Polina Barskova
Translated from the Russian by Valzhyna Mort
In this story I moonlight as a bitter-eyed
Scheherazade, a dark-tongued, grumpy-
bootied Scheherazade, full of sand
and ash-sand and ash,
as the story spins, my body grows harsh
hard body roams grows presentable sour
milk of speech
ferments into quasi senses.

Shahriar, sentence me to mercy.

Not because like the rest of them
searching for you between sheets and pillows
I wrestled my night fears inside the cuddle of wills.
Not because I'm averse to climbing a scaffold,
to the stink of a blade, the affections of the last goodbyes.

Sentence me to mercy because across the snows
(flaccidly he asks, What is this "snow"?)
I would lead you away from here;

like a worn blanket,
snow in my empire is yellowed, gray, marked
with mysterious tracks.

Like, in the smoke, after a house fire,
dead shadows are still trying to reach for safety,
snow in my empire frames
the end of desire:

Mercy, Shahryar.

As I speak
of a fish that erupts like a volcano,
of an underground vagina that leads straight to Maghreb, into a tomb
     of demons,
of a feline tsarina of poison,

You sit in the way of sorrow, grief, pleasure,
solace
you are a word you are a white
dozing newborn,
a backbone of a warm house, its breathing.
A dog snores, swaddle blankets embroidered,
Grandmother, wise and living, touches your face,
howling out of unbearable tenderness.

I repeat once more
Have mercy
A ruby flares
A word, unsaid, flares
under your cheek, I tuck
— as if putting my body into your fire
to keep it going —
a paper chip    (a pearl)    a wood chip.
from the book AIR RAID / Ugly Duckling Presse
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"A Conversation with Shangyang Fang"

"Those paintings and mythologies are materials of the poems, but also some become the forms that give lives to expression. I had the first two lines of the poem 'Argument of Situations' long before the poem was written. I tried several drafts and all of them failed. Then, I saw the Song dynasty painter Fan Kuan's work at a museum in Beijing. All of a sudden, I felt the unwritten poem inside me echoing with this painting in front of me." 

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fahima ife (New Orleans) on Ecopoetry Now

"That I required a desert to write poetry of the swamp. I open another poetry collection, wander inside the wet density of word, step outside world as we know it. As if poets hold access to the mycelial inner-dimensionalities of Earth as we continue singing in its wake. Something about lack of old forest in the DeepSouth—as you say: the woods here are less than one-hundred years old, on a billions of years old planet, in a newly-contested country, written in the lineage of descent."
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