You cleaned buckwheat in Ukraine and you’ll continue in America. You even brought a sack of groats with you. Were you afraid you’d starve in this great capitalist country?
Tag: Ukraine
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
And they continued with more world history examples
where a victim lived happily ever after next to her executioner,
having forgiven and forgotten.
(poetry/translations)
I tried to envision walking down old cobblestone streets, but my memories drowned in darkness: My brain clasped shut. The doors that were so hard to close when I was leaving twenty-two years ago were even harder to reopen now. But I had to. I had to go back and face the ghosts and the memories. Had to shine a light into all corners of the old dark closet. I was planning a trip to visit my mother in Russia, and as the trip got closer, I decided I was ready to go home. I tacked on a few days in Kharkiv.
(nonfiction/Dispatches from Ukraine)
My sister wrapped her arms around me. I did not cry. I felt nothing.
(nonfiction)
All that’s left of the baby is the rattle. / All that’s left of the granny is her knitting.
The summer heat sprawls on my skin like a thick cover of wet glue.
(nonfiction)
I’m paranoid, I’m chronically fatigued. / Neither Freud nor Jung can help. / Lord, grind us with your palette knife down into / the dark, into the soil.
(poetry)
She returned home when her village was liberated after six months of occupation. Her house greeted her with a collapsed wall.
(translations)
There’s joy on Easter, and that joy lasts a long time. And Lent, it’s not about food, it’s about self-sacrifice, humbling yourself before God. You’re saying, You’re the big guy. I’m the small guy.
It doesn’t matter which language you speak, because language does not influence your way of thinking.
The older generation of course, they didn’t teach their kids about the horrors of Stalin, because they didn’t want them to have that memory.
(Dispatches from Ukraine)
Now I remember it like a dream, but it was terrible.
(Dispatches from Ukraine)
Grigor, as everyone who met him agrees, had been dropped on his head as a baby. Or else nursed on straight vodka.
(fiction)
We were excited to go to Ukraine
because we were promised a disco night in Donbas organized by a local Young Pioneer
group, a junior division of the Communist Party.
(nonfiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 