The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness
Nothing in common but warmth and fleece,
Lonesame keys and nine orifices,
Filled with what? moisture, pleasure, shit;
Covered by a mouth; closed by sleep.
Baking up: blood, tears, kids and wax.
Surrounding: their essence or another’s flesh.
Of my own nine, I enter, sat to remove.
I stood to be. And head to the pool.
Pink and yellow, big like babies,
Nakie-nude, towels to the neck—
Crossing the floor are flocks of girltrees.
Each to the shower, languidly leaning its trunk.
Like types of wine and species of aves
They must be classi- or curiosified:
Here’s collarbone plates; there: sails of shoulder blades.
We must catalogue each footarch height.
Soon these ones won’t be. Soon they’ll be replaced.
Here’ll be wound in velvet, there: the stage refaced.
Visitors will stare amazed, not hiding tears,
At the combos of bones, skin, and black braided hair.
Some pretty boy on hand
Or baddie good’un
Plays in the kiddy garden:
Touching your plum,
Partaking of your pear,
Gathering, in his mouth, water:
Then winter will come into it, bejeweled and cut up time,
And the brother go unknown by the animal of mind.
This pillar of water might turn to ice,
Reason to a poison, air to gas,
Sweetie-pies will march and stride
In closed ranks through shops and shacks.
And the door that led out to the swimming cube
Will open just a tad, like a zipper on a boot.
And we’ll step out of slippers, nails and crowns,
From watches, juxtaposed rags, our voices’ sounds.
And into nostrils, ears and mouths, like out a kettle spout,
En masse they’ll surge and spill, souls
Who broke the lock.
But like in forest schooclass="underline" the noisy surplus
Of creams, muscles, hair, armpits and lips.
Self-tanner and shame, as vixens from their bores,
Look at our bodies’ surface through the lenses of our pores.
But like in cattle cars, with cramped and vulgar mutter,
Squares of steam and lengthy howls roam-wander,
Unbreachable, the sky becomes a brother.
And someone sings in the shower room.
In summer camps, in July’s blue shorts,
First hanging back, then straightening spine and neck,
My first I, scowling like a bullet,
Makes its very first step.
And furrowing the landscape, like crushing paper in the hand,
I look at it as almost with the sky. And will then
Lie down, like ball lightning does in fields:
With a single revolution of the wheel.
Translated by Zachary Murphy King
Sarah on the Barricades
1.
The year nineteen-oh-five.
In the cradles sleep no more.
Tiny hands unshod, open eyes,
Toothless mouths yawn wide,
Packed in the train like Guidon in his barrel,*
Oh, no, like sardines packed in a tin,
Rattling off to distant steppes.
Over them in Tambov and Yeysk
In the sackcloth of drapes gone feral
They sigh, those misty Jewish mamas
(German Russian Polish or …)
And the list of children’s surnames
Like a roster of those lost in war.
Their future lady-loves, their girlies,
Come spilling from grandfathers’ loins,
And peer into the eyes of needles,
That lead far into unknown wombs.
(The funny grove around the funny shame
Is curly as a picture-frame.
Above it twirl the scents of procreation,
But no speaking of them.
—
* Prince Guidon is a character in Alexander Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan (1831). As a baby, he was sealed in a barrel with his mother and thrown into the sea.
Then there are the mists of soup and toilet.
And headlines of today’s financial news,
First bell, a second-class train,
Inkblot and tear stain.)
I know (it would be better not to know)
That these universal birthing pains,
Rhythmic as a cannonade, are
The coming of a whole new strain.
That into sleepless bassinets
Yawn these gaping hatches.
That this demo-graphic tide
Boils and bubbles with every type.
Any old Martha from off the street
Boasts the same kinds of folds,
A map under every skirt—
A yielding, nebulous, smooth
Landscape, going under ice
For years and years to come.
Atop should lie like tracing paper
The periodic layers of events,
Of spectacles and blood-lettings;
A steamboat chugs across the heart
From nineteen thirty-nine.*
While in the throat—a barricade in black-and-white.
—
* An allusion to the popular song “Parokhod” (“The Steamboat”), which was written in 1939 and performed by Leonid Utyosov and his jazz orchestra; also a reference to Marina Tsvetaeva’s return to the USSR from France on a steamboat in 1939. About the latter, see Stepanova’s essay “The Maximum Cost of Living” in this volume.
On which great-grandma Sarah
—her eye, punched black last night,
is tied around like a pirate’s—
and Sanka and Sarah Sverdlova
are standing with the workers of the world.
2.
Of all those lying in the earth, foreheads tossed back,
Keeping my speech in mind through the pine coffin,
Poured like dry grain into a tin can,
Playing in the city park, I choose one:
In a white hat, with girlfriend and friend,
On an alpine path,
Where the century’s burning down like a wick,
Dwindling in the throng;
On a summer day in the Luxembourg Gardens,
Where Mary Stuart is,
Where I, too, in a hundred years, will stand
And there’s no covering your tracks;
On a winter night in Villefranche-sur-Mer
Watching the lights go.
In Petersburg in prison,
Here, look.
Sorting through the desk box
In the Moscow apartment.
On Pokrovsky Boulevard.
In the communal latrine.
In the hospital ward
In a white coat—
Receiving patients.
Now—only in my crowded skull.
With her daughter.
Her granddaughter.
Her great-granddaughter me.
This feminist firmament—its swallow, its stormcloud.
The Noah of a female ark.
And when she crowns that barricade,
I will not bare her arms-her breasts,
But neither will I cover her with a flag,
For there is no such flag.
And neither red, nor blue & white
Is any good for things like this.
Now, from on high the radio turns on
Liberty, barricade, democracy.
And for them, Sarah Ginzburg’s a demonstration
(Perhaps of the reasons for poetry?)
Though any old acacia growing wild’s
Both easier and better for things like this.
… but who can tell the difference anymore.
And if you put our Sarah in a vase
Or drape the barricade with acacia—
It’s the same number (of the estimated year)
We get when we go look up the solution.