FLU REMEDY

JULIA NEMIROVSKAYA
TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN BY BORIS DRALYUK

Hissing, rushing like a comet,
it wants back into the pill,
but hollow beads of air
climb up the cut glass wall –
life as it slips away…
Let it help heal someone:

Acetaminophen.

 
От гриппа

Шипит, кометой мечется:
Назад в таблетку хочется –
Но у граненых стен
Воды пустые бусины;
Так жизнь, когда источится –
Пусть ею кто-то лечится:

Ацетаминофен.

Julia Nemirovskaya is a Russian poet and prose writer who was born, raised, and educated in Moscow. She immigrated to the United States in 1991 and teaches Russian literature and culture at the University of Oregon. She has published two collections of poems, Moia knizhechka (My Little Book, 1998) and Vtoraia knizhechka (Second Little Book, 2014), as well as the novel Lis (2017). 

Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and Ten Poems from Russia, and translator of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. His poems have appeared in The New Criterion, The Yale Review, Jewish Quarterly, and elsewhere.