To Russia, with You

                        1. To the Epicenter

What transport takes flight to Russia for two women
who are in love? A bird of Aeroflot paradise? A quiet
Baltic Sea cruise? Slow-dance with me on the deck,
you who want to know the distant planet I’m from.
I’ll pull my hand away when we arrive. A precaution,
not rejection. Let’s run up the gray stone steps
of the Neva like friends; the blank for omitted “girl”
in the word “girlfriends” will be our breathing room. We will
wake up safe, in each other’s arms, in a babushka’s rental,
an Uzbek rug on the wall framing your pixie cut.

Let’s walk to the farmers’ market – it’s here,
every day of the week! Not the scheduled
seasonal Thursdays you’re used to, those pale
Jerusalem artichokes grown near Boston or Madison.
No: fists of mauve peach flesh, sky-blue plummies,
and their tiny yellow sisters breathing warmths
of Azerbaijani into their Russian name: ah – lyh – chah.
Warm are the blue hawk tattoos on your arms.
Let me pull your T-shirt sleeves down,
now they almost cover up your birds.

I want to hear you moan as you dig with a big slotted spoon
into kloobneeka slowberries, cherneeka sweetberries,
forever-child-berries, before-I-knew-berries,
almost those berries Tolstoy’s Kitty preserved,
and, listening to her jam-making, Levin realized
he only wanted prose out of life. Will you wipe off
an acidic Antonovka apple for me? I dare you
to bite it, to smell beet greens dusted
by car exhaust, to know the toxic aroma that keeps me
awake on chilled sheets in Non-Russia.

In our imaginary invisible armor, I kiss you on the lips
and no one notices. So prosaic.
The drunks calling out “Best price!”
do not care, nor the lady with the perm,
the one cheating us a little on the scale,
nor her second cousin from Snake-o-grad,
nor a random nobody—
they aren’t walking over here, I swear, not pushing us apart—
Lesbianki! Who do they think they are, showing off!

Busy selling. They might not spit at us.

                        2. No, Not to Russia

No time for sleeping tonight. Little son, Nathan-Natán,
wake up, let’s fly to Odessa, where mommy was born,
where she spent her summers when she was a kid!
It’s one of the worst times to go in Odessa’s history,
but you are four, and will neither know nor care

about the war, nor about differences between the USSR,
Ukraine and the Russian Federation. You will know
about three flights, yes, all on airplanes! Tiny cookies,
peanuts, endless cartoons. We will go to the beach, just like
back then, yes, I once was little. We will find mussels

with the most mother-of-pearl, and sit by the three-pane
mirror in your great-grandfather’s apartment
on Cosmonaut Street. I just learned our family still
owns that apartment. I’d thought it was gone. I’d spent
my childhood playing with Grandma’s Chinese baubles,

green jewelry boxes, little swans. Five minutes is all
I want you to have. Is the matchbox-shaped building
ugly? I didn’t think so. But I need you to look at it
and tell me that it is gorgeous. Chipped, mosaic-laden
concrete balconies. When one is little, it’s joyful to walk

under the first story. I still love the intricate
network of grapevines clambering up them.
Odessans continue to make wine
out of these grapes, but every week the terrorists
go for these balconies, for some reason. Killing no one,

we are told over tea. But why did you bring Natánchik
here, say the maybe-not-to-be-victims? The conversation
turns back to Brodsky, though faces darken. Then
we fly back to Connecticut. But would I risk your life,
kiddo, just to hear you say, Mama, was that your home?

I’d press my forehead against yours: Now you know.
Would I still feel that was home when we got home?
We live on Choice Street, Hiding, CT. The address
where I can unbuckle you and run-run-run
with you to Wi-Fi and Facebook.

All the Odessans we know are still alive.

                        3. To a Lake

Reader, how would you like to go to Lake Baikal?
I’ve heard it’s on the other side of everything.
If you like fishing, we could fish for omul. It has
an unusual, delectable taste. I read all about that

in an e-mail. Or we could sit by a lakeside bonfire
in an Adirondack chair. (Check out the 31,000
Russian web search results
for “Adirondack chair.”)

I could help you look for a graying sunset
that hasn’t murdered anyone, yet.
Some ecologists stand, chatting, nearby.
Hey, reader, aren’t you and I

speaking English? Within minutes
one ecologist, wearing a hunting jacket,
walks to us, pushes our chairs over
onto the sand, kicks us in the jaws, yells,

speek Russian, speek Russian.
His beer-warm buddies stand back,
unsure of what the right thing to do is,
grinning just in case grinning is the right thing.

There is no mystery, none of that Russian soul
made up by Americans. Jews, openly gay people,
Ukrainians with an accent will suffer,
already do. No one should ever

go to Russia. In fact, Russians
shouldn’t go to Russia.
But this never happened.
No one walked over, no one screamed

or hit us. The guys remain by the bonfire
in peace. We, closer to the lapping quiet.
Gritty warmth. The scent of dying dragonflies,
while some still flit about, fatly.

Our home, the world, dims into the ornate
auburn rug of the sky.
By this biggest and cleanest bowl of water
we are but an ordinary variant of the norm.

But a gray mass approaches. A swarm of mosquitoes
flying in from the lake? Or a mob coming?
Alychah plum yellow, the granulated jade
of the jewelry boxes on my grandmother’s makeup table,

all swept off and replaced by a dark gray, no,
not gray, the color you see when you try to protect
your face with your arms and sweater.
Something is coming at us and this is all we’ve got.

Help me, reader, lift this gray like an outdated, grainy
satellite image of a country,
help it bloom into a mosaic, dappled like rivers
and dogs and horses, a thousand colors lush.

Olga Livshin is a Russian-American poet and translator. Her poetry has been published in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Persian Anthology of World Poetry (in translation). She holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literature, and teaches Russian at Swarthmore College.