Diary March 2017
Another wave. Another. Another...
We go to the grocery store
And as always spend more
Than you can’t
admit you
can’t afford
Your skin shrivels on your frame
Walking home chins down
I say can’t you be straightforward with me
Next time won’t you be straightforward?
Chinese grocery parsley
Skinny lilac eggplants
And honey candy
You vanish into the outside
Goodbye
I sob watching videos
Of March Eighth protests in St Petersburg
Durutti Column plays in the background
It is unbearable
the girls’ faces the freedom and intelligence
The confused masks of the army people in black
Like a summer picnic
Of pork sausage
When my brother started talking
About his two hundred dollar steak knife
With the same face
The same face
The face
Of Ice
And Sweat
The vertiginous
Vertical shriek of the alpinist
Your English language
Is only a neighbor
To the really important emotions
There are places between sleep
and waking
that are beyond good and evil
I defeat
A bear, a giant head, and a rapist
And they put me in the newspaper
Get up cough blow your nose
The waves stop
It was the only thing
I imagined
Could give you the face
You were born with
Charcoal and sun
A lunar scowl
Charted
In snow
I left
not because I
didn’t love you
but because
I thought my
life would be hard
red and pink colored flowers
now no
one owes me anything
Lena Tsykynovska
Lena is a poet from Soviet Ukraine and Massachusetts.