It has Been A Great While
I've neglected this thing because of all the stuff I've been failing to accomplish, but now that the semester is coming to a close I feel that I might as well tie myself to a palm tree and just wait for the wave to hit.
Some more translations have been accepted. Hampshire Archive. Personalia by Polina Barskova is going to be published in Russian and English in the 6th issue of Circumference. House From Beneath The Table is coming out in the first issue of St. Petersburg Review. Absinthe: New European Writing is publishing some Danila Davydov poems, and Cimarron Review is publishing a few Anastasia Afanaseva. I can't remember if I already mentioned this, but I am sure this redundancy will not raise anyone's chances of cancer.
I am returning to Russia at the end of May to work a bit more on the translations, and maybe to conduct some interviews --So stay tuned.
I leave you with a poem I wrote after Mr. Cho's temper tantrum:
Dreams of Children Who Scrap Mold Off Their Tongues For a New Kind of Penicillin that Cures Failure
If you dream of your fingers falling off
If you are writing a tractatus on the consumption of animals
If you are taxing the nations video games
If you believe that yellow stone On August 27, the volcano entered the final cataclysmic stage of its eruption. Four enormous explosions took place at 5:30 a.m., 6:42 a.m., 8:20 a.m., and 10:02 a.m. The worst and loudest of these was the last explosion. Each was accompanied by very large tsunamis believed to have been over 100 ft high in places. A large area of the Sunda Strait and a number of places on the Sumatran coast were affected by pyroclastic flows from the volcano. The explosions were so violent that they were heard 2,200 statute miles (3,500 km) away in Australia and the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,800 km away; the sound of Krakatoa's destruction is believed to be the loudest sound in recorded history, reaching levels of 180 dBSPL 100 miles (160 km) away. Ash was propelled to a height of 50 miles (80 km). The eruptions diminished rapidly after that point, and by the morning of August 28 Krakatoa was quiet.
If you believe krakos is a kind of savior
If you believe the earth is an apple which is a snow ball which falls and falls and falls into a vat of milk the size of a pyramid
If you believe the american constitution is the senate’s pastoral
If you believe it’s just getting started
If you stare in the black mirror on the wall like a volcano
If you wake up naked
If you don’t wanna live in
If emergence the bottleneck nonsense which is our apparition population
If we are entrenched in the hallucination of wet carnivores
If the Dutch man loves his family but keeps them from leaving
If kids make bombs
If kids sweep the Nobel Prize
If kids are movie stars
If kids are presidents
If kids are the proletariat
If kids are girl who just wanna have fuck
If kids drive the animals from their cages
If you are too old to understand
If you feel superior to the inferior on the bank of the rio de la plata
And then a women comes in
She is that thing which causes the epic in our monkey species
She is young and has a bandaid between her toes
A tent in the wind…
It blows and blows and blows until someone yells: SHE’S CAMPING IN SPACE!!!
If every day is a modern art museum and a pride parade
If the mayor is in the dream of a dog
If the bookstore is inside the superstore next to the kwiki mart
If our money is broken and doesn’t feed us
If the bumpin shaky turquoise
If the problem south of the border is the problem north of border
If our jews are hipper than your negroes
If our intelligentsia is a sensitive child with calm panties
If our studs are found your beds
If reading james hansen at the bus stop we notice a pretty girl
Holding herself up near the hip with her left hand
A cigarette in her right hand
A guy in a raiders cap lights it for her
Just then we notice her enormous stomach
The size of a watermelon
The watermelon girl smokes her cigarette
But we look up at the sky because we have missed our appointment
The sky heats the air
A man sits down with a car magazine
He asks: where are you going? Is that where the family is? Are you just visiting?
He circles a black convertible
Taking a donut out of his pocket
The parking lot is open
Weeds marking its edges
A box of smashed donuts
No pigeons or ants
Making it empty
posted by Peter Golub at 12:32 AM
