little green lights
love—it’s a question of choice
or, as one E-burg poet said, an instance of total defeat
in the section on “Actual Problems of Erotica and Pornography”
they won’t write about it
in general not much is written about it
and what you’ve read and heard is the manual for dummies
make love to forty thousand sisters and brothers
stop making love to the most tender woman in the world
you won’t get smarter in a single fibromuscular organ
in fact, you’ll never become anyone worthy of love
but you already know that
all you can do is move towards spam
towards “I’m not the one losing my mind, but I got tired over the summer,”
towards “the subscriber isn’t connected, please try again later”
towards the electronic novel in seven hundred thousand characters
towards the forever more, always, and now block
and the green nimbus above your head on Facebook
is the carnival form of divine omnipresence
(green-eyed God, does this play in movie theaters where you are?)
it’s nothing more than the illusion of permissiveness made by light
if they cut off the power, with whom will we all talk
so we live with these rotten, cloudy optics
one person is “online” to another
one person is “chat” to another
(Skype’s calling)
and a typo
***
is there hot war in the tap
is there cold war in the tap
how is it that there’s absolutely no war
it was promised for after lunch
we saw the announcement with our own eyes
“war will arrive at fourteen hundred hours”
and it’s already three hours without war
six hours without war
what if there’s no war by the time night falls
we can’t do laundry without war
can’t make dinner
can’t drink tea plain without war
and it’s already eight days without war
we smell bad
our wives don’t want to lie in bed with us
the children have forgotten to smile and complain
why did we always think we’d never run out of war
let’s start, yes, let’s start visiting neighbors to borrow war
on the other side of our green park
start fearing to spill war in the road
start considering life without war a temporary hardship
in these parts it’s considered unnatural
if war doesn’t course through the pipes
into every house
into every throat
***
when they kill my father i dream
i’m surrounded
by uprooted trees
muddy waters
coming up to the very edge
of the second story balcony
one step more until its sepia embrace
and it’s really beautiful
like in a Tarkovsky film
and to the right
the earth rises in mountains
don’t even think of leaving the house
either you’re a raft
or a carpenter
reverse perspective
father father why hast thou forsaken me
from A Little Further from Heaven
Iya Kiva
translated from the Russian by Katherine E. Young
Listen to "[is there hot war . . .]" read in the original Russian by the poet:
Iya Kiva (b. 1984) is something of a contradiction: a poet of contemporary Ukraine who most often expresses herself in Russian (although she occasionally writes in Ukrainian); a once-formal poet who now frequently employs techniques of free verse, collage, and montage; a war refugee who by her own account can’t seem to right herself, even far from the front lines.
Not surprisingly for a poet who’s spent most of the last four years as a refugee, themes of memory, violence, trauma, and borders/transitions run through Kiva’s poems. She also explores states of alienation and separation, ways people fragment and become disconnected while paradoxically “connecting” via digits and pixels. Death is another of Kiva’s preoccupations: “[D]eath interests me not as ‘we’re all going to die, how terrible,’ but as a particular variant of violence. And as a complex psychological problem. That is, not as an ending, but as a breaking-off, an incompletion.”
In 2014 a particular kind of breaking off occurred in Kiva’s own writing. That year, the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine saw a Russian-backed incumbent ousted from Ukraine’s presidency; soon thereafter, Russia forcibly re-annexed Crimea. Kiva’s hometown of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine also became (and remains) a battlefield. According to Kiva, she began to write “completely differently” after these events. In wartime, she writes, “luxuriant metaphors seem superfluous to me. Difficult times demand simplicity in speaking. But that’s just formal minimalism. I don’t mean semantic simplification. I mean something like the inability to put on a beautiful, expensive dress if everyone around you is a beggar.”
Kiva is also known to Russian-language readers for her poems about the Second World War, including poems that explore the complex history of Ukraine’s Jewish population. She says wryly that many consider her poems “gloomy and depressing,” although she insists that’s not the case. One of her interests as an artist is precisely the moment when things deviate from perceived norms, from convention. Her life, she writes, is not typical, or easy, or smooth: “My poems look very much like my life.”
Not surprisingly for a poet who’s spent most of the last four years as a refugee, themes of memory, violence, trauma, and borders/transitions run through Kiva’s poems. She also explores states of alienation and separation, ways people fragment and become disconnected while paradoxically “connecting” via digits and pixels. Death is another of Kiva’s preoccupations: “[D]eath interests me not as ‘we’re all going to die, how terrible,’ but as a particular variant of violence. And as a complex psychological problem. That is, not as an ending, but as a breaking-off, an incompletion.”
In 2014 a particular kind of breaking off occurred in Kiva’s own writing. That year, the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine saw a Russian-backed incumbent ousted from Ukraine’s presidency; soon thereafter, Russia forcibly re-annexed Crimea. Kiva’s hometown of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine also became (and remains) a battlefield. According to Kiva, she began to write “completely differently” after these events. In wartime, she writes, “luxuriant metaphors seem superfluous to me. Difficult times demand simplicity in speaking. But that’s just formal minimalism. I don’t mean semantic simplification. I mean something like the inability to put on a beautiful, expensive dress if everyone around you is a beggar.”
Kiva is also known to Russian-language readers for her poems about the Second World War, including poems that explore the complex history of Ukraine’s Jewish population. She says wryly that many consider her poems “gloomy and depressing,” although she insists that’s not the case. One of her interests as an artist is precisely the moment when things deviate from perceived norms, from convention. Her life, she writes, is not typical, or easy, or smooth: “My poems look very much like my life.”
Iya Kiva was born in Donetsk, Ukraine, where she graduated from Donetsk National University. In the summer of 2014 she fled the military conflict in Donetsk and since then has lived in Kiev. Kiva is the author of Podalshe ot raia (Kaiala, 2018). Her poems, reviews, and translations have been published in the journals Studiia, Slovo/Word, Neva, Raduga, Plavuchii most, Novaia yunost, Novyi mir, Belyi voron, Kreshchatik, Oktiabr, Interpoezia, Poem, Po&sie, and on the websites ArtPapier, Litcentr, Literratura, Polutona, and others. Kiva is the laureate of a number of international and Ukrainian poetry festivals: the Konstantin Romanov International Youth Competition (St. Petersburg, 2013, 2014), the International Festival of Literature and Culture Slavic Traditions (2013), the Yurii Kaplan Literary Contest (2013), and the International Poetry Festival Emigrantskaia Lyra (2016). She won the All-Ukrainian Poetry Competition Malachite Rhinoceros (2014) and was long-listed for the 2014 “Bella” and 2015 “Debut” (nominated by Poeziia) literary prizes. Her poems have been translated into English, French, Polish, and Lithuanian. She translated Maria Galina’s novel Avtokhtony into Ukrainian (Folio, 2016).
Katherine E. Young is the author of Day of the Border Guards, 2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist, and two chapbooks. Young is also the translator of Farewell, Aylis by Azerbaijani political prisoner Akram Aylisli (forthcoming in 2018), as well as Blue Birds and Red Horses (forthcoming in 2018) and Two Poems, both by Inna Kabysh. Young’s translations of Russian and Russophone authors have won international awards and been published widely, including in Subtropics, The White Review, Words without Borders, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and 100 стихотворений о Москве: Антология (100 Poems about Moscow: an Anthology), winner of the 2017 Books of Russia award in poetry. Several translations have been made into short films. Young was named a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow and currently serves as the inaugural poet laureate for Arlington, Virginia.
