April 2024
Bio Note: I was born in the Soviet Union and came to the US as a refugee at the age of 16. I have a bachelor’s degree in Electrical engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University and a Ph. D. in Statistics from Cornell University. I am a student in the Fairleigh Dickinson University MFA in Creative Writing program. Currently, I am translating from Russian into English anti-war poetry that is being written at this time by poets living in Ukraine, Russia and Russian-speaking diaspora.
Scarecrow
Once she’s done sweating us out of her pores, heaving us out with floods and conflagrations, she’ll set to work to balance, to restore, to heal extinctions with her new creations. As she takes time to make fresh, fertile soil out of our piles of refuse and our bones, turn reckless plastics back to buried oil, cleanse war-scarred rubble down to simple stones, Will she be thorough? Or not quite erase all of our works, but leave some scars and stains, so all her future creatures mark our trace: our petrified possessions and remains? This way, perhaps, she can scare back to sense those tempted to ape Homo sapiens.
Atlantis
Were the gods jealous and capricious? Were they just
when they condemned my city to the flood?
I can’t recall. All memories turned to rust.
Were we more given to violence and lust,
more full of hubris and obsessed with gold
than others were? And thus, the gods were just?
It is too late. So why wake up the past,
dig for my own and for my city’s faults?
It is too late. All memories turned to rust.
Or maybe not. Under the barnacles and crust
of centuries, the pain we felt, we wrought
retains its edge. Were the gods jealous? Were they just?
The sunken pain is solid. But why trust
the shifting foam of stories still afloat?
I crave oblivion—clean water, free of rust.
Since our destruction, empires rose and fell to dust;
yet we can’t rest, our tale isn’t fully told.
Were the gods jealous and capricious? Were they just?
What stains us red? Isn’t it only rust?
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