Siani Ammons

The Visual Poetry of Anzhelina Polonskaya

August 1, 2024 Poetry, Translation

By ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA
Translated from the Russian by ANDREW WACHTEL

Poems appear below in English and the original Russian.

Translator’s note

Anzhelina Polonskaya frequently writes poems inspired by visual artists. These are not, however, ekphrastic renderings of an image in words, but rather a snapshot of the emotions that a given painter’s work evokes. In the poem “After Breughel,” published here, we need to ask, what precisely makes the text Breughelesque? To me, it is the anthropomorphized image of snow, with its dead white eyes in the first stanza, contrasted with the scarlet color (of blood, hell, the burning bush). This unsettling juxtaposition creates the Breughelesque landscape which has destroyed the artist, as in the painting Dulle Griet from 1563. But Polonskaya provides her picture without the scaffolding of a narrative, and, as far as the translator’s job goes, I needed to avoid explaining the poem, rather allowing the translation to be as allusive and mysterious as the original.

—Andrew Wachtel

After Breughel

Snow, listen up. Your eyes are dead.
We know full well we’re being led
like hostages of universal blindness.
Who are we, then? Unknown and homeless.

July 2024 Poetry Feature: Megan Pinto

July 25, 2024 Poetry

By MEGAN PINTO

Excerpted from “even in silence”

My father is perseverating, moving around the edges of rooms. On repeat, he asks, but how will
we pay for it? How will we pay for it?

He follows me, my mother, then me, then my mother. Inside my childhood home, there are only
so many rooms.

On Christmas Day, I bake a loaf of frozen bread. I feed slices to my father with my hands, then
catch each chewed up bit he pushes back out with his tongue.

He is speaking.
I am numb.

Muscle and Rubber and Cotton and Bone

July 16, 2024 Fiction

By JULES FITZ GERALD

There is no such thing as silence in the South. There is always the percussive hum of insects, winged bodies waiting in the weeds for dusk. This sound fills the fissure before Coach Meeks fires the gun, while Joanna leans over the spray-painted line in the crabgrass field. She is sixteen but still as stick-legged and bird-chested as she was at twelve, brushing daily knots from her homeschool-length hair because her mother gave up trying to teach her how to make a braid. The billow of smoke erupts from the pistol’s nose before the crack of the blank reaches her ears. Her hair streams behind her, loose and wild, as she pushes off the line. She believes that it makes her faster.

Ho’omana’o

July 10, 2024 Dispatches

By EDWARD LEES

Photos by author.

Lahaina, Maui

When I was young, my parents
took me to Pompeii.
I remember the grouped bodies in the museum
of people who had tried to shelter.

Museum Ice (Extended Dance Mix)

June 13, 2024 Fiction

By AMALIA GLADHART

Anna was slow to do the math. B saw it instantly—what might be left after everything else melted away. White captions flickered in the dim exhibit hall.

B had turned thirteen that fall, ready to join Anna on a trip that was part research, part treat and adventure, the first time they had left the country together, alone. A few days in Rosario (a university lecture, an interview with a playwright), the long bus to Buenos Aires. Invited to contribute to the itinerary, B asked to see glaciers; Anna booked a half-day trek across the ice.

Passengers all around them had clapped when they landed in El Calafate. “That’s so sweet,” B said, joining in. Anna clapped, too, hoping it was thanks, not bald relief. The tiny airport was rapidly navigated. Advertisements lined the baggage claim, placed to catch a teenager’s eye. “They have an ice bar at the ice museum,” B said. “Can we go? There’s a free shuttle from the tourist office.”