translated by Boris Dralyuk

A branch pokes its fingers into the streetlight’s face. 
The rain has died down and the world has opened its gills. 
The fish of the wind tells the fish of the water: “Dear sis, 
let’s scatter the lawn signs. They’ve closed all the polls.” 

The book of wet grass cries out to the book of dark streets: 
“The sun will come out and dry up our leaves, just you wait.” 
The sky, in a whisper, laments to the earth: “I wish we could meet.” 
I’m tired of walking the dog but too lazy to wake. 

The dog drags me off to a wasteland, to rows of old cars — 
pulls me so hard I can barely hold on to the leash — 
to a town without name, a town that I’ve known all these years, 
where the mess of the life I have lived bares its teeth. 

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.