ENTER GHOST

Genya Turovskaya

II

Enter mother Enter mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother
Enter unnamed mother called only Mother Enter ferocious
mother of all suns trillion-eyed trillion-armed mother
of all saviors mother of all bombs all balms all salvos all salves
Enter mother of all
slaves all masters Enter mother of all psalms
all amens
all women men all elegies all howls all unknown soldiers all keening wails
Enter mother
of all mother
tongues
Enter old mother that forgets
her daughter’s name
Enter mother that climbs down from the swaying trees
and gently picks the fleas
out of our matted fur

III

Enter as error message as a glitch
in the code caught
like the punctured lung
of a plastic bag
its faded Thank You
For Your Business
twisting for all eternity
in the branches of a London plane tree
that stands in the memorial park at the foot of the monument
for the war dead
of a distant century.

Genya Turovskaya was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City. She is the author of The Breathing Body of This Thought (Black Square Editions) as well as numerous chapbooks. Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in A Public Space, Asymptote, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Octopus, Paris Review, PEN Poetry, Sangam Poetry, Seedings, The Elephants, and other publications. She is the translator of Aleksandr Skidan's Red Shifting (Ugly Duckling Presse). She is the co-translator of Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse), which won the University of Rochester's Three Percent 2010 award for Best Translated Book of Poetry. She is also a co-translator of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan). She has received a Fund for Poetry Grant, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Montana Artist Refuge Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Translation Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute, and a Whiting Award. She lives in New York City where she is a practicing psychotherapist.