Dzvinia Orlowsky

The Fortieth Day

Now she called forth nights of a different kind of brilliance when the moon wrapped every thing with light—trumpeting yellow pumpkin blossoms, a water pump with a dropped handle resembling a rusty beard, an old chain saw depression at the top of a tree stump—things outside that scratched or crumbled spoke with flimsy or hoarse voices.  A minute passed…then another.  Old roses opened fearless and beautiful on this day of sadness.  Since, flowers were no longer just flowers, they blurred and stretched into transparent curtains walking in the breeze of the raised storm window, walking, for those of us left behind.

Pussy Riot/Want/Don’t/Want

I thought you were a catch phrase for the not tonight, oh yes
tonight, but not two nights in a row!
of late middle age

how else to say it:

the thatched roofs are on fire
& the villagers have fled
except this woman
whom you left behind,

her skirt rising in flames,
wild heat,

a wreckage of K-Y and Oil of Olay

* * *

O graying fraying housebound hive,
you’re not my  problem,

though I will admit

your spreading reflection in the hand held mirror
looks, this year,

don’t make me say it,

wiser –

if not for love or song,

* * *

Can a finger dip into honey

in late January?

Can red wine stream like blood down my legs?

This afternoon, huddled against the cutting winter wind
in front of Boston’s State House,
we protested

Putin must go!

            Yanokovich is a cesspool!

 
while you, Prison punk prayer,
turn the world’s attention

to

holy
hooliganism!

I thought you were a catch phrase for the want-don’t want
of late middle age,

(oh pussy, what a riot, I had you all wrong)

Author: Dzvinia Orlowsky

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a founding editor of Four Way Books, translator, and author of seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including A Handful of Bees, reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series; Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry; and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Book’s Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was a winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize selected by Robert Pinsky. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s and Halyna Kruk’s poetry have been short-listed, respectively, for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry and the 2025 PEN American Literary Award in Translation.  Their co-translation from the Ukrainian of Oleksander Dovzhenko’s novella, The Enchanted Desna, is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2026.  www.dzviniaorlowsky.com

Plume: Issue #53 December 2015