Tag: Ukraine

Three Years Later by Julia Kolchinsky

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Three Years Later

When it began, we feared the end
would come too quick, like summer rain, but war
leaves roots and heliotropes towards flame, a sunflower

weighed by grip and reaching. A Baba stuffed sunflower
seeds into an invading soldier’s pockets, you’ll end
up in our soil, she told him, but at least your war

will grow you, turn you into something beautiful. War
is water that drowns as it quenches. The sunflowers,
like open wounds or mouths, demand it doesn’t end

like this. War doesn’t end in sunflowers, it begins—

*

Julia Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS, PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist of the Miller Williams Prize. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, with nonfiction in Brevity, Shenandoah, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.

Two Poems by Olga Livshin

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A Tulip in a Besieged City

Like a soft bomb.

Like a clock,
if the clock knew
it might not go on.

It holds one petal to the side,
an ethereal skirt.

The dark, furry pistil,
fit to create, to mess something up.
The bloom, ready to croon its orange-black insides out.

A smattering of sand falls from the sky.

Petals remain
bright gathered flags.

*

Blowout

Our reading about the war in Ukraine
is tonight, here in morning-washed Miami.

I said to Julia: At least we will have beautiful hair!
Aching for our homeland, I paid strangers in a salon
to comfort our hair.

Or maybe I wanted to cover up
our knee-bent, back-curved, salty-eyed content
with presentable form,
and prettiness is an ally.

Or maybe, in the room next to my mind –
five thousand miles away –
an explosion killed a three-year-old boy
in his bed, in the night.
My phone shook with this news.
But why am I getting curled
when I have to straighten myself out?

Julia’s hair is like a river of dark metal
brushed aglow. My girl’s big laughter,
a yearning flame. Love this blowout!
she says to her stylist. Her love of love,
and voice like a beautiful animal.
She stands up, spins around,
sweeps me into a hug,
not compressed by gender or history,
amplified by what we must endure.

*

Olga Livshin’s work is recently published in the New York Times, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and other journals. She is the author of the poetry collection A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (2019). Livshin co-translated Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (2023) and A Man Only Needs a Room by Vladimir Gandelsman (New Meridian Arts, 2022). As a consulting poetry editor for Mukoli: A Journal for Peace, she reviews poetry from conflict-affected communities across the world, with a focus on Eastern Europe. She lives in a suburb of Philadelphia.

IN CONVERSATION WITH MOURNING by Margo Berdeshevsky

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IN CONVERSATION WITH MOURNING

Whisper histories our
Grandmothers passed

like sugar cubes bitter and
sweet — tongue after

tongue so we would chant
louder — later —

Once upon wheat fields, color
of sun, once upon skies, color

of an infant’s breath —

Whispers of Babi Yar, pit
of slaughters kin to this year’s

landfill, kin to where my father
was spit from his mother’s depths —

where he said he was
Russian, to not have his own

tongue slit — dirt today where
Russia’s flames bury babies

who will never grow old —
Whispers of Odessa, once

for her song and colors, still now
for broken voices under moonrise

In a fist I’ve carried since
when, or then —

a grain of a cry the color
of iron — whispers

of thorns for gardens
that belong to none

but their interred,
and even so, their winter births—

*On Sept 29, 2023, Volodymir Zelensky visited the site of Babi Yar, on Ukranian soil—it was the 82nd anniversary of the massacre.

*

Margo Berdeshevsky, NYC born, writes in Paris. Her forthcoming book is: It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat from Salmon-Poetry. Just published: Kneel Said the Night (a hybrid book in half-notes) from Sundress Publications. Author of Before The Drought /Glass-Lyre-Press/finalist for National-Poetry-Series, Between Soul & Stone and But a Passage in Wilderness / Sheep-Meadow-Press, and Beautiful Soon Enough /FC2 /recipient of 1st Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award. Other honors: Grand prize for Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and the Robert H. Winner Award from Poetry Society of America. Widely published in international journals, kindly see her website: http://margoberdeshevsky.com

Two Poems by Nicole Yurcaba

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Ode to a US Army Special Forces Soldier Educating Me about My Homeland’s Literature

Tell me again how you want to fight
Zabuzhko’s sentences into philosophies
bound by proper punctuation. You don’t know
what it is like spending your life lost
in translation, how one language wrestles
a second or third face-down into mud
& forces it to swallow handful after handful–
dirt, grass, gravel, piss, shit, & blood
until you no longer remember
how to say bird or sky or death,
so you could wake up one day to learn
your pregnant cousin who stayed behind
in your family’s homeland burned alive
in a car bombed by occupiers who clip
phone wires & mail them home believing
the internet’s entirety exists within. Tell me
again my homeland’s history, how our nation’s
bard lived in exile, how when my family escaped
we had no home yet home is a mosaic
6,000 miles from where I stand, squinting
in wonder that you think Lemko
is merely a former team mate’s surname.

*

Ode to Drinking at QXT’s in Newark with Franz Kafka

A friend advises I stay wary
of the Existentialists. He knows
damn well I am in too deep
with Kafka, who sits beside
me on a Saturday night,
sipping a cosmopolitan.
Franz, I say. We were born
beautifully dead inside.
Kafka weighs our insignificance
in his right hand.
Your heart weighs an ounce
too little, Franz says. You
are awarded the precipice’s edge.
The DJ spins Blutengel’s
“Forever Young.” My phone
Buzzes–a message from my friend:
Nikola, I wish you didn’t think
of yourself as other. Kafka’s drink
trembles in his hand. He leans
into me, his lips hot on my ear.
His finger’s cold sinks through
my fishnets. We spend too much
time together, Franz states.
Another night, and I may not
be able to keep myself
from pushing you. I take
Kafka’s hand, lead him
to the dancefloor, place his hands
on my chest. His fingers
tap      tap      tap     
the bass rhythm
the policy of truth
known only by the darkness
thrumming beneath my bodice’s ties.

*

Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба–Nikola Yurtsaba) is a Ukrainian American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, West Trade Review, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University. Nicole teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and is a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and The Southern Review of Books.

Dust of Snow by Laura Foley

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Dust of Snow

I thought I was done
mourning war
learning to savor

a faceful of snow
from the shaken pine
without remembering

the water dripped
on my father’s head
his torture into a coma

surviving four years
in Japanese prison
to become my father

in the same war Stefan
escaped on skis
from Poland

across the Tatras into Lithuania
and then Russia
and became my husband

now long since gone
this dawn after snow
as the new war invades my mind

and sun lights a thin white line
rising from the chimney
of a peaceable slate gray house

where I live with my wife
on a wooded hill
but see the smoke

of bombed buildings
barely noticing how snow
dusts from the arms of a pine

drifts like a beautiful ghost
or an angel I wish
I could send to Ukraine.

*

Laura Foley is the author of eight poetry collections. Everything We Need: Poems from El Camino was released, in winter 2022. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, One Art Poetry, Poetry Society London, Crannog Magazine (Ireland), DMQ Review, Atlanta Review, Mason Street, JAMA, and many others. Her work has been included in many anthologies such as: Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. Laura lives with her wife, Clara Gimenez, among the hills of Vermont. www.laurafoley.net

Tenderness by Yuliya Musakovska

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Tenderness

The sun kisses my face. I want so much to save
at least a sip of this height, so blue, for later.
The animal song of reddened leaves,
a swirl of wild grapevines, exploding from roofs.
We seem unperishable as if no one after us
will divide a yellow pear in half as in communion,
will forgive one another while hugging the whole world,
not allowing petals to fall from numb blossoms.
A movement of a green dragonfly’s wings,
a tremble of eyelashes,
a children’s toy, abandoned in the grass,
a flock of honey mushrooms that hatched around stumps.
This emergence is witness to a new day coming.
How long should we pull before realizing—the cord is strong?
Tenderness, a rope that keeps us from falling out of the boat.
You hold so many treasures in your hands, my love.
We have no time for disbelief, and no right to it.

— Translated from Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and the author

Yuliya Musakovska is the award-winning author of five poetry collections in Ukrainian, The God of Freedom (2021), Men, Women and Children (2015), Hunting the Silence (2014), Masks (2011), and Exhaling, Inhaling (2010). Her poems have been translated into over twenty languages. Recent works appeared in AGNI, The Apofenie Magazine, Life and Legends, The Springhouse Journal, and Red Letters. She lives in Lviv, Ukraine.

Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection Songs from an Apartment (2017) and the chapbook Memory Project (2018.) Her novel Temporary Shelter was released in 2021 from Cervena Barva Press. Her translation from Ukrainian of Vasyl Makhno’s collection Paper Bridge is forthcoming from Plamen Press. She is the founder and curator of the Poets of Queens reading series.