Alla Through the Looking Glass — Blackbird Archive

← v19n2, Fall 2020

To please her

I comb my hair

put on my earrings

and lipstick

Still in my pajamas

I show my face

Like an actress

she says, delighted

Tell me about how you lived

during the famine

—in my mind, a question

I do not ask

She says

that the wild strawberries are in season

that she splurged on a pair of

secondhand slippers

that my cousin—the prettiest girl

in town—can’t get a date

Men her age are all married

or else they went to war

Lips like a pair of crayons

bound by rubber bands

I look at myself

an old woman

Lips like a pink sea mollusk

doing a wedding dance

She looks at herself

a young woman

Double this, double that, momentum transfer

from her palms to mine

on FaceTime

a salute to chance

the resilience of genes

the disquieting miracle of survival

family aging history

Oksana Maksymchuk

Oksana Maksymchuk is the author of two award-winning books of poetry in the Ukrainian language, Xenia (2005) and Catch (2008). Her English-language poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner , Salamander , The Common , and elsewhere. Her translations have been featured in Words Without Borders , Poetry International , Modern Poetry in Translation , and elsewhere. With Max Rosochinsky, she co-edited Words for War: War Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2017). She won the 2004 Richmond Lattimore Prize for Poetic Translation and the 2014 Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender Prize. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities and the National Endowment of the Arts. Maksymchuk holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University and has taught at Northwestern University and University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Photo by Natalya Mykhailychenko