State of Light: 1986
1
A girl, I sing in the boys’ choir,
mine is a city defaced with light’s acid,
among the amphitheaters
of boys’ mouths,
my body –
a slice of nothing.
Muse,
with two tongues where wings should be,
I begin with music
thrown onto meat scales
in the city of acid,
light speaks with the thin lips of streets,
the thick lips of avenues, strings of light
stretched in the doorways of milk and meat shops,
music
thrown onto meat scales
by saleswomen defaced with light’s acid
by saleswomen whose hands are square like picture frames,
our saleswomen
who never see themselves in the canvasses
of great masters,
have the most pictorial lips –
arches of finest architecture,
triumphant arches built for their language of contempt.
They despise our hunger –
a child’s place is in a choir, not at the table!
They despise our money –
children shouldn’t touch money, money is the genitals of our State!
We fry light to the screams of light
and we live on light
in this innocent city defaced with light’s acid
built not on bones – not on bones – not on bones – not on bones.
Not one splinter of human bones in our earth!
We can lower our hands into our earth as into water!
And my history book is stuffed like sausage.
2
Verily, in Your image: I hover
in the glory of fish shops,
in the chlorine of classrooms.
In my stomach is the midnight of bread,
the abyss of cognac.
As a species I’m closest
to a screw
that loosens regularly.
In a Rembrandt-black bathroom
a girl-child – illiterate – washes me,
left to right my illiterate child
crosses and underlines
with a soaked sponge
what You’ve made in Your image.
She wasn’t born.
She stood up and threw me off her back
like the skin of an animal.
I know a word for this
but don’t ask me –
ask a cow, ask a dog.
Verily: except for Rembrandt’s right cheek,
it is dark.
Having picked
a headful of vines, Caravaggio
honestly paints the dirt under his fingernails.
No, honest historians, this dirt does not mean decay.
Under the charred nails: orchard,
origin (and I’m a screw that loosens regularly).
In its uncharted dark –
women washing each other
in the light of their cheeks,
in the light of their knees.
Little Songs
Over these houses
like a dead man’s hands
the roofs are folded.
*
‘A train?’ ‘Dogs
rattle chains.’
Windowsills, snowed over
with weary flies.
*
Amelia drinks thick coffee.
Yanina shares utensils like playing cards.
Yusefa, after loud, theatrical farewells
is dead.
*
Yusefa crunches members
of broken households, she budgets
children and relatives, subtracts the dead,
carries over the missing.
It is a math problem
she buries with herself.
*
All windows in bride-white, a step-
house with step-inhabitants,
born in this kitchen, back three times a day
to have a meal in the place of their birth.
Yet none is buried anywhere close.
*
Yanina shovels snow piles of flies.
Like a manly tear, a bird glides across the air.
*
Chains follow dogs as if chains were discharged
like slime.
*
Justice has turned out to be
more terrifying
than injustice.
Yanina falls like dust onto her bed.
*
To look healthy? Leave that
to animals.
Once a tank drives through a street here.
Like an elephant,
it waves its trunk
from right to left.
An elephant in our village!
Instead of hiding, women run to look.
*
Since then, many birds are shed
across the air.
The dents on cups gag many thirsty mouths.
What has been done to us is muddled with the fears
of what could have been done.
Our famous skills
in tank production
have been redirected
at students and journalists.
But under that roof, folded
like dead man’s hands over the house,
we still live.
*
But under that roof, folded
like dead man’s hands over the house,
we still live
carrying buckets between a tree and a beast.
And instead of evening prayers
I plead
with myself
to just leave you
be, my dear, my
undear Lord.
Photograph © Julia Cimafiejeva
