MATERIA PRIMA

GENYA TUROVSKAYA

the moon sweeps
the cornfields
and the cornfields creak

the alarm comes
to life

awakens
the neural bomb wires

the grid of speech
I misspelled as “greed”

—the greed then
of speech—

grounded by grammar

the airplanes that don’t take off
don’t climb grand and blithe the bluer altitudes
of the thinning air

the waterfall
has frozen
and the pipes

cracking
the cold floor of the vertical sky

inverting the inked lines
the thorny and lurching
script

a streaking
lark
in the tear of labile weather

I was unreliable or I was unable or it was
the code
care-worn and creased
folded closed and pressed
into the fissure
between mind and mineral
mine and not-mine meaning and moan

the frozen embryo suspended
in its solution it is not quite alive
is held aloof from life

not-mine and mine or not
what I mean or where
I meant
to go

to begin
again at the beginning
the word

that ruptured
the watery imprecision
of the dark

Genya Turovskaya was born in Kiev, 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 Series, 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.