a thread, don’t remember
The souls of objects
that weren’t selected
will overwhelm you, won’t let you leave
They say that sprouts germinated from the surviving vases
And that at night you can hear
cracklings of music coming from the basement
*
Now the only thing that you can do for her, Christ,
is not open the black envelope
Let her go
the windows will be replaced before Easter
just like that
A drowsy bee flew in and landed on the notebook
a quiz
on February 23
Lord, you have so many worries
the city of crematoriums shine
with a phosphorescent light
onto the complicit Vatican
A rosary of a humanitarian convoy
moves West across shaky bridges
saturated soil swells
It’s time to sow
Maybe you will at least close the sky
Who is there with him?
No one
a little jealous teacher
…The last one to touch him was probably the barber
Now you come forward
to identify him
You dreamed of a tall nuclear Easter bread
children running every which way
You couldn’t catch them
your voice broke
On the bed where the child slept
were just feathers
and charred clothes
Look, these poems are made of fragments
pulled from the ruins
Do with them as you wish
Lead her further away
from the black envelopes
Holy Immortal God
but his telephone came to life
from the envelope
*
Unfold and dive into me, to my very bone,
Feed me with clarity the boundaries of this fantasy game,
journey where no one has journeyed before, to the ending credits,
until dawn spills over like dark cider,
until we aren’t trapped in an insect’s likeness –
don’t stop, find out what I am made of.
As long as we haven’t decayed to precious dust and citations,
as long as we buzz to each other, like two autumn cicadas, –
label me, a leper, sing it, unsung
let firm bulbs of wonder in tight vases blossom
all over the room from your song,
let everything genitive, nominative, and unnamed – come out.
They say that at the end the very gates await us,
beyond which we are free…A little brahman conjures,
an enamel lotus swims in the sky, like a lamp…
A saber-toothed deer flies, and its large shadow
falls softly, like love, which you can’t let go of anymore,
on the spines of books, resembling a keyboard,
because the twilight’s music plays with us in the abyss of rye…
Kiss me there, where the earth is firmly sewn
to the sky, the soul to the body, winter to summer…
…And that which you will see then, leave it to burn.
Anna Malihon is an award-winning Ukrainian poet, and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals, included in several anthologies, and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.
Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets, the chapbookMemory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter. She is the translator or co-translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, Vasyl Makhno, and Yuliya Musakovska. Her translation of Anna Malihon’s Girl with a Bullet is forthcoming from World Poetry Books. She lives in Queens, New York where she founded and co-curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.
