Holy Winter 2021 by Maria Stepanova

Author:Maria Stepanova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions

(D)

You, whoever you were: a refugee, forgot your name

Or even where you came from, carried on your family’s back

Little piss-pants, your father always on about how

He was once some big shot in the Veterans’ Office

You mixing up words, always on the lookout, ready to draw

If it hadn’t been for me and my strip of farmed land

My widow’s capital, where would you have been

Would you even have been.

When I lay with you, I lay as if in a small boat,

As if in the winter sea I lay, and slowly

Learned to see, through the wreck of your hull

The slow procession of sea monsters

The hulks of sunken cruise ships

The thrum of the motor as immigration draws alongside

Demanding all hands on deck and no resistance—

And I showed no resistance.

But still we went down. And you emerged onto dry land

Under different constellations, you lost your fins

Grew lungs and left me there in the sand:

Driftwood, driftqueen, drifting boat.

And if I want to give chase—to catch you

I must make myself to fire and air, like the Egyptian

So the smell of me clings in your nostrils, and you wish to dispel it

But can’t.

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