Alex Braslavsky: 5 Poems
Moonsitting
There was no poverty. Only a honey farm.
The bees drink and drip like an ocean. They're fleecing us, Moon,
what are we to do?
We'll give you some happy gas. You'll
lollop with your surrogate daughter, the cat
laying her skull on the neck of a pewter version
of herself. Fumes, dewlap. Apropos of the dingy window—
places where the feline sleeps in her fits,
her seizures. Clawfoot tub,
casserole dish in the pantry, suitcase
feathered over with fur, holding all winged specimens
in her forepalms.
A blot of ink, silk, platinum pelage. Look, leaves grow dull
on a frame, threaded by globules. The blouses dart
on the line. Her brow like a feather,
a gurgle tin pursuit a grate made up handsomely
of plumes of heat. Her flank heaves. Hocks cute
as jellyfish. Tail like a strip of fire.
Panta Rei
"It's the kind of flower that when it flowers the sea gets rough, and the night is brighter than day: devils fear it." – The Tale of Truth and Falsehood, A.N. Afanasev’s variant no. 116
Never have you been dry.
If you come up your spine,
you will splash
onto your
pineal gland. A bowl on top
of a fountain. Sea parted,
came in
clutch, with tresses it could
make a cold cake
out of the protagonist.
Turns out the ruddy shelduck
with its nosehook is
extinguished. Though the book
is whole it
curls up in a pile
of lost blood having
four bullet holes in his car.
Roberto, our neighbor, never
denigrating anyone.
His daughter’s photograph
of our house. Holy fools who,
in building a house, forget
the windows and try
to bring in sacks of light, who
try to milk chickens.
The candy the fool
brings turns to excrement.
They lock him up with the cows.
Overnight the bear tears
up all the cows. There's one more house on the block that are gun
people but the police took away their guns but they'll probably
buy more guns. If I invite my friends
over for the spinning bee while my parents are out
the bear turns gray.
Mother (1926)
After Vsevolod Pudovkin
A guard glances down
into an ashtray only
to see a cockroach twitch
upon the plate. Mother's
visage followed by
the dead face of her
husband beside. As the
light crawls up the son's
right cheek, the door departs
and takes his shadow
along. Water drips
into the bucket. Her face,
and bucket again, accepting
of another water. The candle
behind the father's head.
A child crying in
the sunshine geese trample.
Hands against a grate
the camera floods with
fierce flashes of purling.
A son suckling
at the breast of his mother.
Feed of regular forgiveness.
The film wants to rot
in wanton sunshine.
And the ice beat softly
against the tin. The net gives
when I try to yank
at the breathing rioting ice,
so creaturely,
as the demonstration happens.
What light
could talk like this,
giving speeches
in the billowing tenor of
wordless filigree.
Borealis Cream
On Sunday, a parent of a student called after not being able to reach the student.
The parent was with a sibling at the house.
I contacted the student, who was away from the house
at the time and did not want to see the parent and sibling.
None of them seem like words you would use, they're just
in the dictionary. Like snakelet.
Or wheat's deadness mapped onto the human seed. The human skin.
And different jars made different resonances.
Depending on how metal bounces around, you get a different constellation of sounds,
you also get a different constellation of memory, from where you found your bits.
Wumpf.
I'll rhetorically decapitate you.
Headless everyday questions.
There will be no place to need to perch, to preach, to teach you
of the day that isn't to come as an agent drinks blood from the receptacle of the I. Which
self-professes
to be a wound.
I don't understand how the crow was split in two or if it was a good, long bus.
Our knees wouldn't fit. She’s allowing her hair to push through
interfaces. It was an airport bagel and the whistling seconds
in your heart I can't get to your heart
straight to the heart. Her eggpuppy pouting on the runway.
The holdout being our dreaded syncopation
in thudding orange rinds.
Anastasia
Duchess, along the surface of my red
tea, your self-portrait.
Eyelids, like ions. While you sleep,
the Elephant rues
and buries its head among parishes.
You visited saldati
in hospice immurement.
I take care of my country
My country is my field
My field is my finger
A long map, curtailed.
My dedicatee is my dacha
My franchisee is my hol'
With the hydrogen on,
My industry is my chair.
Salted meats in a fist
The other fastened on his imposter.
{She coughed
and the door slammed}
Her headscarf blew
at the same time.
Saltines, in an amputee's
crook. What's dry? What's no longer
Even that. What's already festooned
may flower again.
She coughed and the door slammed.
Just because I'm a woman
Doesn't mean I'm a mother
I'm a mother of nothing.
I like colors that you can't name.
Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is working towards her doctorate in the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Polish, Russian, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. She is the translator of On Centaurs & Other Poems (World Poetry Books, 2023) by Zuzanna Ginczanka, who was killed in the Holocaust at age twenty-eight. Alex’s poems appear and are forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, and Colorado Review, among other journals.