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* * *
– Look, Martha said.
The lawn of your thoughts has turned green
water drips from backs of your words
grass poems grow especially fast after the rain!
– there, that’s what I’ve been saying, that this lyric module is better written! –
Banin replied.
“set at 80%, less than 2 minutes to go,”
they read from a shared screen
the images of their bodies were getting closer and were almost touching each other.
“I feel like a tree,” Martha whispered.
opening my arm-branches to you!
“wait a little,” replied Banin, “wait for it to reboot”
finally, everything happened
the distance between them
due to imperfections in the previous code
vanished
their graphical bodies merged into one
and the corresponding memory area shone with an entry
reflecting the delight of a successful upgrade!
* * *
he took himself out of a box
– normal for that price! –
he thought –
everything is quite decent:
the eyes close at a sharp tilt
and you can’t even see the seam
where the cable was connected.
– thank you for your purchase! –
he read a pop-up message
on his smartphone screen.
you are already fully loaded
You can unplug your old body
and proceed to recycling
the new one will activate automatically
Translated from Russian by Nina Kossman
Vlad (Vladimir) Pryakhin was born in 1957 in Tula, Russia. He lived in Tula, Smolensk, the Baltic states, and in Moscow. In the 1980s he published The Idealist, a samizdat journal of poetry and prose. Since 1992, his poems and short articles have appeared in literary magazines in Russia, as well as Latvia, Poland, as well as in various international online magazines. He is the author of eleven books of poetry and experimental prose. In 2012, he became the editor and publisher of “The Environment”, now known as “Tonkaya Sreda” (www.sreda1.org), an international literary almanac. From 2017 to 2021, he was the editor of a portal dedicated to poetry and art. A winner of several literary awards, he participated in free verse festivals in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
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)
