This Is Not An Anniversary (or at least, not the one You think it is)
My niece, newly-arrived from Ukraine eight months earlier, has to write a cycle of poems for English class. At her Mama’s request, I try to help….
Of Migration, Literature, and Grain
The war came to my house a few weeks ago – in the form of my family. My cousin and her 5 children are now in…
Sister (Sestra)
I will weep for youall these shredded hoursof war. I will ruin my morningdestroy my nightsall these obscene daysof war I will wear your filthy dressfeel…
Of Massacres and History
***trigger warning*** Early Sunday morning, branches of trees barely visible in the grey dawn light. I check my phone for the time. There’s a tender text…
Of Genocide, Popular Humour, and Poetry
“They fire as the crowd of women flees inside the nostrils of search lights. May God have a photograph of this…” – from “Soldiers Aim at…
March 21: Of Villages, Archives and Belonging
One month of war. Mariupol. Kherson. Irpin. Chervone, Bohdanivka, Putylivka, Schvaikivtsi. All the countless villages, the selos of folk song lore, of our warped diasporic memory,…
March 16: Of Other Wars
I take a day off from the news. The real world itself reappears. Strangely, it resembles a dream. On the streetcar, instead of checking the war…
March 12: Of Music, Food and Diaspora
I cannot bear to look at images of bombed streets any more. Partly it’s because I think this is how people have always seen Ukraine,…
March 11: Of Archives, and Palestine
Teaching, in these dark days of war, is oddly sustaining, a place to make some sense of things. I weave Ukraine and war, into my lectures –…
March 10: Of Salamanders and the Moral War
“…and every day is like your last chance / and every night as though for the last time…” -from “Hotel Central” by Natalka Biloserkevets Mariupol was…
March 9: Of Roots and Trees
Two weeks or so into war, there this psychic sense of things falling apart. This war, I find, is deeply connected to my own subjectivity. It’s not…