I am the youngest one in this flotational room,
one only meant for roads,
but I will be the biggest ears.
In that room, parallel to ours, my friends froze to death.
They outwrung their organs,
They insisted we all listen.
So the people they grind and cut up to bits
for research are the ones with no families, poor,
ones who have no one to bury. Somebody
takes their limbs for progress.
Snow, smoldering, white ash,
I haven’t words for your sparkling dividends.
His dark eyes are closed by fatigue on the other end.
And I caught her sneeze visually,
she was a quiet sneezer, but still I blessed her.
It’s a matter of placing your mind
in front of your face.
On the bus, from outside, the leaves
wait to be seen through a window,
rustling, in swathes, in swatches.
Everything is making it easier to sleep.
one only meant for roads,
but I will be the biggest ears.
In that room, parallel to ours, my friends froze to death.
They outwrung their organs,
They insisted we all listen.
So the people they grind and cut up to bits
for research are the ones with no families, poor,
ones who have no one to bury. Somebody
takes their limbs for progress.
Snow, smoldering, white ash,
I haven’t words for your sparkling dividends.
His dark eyes are closed by fatigue on the other end.
And I caught her sneeze visually,
she was a quiet sneezer, but still I blessed her.
It’s a matter of placing your mind
in front of your face.
On the bus, from outside, the leaves
wait to be seen through a window,
rustling, in swathes, in swatches.
Everything is making it easier to sleep.
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Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is a doctorate student in the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. Her translations of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka were released with World Poetry Books in February 2023. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, and Colorado Review, among other journals.
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