Larissa's Blog

AMERICAN AND IRANIAN POETS DO NOT WANT WAR!

I am proud to be translated in Farsi by Iranian poets Mohammad Mostaghimi and Mersad Mostaghimi - poets do not want war! A translation of a SLY BANG poem, Vow:
Vow
We will love like dogwood
Kiss like cranes
Die like moths
I promise©2007, Larissa Shmailoلاريسا شمايلو 2007پيمان بهارما عشق خواهيم ورزيدمثل زغال اختهبوسه خواهيم زدمثل درناهاخواهيم مردمثل پروانگانمن نويد مي‌دهمگزاشتار: محمّد مستقيمي(راهي)

"I am not your insect" in Noon Anthology

Delighted that my poem "I am not your insect" is included in Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press of Tokyo and London) edited by Philip Rowland. The text of the poem, which appears in my collection #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books 2014) follows below.I am not your insect
Your underfoot, your exterminated, your bug. My unabashedly hairy legs, whose gymnopédies twitch like a chorus for a fatal Sharon Stone, delight in ces mouvements qui déplace les lignes, in the motion, the quiver, le mort, the catch. Mother Kali, you have made me what I am: feminine, brilliant, entirely without fear. Like my mother, I watch and pray for prey – that it be there, that it give gore, that I feel it die, that there be more.

Anna Karenina: #MeToo (recently published in KGBBarLit)

Note: Dmitry Merezhkovsky was a Russian thinker and critic.Ah, Merezhkovsky: to you I was a mare
ridden badly by a man; and because of him,
his error, I had to be destroyed. And Lev, my dear:
You never gave me my own voice, you didn’t dare.
What did I talk about when I did talk, after all:
Abortion with Dolly? Every damn thing
Vronsky did, that I did better? The problem
was not that I was sexual (men, you
count on that). The problem was that
I was smart. But sexual women must be killed;
All the books attest to that.Merezhkovsky permeates the consciousness
of Slavic scholars, is the Anna story, still,
but I fault you most, Lev. You knew, soon
that the problem was not one woman
and one man; it was all women, all men. You had
Vronsky climb in society, while I—damn, I even
knew more about horses than him!—I was
the scarlet woman, though our offence was the same.
Did I abandon my child? Or did a martinet
bar me from him? Ah, she holds Vronsky back!
Ah, the guilt!Oh, there is no talking to you.
You sent me the dream
that haunted your ruling-class sleep,
a peasant with an iron,
the proletariat that said, fuck you
and your landlord’s way of life.
You killed me with the railroad that they built
for you. Because you “had to.”
Where was your Resurrection then?
You repudiated Karenina, it’s true,
but you abandoned me to my fate.
And so, Lev, I still struggle,
a century and a half later,
to have my story told.

POEM FROM SLY BANG: SCHWEINEREI

A poem "by" Nora Volkhonsky, the protagonist of SLY BANG, for D-Day.SCHWEINERIEGet up, schweinerei, my father says, waking us late.And at dinner, my dyadya, talking drunk and loud,says that he and my dedushka guarded railroadsin the war. For the Germans. The railroads are old,but this country is new: not the Soviet Union, I ask?,not wanting to know. Barely breathing: the world,hard, atrocious, and cruel, falls into place.And Babushka? Babushka worked at the railroad, too.(I feel her hard hands braiding my hair, the stern lipsmouthing: zhid). I remember my mother, seeking salvationat her grave, saying (but lying): “I once opened a gate.”The world falls into place. What was on those rails? Who?And what did their guards do? Somehow I knew, I always knew.Tonight, I hear my mother’s reedy voice simper, singing,Nach jeden Dezember ihr kommt ein Mai. Her home ofgemutlichkeit,comfort without joy. My mother’s lovefor the German tongue; how often she said “There weregood Germans, too.” As Ukrainians, save the martyred few,they were kapos, collaborators, too. Did they have a choice?Starvation in the kolkhoz, bodies lying, dying in the streets,and only the Germans, said mother, protested Stalin’s rapeand collectivization of the Ukraine. How much victim?How much volunteer? Did my mama, my papa, my dyadya,my baba, my dyedushka commit atrocities in the war?In Kalinivka, the mass graves; my family was there.In Prymsl, deported Jews; my family was there.In the Harz Mountains, Northhausen and Dora-Mittelbau;my family was there. What other families? Who survived,and why? (There was no crematorium in Dora, my motherlied.) In the face of starvation, of death, of Stalin’s camps,tell me, you, well-fed and safe, judging me and mine: is therecomplicity when there is no choice? (Was there choice?)The stories, the lacunae, the lies. Now I know why I always feltlike a Jew. O, Adonai, why? Why these origins for me, why noorisons for me? The dead are dead, but not within me, myholocaust today, forever my bread.

MEMORIAL DAY

Memorial Day - I have no family, only memories of my dead: my father's blackened nails, caught in a printing press (he never complained); my mother, a bookkeeper at a canning factory, always handing out paychecks to the workingmen first; my sister, who fought workplace discrimination against her mental illness, and won; my niece and godchild, a psychiatrist and the upwardly mobile pride of her working class grandparents. Their Russian immigrant accents, their war and labor camp survivor insistence that anything could be fixed except death. I thank my family for my privileges of education and culture - the museums, the theater, the opera and ballets they sent me to, although they never went themselves, conserving funds, always working. I remember them today, and always.

Bios of My Birthday Readers!

I am thrilled to be celebrating my birthday May 31 at Unnameable Books with readings by Steve Dalachinsky, Ron Kolm, Dean Kostos, Stephanie Strickland, and Michael T. Young. Here are their bios below.
Poet/collagist STEVE DALACHINSKY was born in Brooklyn in1946. His book “The Final Nite” (Ugly Duckling Presse - 2006) won the PEN Oakland National Book Award. His latest cds are “The Fallout of Dreams” with Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach (Roguart 2014), “ec(H)o-system” with the French art-rock group, the Snobs (Bambalam 2015) and the book/cd “Pretty in the Morning with the Snobs”(Bisou Records – 2019). He is a 2014 recipient of a Chevalier D’ le Ordre des Artes et Lettres. His recent books include “The Invisible Ray” (Overpass Press – 2016) with artwork by Shalom Neuman, “Frozen Heatwave”, a collaboration with Yuko Otomo (Luna Bissonte Prods 2017) and Black Magic (New Feral Press 2017) and The Chicken Whisperer (Positive Manets – 2018). His newest book “where night and day become one – the french poems” (great weather for MEDIA 2018) received a 2019 IBPA award in poetrRon Kolm's latest collection of poetry is Welcome to the Barbecue. He is an editor of the 6th Unbearables anthology, From Somewhere To Nowhere: The End of the American Dream and a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. He is the author of Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift and A Change in the Weather. He's had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge, The Opiate and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales CollectionDean Kostos is a poet, translator, anthologist, and memoirist. He is the author of eight books. His collection, THIS IS NOT A SKYSCRAPER won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, selected by Mark Doty. He was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation grant. His memoir, THE BOY WHO LISTENED TO PAINTINGS, will be released this fall.Stephanie Strickland’s 9 books of print poetry and 11 co-authored digital poems have garnered Brittingham, Sandeen, di Castagnola, and Best of the Net awards. She has been granted National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships. Her digital poems have been shown at the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Strickland’s work in print and multiple media is being collected by the Rubenstein Library at Duke University. How the Universe Is Made, a volume of New & Selected Poems, has just been published. http://stephaniestrickland.comMichael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was long-listed for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for his collection, Living in the Counterpoint. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including The Los Angeles Review, One, The Smart Set, Rattle, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His poetry has also been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac.

STRUDEL AND MOVIES

In Nazi Germany there were brilliant movies and groundbreaking art, not to mention delicious strudel and heartstopping sports. And there was money to enjoy them all. Yes, somewhere Jewish families were being separated and sent to camps, and the chancellor became the Fuhrer and attacked the press and controlled the judiciary, but this all seemed like it would pass any day and the opposition would soon rise . . And how bad could things be with such delicious strudel and movies?

Constitutional Crisis

Another blow to the separation of powers from the proponents of the unitary executive, or the philosophy behind Trump's expanding article 2 powers: Emmet Flood, Trump's attorney, argued in a letter today that the president's advisors work for him, and "not for the people" (that is, we taxpayers who pay their salaries). Therefore, Trump may forbid these advisers to testify before Congress. With the executive's defiance of lawful congressional subpoenas and its wholesale annexation of the judiciary in the person of AG Barr, who will "supervise" the 14 investigations referred by Mueller much as he did the Mueller report, we are galloping headlong toward an authoritarian government. We should be in the streets about this.

Pages