Our People Don’t Believe in Tears

         For Gala Mukomolova

I pull the Death card &you go Know what this means? not unkindly.
Something crucial about living keeps grazing me by inches. No grip
on my future. As we say, nu i chto? As we say other times, & so what?
Our people toast relentlessly to health, don’t fall for anyone’s easy grin.
We learn guarded early. In certain company, I’m cowed. I hollow out,
for ease of relations. My parents never knew Marina loved Sophia until
they heard it on the radio, decades after the poet’s death. Things were
complicated then, they said. You couldn’t just live as yourself. At Riis
with you, tits out & facing heavenward, I regard my debts to our legion.
In every direction: bodies gleam, however they present. To be legible
is a release. Someone’s hairdye trails fuchsia wake across the water.
Someone chugs rum on the sandbar. Someone dares leather getup
in rippling heat. Everyone believes in disco. Bliss takes a day-sized bite.
We’re no longer there or then, & yet: Yelena Grigoryeva will be murdered
in St. Pete tomorrow. For living as herself & loudly. Tomorrow, we will
make blini from my babushka’s recipe & lament over our split culture.
Jokes cut with our first tongue, the one that tends toward withholding.
My parents never knew I loved . Occasionally, my mother asks
if therapy is working. Our people prefer their tea & humor darker.
Where were you when you first realized how many more of us exist?
I was here, waiting dimly for my undoing.





Reprinted from Toska (Deep Vellum, 2023) with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.