Two Poems
By Margarita Shalina.
10 hours away
O you who are too good
you are too good
the little year
the throw away year
The pale bird passes as snow over north
when it grows quiet it will all become a payne’s grey shadow
we shall take note of the sounds of winter
we shall all have minds of winter
we shall take into consideration the oyster shell ground
the various scars of snow across our fuselage
We who are unremarkable salute you
as we go drowning
we who offer mauve shades of late
snow cone stained watercolor snow
the marks of man and dog
late afternoon late
bleeds into the face of
our mutual moon
The cycle leads the werewolf
creature morning came with menstrual blood
and lucid dreams of fields
we have no togetherness
in this airplane
I sleep in an empty row in February
I who am unremarkable
salute our pilot, our empty cabin and
the Orthodox girl who is really Natasha Rostova two rows ahead of me
as she breathlessly and theatrically exhales:
let’s not speak of it
let’s not…
father is coming and if he sees,
he’ll take them all for himself
shhhhhhhhh…
Remember and not, I see you
I see you and not
I’m not being honest,
I fear to be honest
as I count years in the color of my hair
Why did you live in your head for so long
a sanguine whisper
dedicated as
a profane drawing
a pornographic dirge
blush your clavicle into the light
where your skin takes an article
a glass jar moth of anxiety and longing
mad then still
This is an old love poem
I wrote it and rewrote it many years ago
First Class
(Wroclaw to Krakow)
There are burned out buildings that
litter the regions like
little gray land marker scars
our train pushes through
tracks that stop abruptly
leading to no where
I come from a beautiful city
I go to a beautiful city
as birch trees make white
stakes and nameless yellow flowers
carpet fields. I fear fields
as we gain speed, the common
rhythm of tracks makes
rail music, the window is
thrown wide open, stray
bugs fly in or are swept in
by momentum, mad and
frightened, out of the forest
into the sun light to bash
their bodies against the walls
of our compartment this is no longer
Eastern Europe, this is now
Central Europe let us purge the ourselves of
the Slavic so as to join a
greater union. I look out
into the green and imagine bodies
buried in the forest
their nationality having rotted away.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Margarita Shalina was born in Leningrad and raised on New York’s Lower East Side. Her poetry has appeared in Poems for the Retired Nihilist V. 2 (Fortune Teller Press, UK, 2007), EvergreenReview.com, New York Nights, and as a broadside for Poetry Motel. She has written essays for ZEEK Magazine and Three Percent, the website that accompanies Open Letter Press. She was a contributing translator to Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive Press, 2007) and is the Independent Press Buyer for St. Marks Bookshop. She lives in New York. Her favorite color is mauve.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, October 1st, 2008.
