Poison (Villanelle)

Is her absence poison?
Does it infect your daily routine?
Who, besides yourself, has she chosen?

Could a chemical cure infatuation?
Is sleep the remedy to her love’s morphine?
Is her absence poison?

Who is to blame when it is over and done?
And you question why the she lit the gasoline?
Who, besides yourself, has she chosen?

Have you had enough of memories and maudlin?
Do you wish to return to the clean and pristine?
Is her absence poison?

Can you bear another face to be her foundation?
Does it pain you her heart is calm and serene?
Who, besides yourself, has she chosen?

Can you eat her soul until it is hidden?
Will you bury the thought of it till it’s unseen?
Is her absence poison?
Who, besides yourself, has she chosen?

Persistence of the Russian Church

Throughout Russia’s turbulent history, rampant with revolution and turmoil, the major cities retained their identities as cultural powerhouses under the shadow of religious persecution. The current capital, Moscow, still to this day remains a popular destination and icon of Russian history. According to Sidney Monas in St. Petersburg and Moscow as Cultural Symbols, “Moscow as a cultural symbol is the ideological home of the Slavophiles. It is linked to the past.” The city always maintained a smaller population than St. Petersburg, only surpassing it in recent years. The cost of living in a city such as Moscow was not as great as in St. Petersburg which contained a large population of soldiers and civil servants. “For the golden age of the Russian novel, Moscow, in this properly literary sense, is not a city at all. St. Petersburg is the only real city…Moscow, on the other hand, remains, like the countryside, a family locale.”

The city which would later be known as Leningrad acquired a foreign identity and took on a European aspect onto its reputation. The infrastructures and air of St. Petersburg appealed the most to Westerners although the climate propagates and exacerbates illnesses that would come to be romanticized through literature and film. Tuberculosis and cancer would make their way into fiction while Moscow’s bout of cholera would be forgotten in time. In fact, the image of St. Petersburg is famously portrayed at the hand of many renowned and respected writers. Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, wrote extensively about the landscape in “The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale.” Nikolai Gogol’s magical realist views also gave us a harrowing and outrageous look into St. Petersburg’s cultural flavor. This identity would permeate into the Communist regime under the writers who lived in the difficult time of censorship and fear.

To Rust

To what we couldn’t admit
So clever, sophic, deliberate
We weren’t
Our ascetic plans, cannot commit
Because we’re doomed and we know it
Still we won’t quit
Fire’s lit.
Anyone in love becomes a poet

Tell me what makes you tick
The absolute, honest, authentic
Don’t think,
That lonely trust makes us sick
Weakness makes us pessimistic
Seems aphotic
Cynic
We will just pretend to hear your music.

Even at our clearest
We confront, calcitrate, and witnessed
Needless
Tempting bait at all and any cost
No more precaution to exhaust
A line we crossed
Uncrossed
Let the now be in vain, decay and rust.