Valiantsina Aksak

When looking

When looking for a day’s happiness-
finish off the bottle.
When looking for a week’s happiness –
roast a turkey.
When looking for a month’s happiness –
get married.
When looking for a century of happiness –
tend to the flowers
in your old man’s garden.

Maryia Vaitsiashonak

An ordered life

When you’ve not filled
the stove with wood
for tomorrow
nor fetched
water
from the well
then you’ve no
future
only a dreary, lingering
today

Once the light
is out
the hut
closes
its eyes
the crunching
bones of the
old wardrobe
shelves
put themselves
to bed
at dawn you discover
a nail on the floor
like a pin
from a woman’s
hair
the hut is alive

Volha Hronskaya

Untitled

When I go into the kitchen,
to wash the dishes,
I call myself Agatha.
I’d have liked something
more romantic, but
what to do
I’m no nymph.
Agatha.
Forty, divorced, in creative crisis,
and I hate washing the dishes

Since childhood I remember
how dishes begat rituals.
Heat up the water
fill a big basin
dunk, scrub, lift
all without soap
so the crumbs
can be fed to the pigs
you scrub with slippery fingers
flowers on a white plate
and you hate washing the dishes.

I read somewhere that
when you wash the dishes
you should think of the dishes
Which gives you a moment
and a feeling of self
I think:
maybe that’s the reason
for my diagnoses, crises, desires?
I hate washing the dishes
and I don’t feel.
But
when water trickles through my fingers
they feel wet.
Perhaps I can be cured.

Olga Zlotnikova

Untitled

To Misha

Before you understand
that you’re travelling platskart
in a blue carriage
on the train from Minsk to Sevastopol

The sun will fall
beyond the forest
a white shuttlecock
and all shall be dark

For now there is tea
in a cupholder, on the ledge
pink sausage slices on bread
passengers chew silently
the sullen attendant passes by

You climbed to the top bunk
sky stretching out
sky never ending
a pale blue in the midday haze

Trees will forever flicker
trees in dark clusters
and those fields upon fields

A longing more than longing
under a July sky
on the train from Minsk to Sevastopol

Radio forever buzzing
songs pressing as the heat
songs which must be shed
like burnt skin
or discarded like cigarette butts
out the window, into the wind
face shielded from ash

my love, we’re still moving
sun leaning to the west
nature fathomless

beyond the carriage glass
blurred by the scratching
nails of a bored little boy

I’m afraid to tell you
that you won’t see the sea
the splendid Black Sea

It’s already night now
the sky darker than never

my boy
don’t lie on the edge
of the top bunk

In the platskart carriage
of the train from
Minsk to Sevastopol

Nadezhda Kokhnovich

Untitled

You’re weird mama, like a swimming pool
you have to think less in your head
why don’t you want nice hair?
I took out the hairclip, I made your hair beautiful,
shake it out!
what if crocodiles climbed out of all the bins?
and what if birds stole the car?
they’d go all over town, making accidents
what if you had three heads?
what a pretty scarfy you have mama
glorybetoukraine, what a beauty you are!
you, mama, are a French princess
no, a French policewoman!
what do animals have claws for?
and what if their claws reached up to space?
what if a planet gets pulled down,
tied to a statue and pulled down?
and then what if snakes slither downstairs,
but upstairs there aren’t any, what then?
and what would happen if you clip monkeys’ nails?
and are there electric screws?
and will you tell papa about grandad’s questions
from before?
and what if there is a body?
and what if you dance inside a rocket?
and if you turn the tap on so loads of water comes out?
and if you turn the tap on, shut the door and run away?
what if there’s a juice flood?
what if there’s a chocolate flood?
and if there was a big flood in our house
would we have to, like, swim in the water?
and then what if everything rots?
I’d better not think about it
it’s like a nightmare!

Iryna Dubianetskaia

This is no tree

This
is no
tree
which grows in me
roots upward
it is – flame
fanned by wind
that burned my own tree
and the blossom and nests upon it
It thirsts to burn me too
but the tree
in which I am growing
does not allow it
its crown
touching
the clouds

Valzhyna Mort

Granny

My granny
doesn’t know pain
she thinks
hunger is food
poverty is wealth
thirst is water

Her body is like a grapevine
wound around a post
her hair – bees’ wings
she swallows pills of bouncing light
and calls the internet
the telephone to America

Her heart became a rose
just for smelling
when pressed to her breast
there’s nothing more to it
it’s just a flower

Her arms are stork legs
red sticks
and I sit on the balls of my feet
howling like a wolf
at the white moon of your head
granny
I tell you: it’s not pain
it is God that hugs you so tightly
his unshaven cheek stings
as he kisses

Nastia Shakunova

Apple tree

We’ll play at buttons or coins
pull out a long stick
from the shed, or slingshot
to knock apples from high branches
nearby is a pond with rusted locks
the bottom covered with silted skeletons
of carp frogs and statues
but not one boat

The oak and base of a ruined bathhouse on the street side
naked women doused each other with water
from zinc buckets
washing children in basins
later used to boil ripe berries in
scooping off the foam with a big wooden spoon
and they would sleep
when the sun set
topping and tailing
if all together

We’ll pull out a long stick from the shed
and play at buttons or coins

*

Nathan Jeffers (ig: @jikooo) is a translator, writer, and teacher. He translates from Russian and Ukrainian into English; translations released in 2024 include the posthumous memoir Socrates the Skinhead, the Life of a Russian Antifascist (Active Distribution) and The Art of Ukraine (Thames and Hudson).by Alisa Lozhkina. His translations and other writings have appeared in the Asymptote Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books blog, RHINO poetry, and Pocket Samovar. He is also currently working on translation projects with Oxford University, UK and Rutgers University, USA.