левиафан / leviathan

GEORGE KOVALENKO

Tonight is rapt in wonder of that mind
become a voice: a redwood rising from the middle of his throat,

a righteous ire in the woods-become-proscenium.
Outside, as many sparrows as Moscow has ears

cross boulevards as quick as questions.
Tonight the theatre’s the eye of the leviathan.

Tonight he drives into its microphone, its mouth,
a never say, a leaden sky, a we survive.

But in its belly: two fingers on a switch
and one across a million pairs of lips,

machine-greased and asleep against a bottle
or a cheek, an old song, or a floor speckled with teeth.

The tape goes dumb, spools out, becomes a hush,
becomes the sound of whistling somewhere inside the fences.

GEORGE KOVALENKO is a poet whose work has appeared in Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere. He has received support from the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, holds an M.F.A. from New York University, and is a Ph.D. student at the University of Denver. An Associate Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, he lives in Denver.