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– Master
I brought you
Kharkov
broken childhood
Your ad says
we
fix everything
– I can’t fix
your childhood
was bombed
it can’t
be fixed
is it
so important to you?
see the expiration date
it expired
a long time ago
– Master
then fix
my city
my university
plazas
fountains
parks
and people
murdered
people
– I can’t
you embarrass me
by asking for the impossible
anything can be repaired
but not everything
can be fixed
go away
– Master
in a house
of my friend
in my friend’s burned down
house
his cat died
fix the cat
can you do this at least
is it possible?
– Nothing
can be fixed
changed
brought back
people
cities
cats
or you
~ ~ ~
Old age is no volk*
it won’t die, won’t run away
get yourself botoxed
drink shark oil
champagne a caviar mask
beat it into your face with someone else’s fist
Dearest
Who are you with?
Who are you talking about?
Old age is not real
It’s just a malaise
There’s spirulina
Microcrystalline cellulose
Alpha-lipoic acid
Hyaluronic thread
Crawl with it through the eye of a needle
Pull yourself through
There’s no such thing as old age
There’s war
There’s love
There’s death
– – –
*volk – волк, Rus. for ‘wolf’
Olena (Alyona, Milena) Maksakowa was born in Kharkov. She studied History of Russian Literature at KSU. Her writing was published in various publications, including Articulation, ROAR, Harpy Hybrid Review, Golden Fleece, etc. She is a co-organizer of the festival Hanover Spring and of Heavenly Kharkiv, a Zoom project. She is an editor of the anti-war website Tochka.Zreniya and the author of Little Diary. She has lived in Germany since 2002.
Launched in 2012, “Four Centuries” is an international electronic magazine of Russian poetry in translation.
Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) was one of the most prolific Russian writers of the twentieth century. Babi Yar and Other Poems, translated by Anna Krushelnitskaya, is a representative selection of Ehrenburg’s poetry, available in English for the first time.
Young readers will love this delightful work of children’s verse by poet William Conelly, accompanied by Nadia Kossman’s imaginative, evocative illustrations.
A book of poems by Maria Galina, put together and completed exactly one day before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is Galina’s seventh book of poems. With translations by Anna Halberstadt and Ainsley Morse.
The first bilingual (Russian-English) collection of poems by Aleksandr Kabanov, one of Ukraine’s major poets, “Elements for God” includes poems that predicted – and now chronicle – Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
A book of poems by Yulia Fridman.
“I have been reading Yulia Fridman’s poems for a long time and have admired them for a long time.” (Vladimir Bogomyakov, poet)
