none of our mothers believed they were dead
they peeled things, boiled things, bled, bled, bled
they worried over the price of meat, wore red
none of us believed we were born of wounds
we have our feet our bantiki our books
our capital letters & our dreamed battlegrounds
you see how I cannot decide what rhymes
with wound; is it something enormous and round
or the ship horn’s wailing: soon soon soon
soon as we leave our mothers in their tombs
of patterns & memories; long afternoons
of finding tongueholds in enemy tongues
long nights missing ourselves, then learning —
how going home is similar to mourning.
Mariya (Masha) Deykute is a Russian-American poet, editor and translator. She is a graduate of the UMass: Boston MFA program and currently teaches rhetoric and creative writing in Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan. She is the co-founder and chief editor of the trilingual journal Angime. Her work in English has most recently appeared in Asymptote, PANK, notokens, Tiger Moth Review and Seventh Wave. Her work in Russian has most recently appeared in polutona and Literranova: an anthology of Almaty writing. Mostly, she writes about the wilderness that exists inside and alongside all of us.
