Indifference is far more efficient
than fission or fusion
as a weapon of mass destruction,
and far less problematic
than uranium or tritium
to procure, occurring,
as it does, massively in nature.
My dad could be tough and distant
and push a little too hard into what hurt
but if God pulled that Isaac shit on him,
saying “I want you to sacrifice your son
for me” it never would have got as far
as me strapped to some Moriah altar.
If I was nearby, he’d tell me to go inside.
Then, he’d resign, curtly quit, from God,
flick a Lucky at the old man’s feet, and
walk away. Later, I know he’d joke,
“That fucking guy? He couldn’t spell God
if you spotted him the G and the D,”
making me laugh even if behind his eyes
he was making peace with perdition.
Matt W. Miller is a poet, essayist, teacher, and author of Tender the River, The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus (winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry), and Cameo Diner. A former Walter E. Dakin Fellow and Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in coastal New Hampshire with his family.
By MOISEI FISHBEIN
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN
Kol Nidre
And damp dust between stars will vanish,
and nothing will ever move or shine,
and as you look up at the sky at midday
the slanted rays will cross your sight.
By ALBERTO DE LACERDA
Translated by MARIA DE CALDAS ANTÃO
To John McEwan
The architecture of the sleeves—
White—
As she composes her response
To a letter
(On the marble floor
The seal
Jumps
From the crumpled letter)
The boy circles once more through the kitchen, past the ledge of photographs & the St. Francis tin, inside of which sleeps whatever’s left of the dog. My boy shows no signs of slowing down despite my tired oration on the topics of physics & premonitions, that denouement when I too was a spinning child & my head tripped down its irreversible path into the solid corner of the piano bench. No signs of slowing down nor do I mention how, playing ghost & turning beneath the sheet, I felt like a cannonball, I felt like nothing else speeding through darkness & then through the fog near the rocky shore. Afterwards, I knew only gravity, my blood, the irrefutable bleeding.
I’ve never been content with less than
God. Visions
like interior castles:
a red and white blanket
over grass, broken
slabs of tile, folded denim
in a fishing boat, sand-gold
grains of rice, all the colors
that tint a bruise—
My parents walk hand in hand through the snow in Seoul.
Instead of flowers, my dad brings a dozen doughnuts.
As fires burn halfway around the world.
By MARC VINCENZ
It seems all the light of morning
has descended here where it’s usually dark
and frogs raise their heads in the bulrushes,
where the last sounds swarm among the oaks.
for & after William Shakespeare
To your beached blessings, add this curse:
not making worse what glass makes
so clear but neither smoking the path
to your impaneled store, absconded
documents across your bathroom floor,
public security, national writ walled in
where you eat shit, as if to flank your fake
glory and never break your bloated story,
without flourish, without wit,
everywhere the news grows: May you dwell
among cases evermore.
Anna Maria Hong’s books include Age of Glass and Fablesque and the novella H & G. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Amy Clampitt Poet Residency, Hawthornden Foundation, and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation.
By VIKTOR NEBORAK
Translated by JOHN HENNESSY and OSTAP KIN
The rusty hollows inside the old mosquito
reduce his soprano to dust. Down the pipe
of his fragile beak, the pumps are already weak.
And his blood flows through fossilized riverbeds.
His gas tanks empty, song silenced, not a drop
of compassion in him… Running on coal fumes,
the rusted engines deliver him to drill
one last buzz through the ears of the crowd.
A kamikaze who would have dropped heavenly tons
on these civilians as on military echelons
and then been posthumously awarded
the highest orders! his name on honor lists!
banners! trumpets! salutes! obelisks!
… if my slap hadn’t smashed him dead.
Viktor Neborak is a poet, writer, literary scholar, and critic. He is also a founding member (along with Yuri Andrukhovych and Oleksandr Irvanets) of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group. His collection The Flying Head and Other Poems appeared in English translation in 2005.
John Hennessy’s most recent books are Exit Garden State, a collection of poems, and Set Change, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych co-translated with Ostap Kin.
Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City. With John Hennessy, he translated Set Change by Yuri Andrukhovych, and A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan.
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