Forthcoming in Vestiges_06: Aporia

 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Enter ghost      the problem
of the body is never
solved

The newlyweds arrive

              by a rising sea     of dissolved
                              unions

Love
                          is no longer fascination

And skin leaks

                  carbon
                  glissandos of heat
                  the sticky pitch
                  of a fever dream

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Enter as interruption    a fly
gorging itself in the still life

Spilled milk

                    Grit
flung in the eyes by an gruff wind

The irritant
                of an irrational desire
cuts in                     cores the quotidian apple
with its burrowing worm

An unlived life      runs
parallel                         achingly
peripheral

First a faint patter
of a pianissimo rain         then the banging
           storm of piano forte

                                 ( Say again

Say against )

The cat    or its ghost   walks across the keyboard
writes its own poem

This interval
                  we have settled into
                  between now
                  and now
is not
               interminable

There it is again
the piercing insistence     of a baby’s cry
        in the apartment upstairs

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Enter ancestral
               animal or the last
animal in captivity    the last replacement animal

Enter your last verified/last
unverified address

Your thumbprint’s whorl your flecked iris your
retina scan

Enter your spit your sample your animal scat

Enter your functional extinction

Enter the face of the animal
                                      missing its face

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Enter the child that you were

The child that you never were but could have been
                   had you known better
                                           or been better
                                           known

Enter ghost of the child that never was and the child
of that child and the child of that child
and so on

O ghost of a child
saddest ghost of all

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Enter the waking hours

         August’s auguries

a wire         a word
                                   — haywire —
I borrowed it
from you
                         or for you

holding forth
an offering

                     Larkspur      blue-petaled
                                        Columbine

Orphic harrow

I can’t will you         out of
the latticed net of the willow’s umbrage

I will leave you there

     beating the drum
                                   of a furious grief

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Enter ghost       the
rest is

wrested
            from

                            an Everest of

silence

 

—

Genya Turovskaya was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City. The author of The Breathing Body of This Thought (Black Square Editions, 2019), her poetry has appeared in Asymptote, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Fence, the PEN Poetry Series, Pocket Samovar, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Sangam Poetry, Seedings, The Elephants, The Yale Review, and other publications. She is the translator of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005), the co-translator of Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version (UDP, 2009), which won Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for Poetry, and a co-translator of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2014). She has received a Fund for Poetry Grant, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Montana Artist Refuge Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Translation Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute, and a Whiting Award. She lives in New York City, where she is a practicing psychotherapist.