recent verses
like the years,
the words and the keys the poet has
to dig up to get back to the дача
after her cousin loses them in its back forest
2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award winner and Commended in the 2024 Anne Elder Award, Svetlana's debut collection If Movement Was a Language is available now through Vagabond Press.
spiced cocktails scorch me tongueless. I dressed to the theme
after waiting to become the kind of person to don all this colour.
last time I was here she told me of all the ways I’d wronged her
under her own roof. another child still walked this earth, then.
this exists everywhere:
cars parked in wait
this exists everywhere: sleep
housing drivers-to-be
desire for the domestic
away\towards
cusp
away\towards
the sunken couch. I always thought
it could devour us whole, my cousin and me,
the dark blue depths the same colour
as the night sky, speckled with white bits of lint.
If movement were a language: triptych
no one would be as fluent as us / swimmers. gliding through what we know as air, density augmented.
an undisturbed sky / stars beat the gloaming / mountain looms into dusk / jaggedly ruptures its pastel slope / dead of night by six / a blanket thrown slowly / maternal figure missing / a comforter doing its job
does it count
if i heard childhood
in the lowing of the cows
in voices that kept the wrong secrets
luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said / had i the fiction / i would have said precisely the same thing / but i had no fiction / consider the facts : the dinner was not
good ; could we not have dined up here alone ?
