translated by Boris Dralyuk

Shadows are spreading, spreading like maps underfoot. 
What if we’re there? Each step makes me wince. 
Refugees carry whole towns, torn out by the root. 
Nothing can ever again be put back in place. 

My head always spins at the sight of the globe standing still. 
Where are its axis, its base, its smooth metal arc? 
I see only bus after bus after automobile 
parked on the road, waiting for time to restart. 

No nights and no days. Remember when father would say, 
“Circle this lamp, spinning the globe — that’s the earth.” 
You’d fly off the globe in your dreams and wake with a cry, 
then doze off again — with the future, with death on your breath. 

Julia Nemirovskaya  is a Russophone poet and prose writer who was born, raised, and educated in Moscow. She immigrated to the United States in 1991 and teaches Russian literature and culture at the University of Oregon. She has published three collections of poems – Moia knizhechka (My Little Book, 1998),  Vtoraia knizhechka  (Second Little Book, 2014), and Slyshnee (More audible, 2021) – as well as the novel Lis (2017). English translations of her poems have appeared in Washington Square Review, Exchanges, Asymptote, and other journals. She is the editor of two translated volumes of Russophone antiwar poetry composed after the launch of Russia’s full-scale of Ukraine in February 2022. 

Boris Dralyuk  is a poet, translator, and critic. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), and translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. He is the recipient of the 2022 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and of the 2020 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly. He is the former editor in chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and his poems, translations, and essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Granta, Best American Poetry 2023, and elsewhere. He teaches courses in literature and creative writing at the University of Tulsa.