After a long hospitalization, my father returns home to die on January 2025’s coldest day—the Thursday after Orthodox Christmas. The packed snow on the steep, gravel driveway leading to his house is a slick, icy sheet… (nonfiction/Ukraine)
Tag: Ukrainian Voices
there are no street ads anymore,
except for advertisements for death and patriotism.
this is our, no one else’s, autumn.
I’m a bit queasy from freedom,
from undercooked pasta with stew and raw water.
under artillery shelling
we are all as free as wheat,
as trees and birds,
(poetry/translations/Ukraine)
I WhatsApp my cousin on his jubilee. He was born the day after the Yom Kippur War started, and here again: rockets, hostages, my aunt fainting. Can we celebrate anything without a backdrop of mourning, or—unlike the other day in Ukraine—even mourn, not adding at the memorial half a village to the slain?
(Ukraine)
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?
(nonfiction/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)
