by HALYNA KRUK
a woman with a heart this heavy cannot fly
like a leaf held to asphalt by a rock
like a page from a book disassembled into quotes. . .
a few minutes for meetings, a few snatched words for introductions
her eyes wide open like the door to her parents’ house
where all her childhood memories are kept in an old marshmallow tin
she says, “if not him, then no one will get them. . .”
the black butterfly of despair, the sharp smell of ether
who will revive her, return her to her passport photo
who will hold her thin, sobbing shoulders
the air raid siren lifts city birds into the air
but that heaviest thing in her doesn’t allow for flight
translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ali Kinsella
From Issue 12
HALYNA KRUK is an award-winning author of five books of poetry in addition to her prose. Her translators for Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024) were awarded a NEA grant and her previous book, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, was a 2024 Griffin Prize finalist. She lives and works in Lviv, Ukraine.
DZVINIA ORLOWSKY’S co-translations with Ali Kinsella include Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope & Sorrow, a 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize finalist and 2022 AAUS Translation Prize winner, and Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living, for which they received a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship. Orlowsky’s newest poetry collection, Those Absences Now Closest, was published in 2024.
ALI KINSELLA’S co-translation with Dzvinia Orlowsky from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s poems, Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow (Lost Horse Press, 2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. They were awarded an NEA fellowship for their recent volume of Halyna Kruk’s poetry in translation, Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024). She won the 2019 Kovaliv Fund Prize for her translation of Taras Prokhasko’s Anna’s Other Days and a 2021 Peterson Literary Fund grant to translate Vasyl Makhno’s Eternal Calendar. She co-edited Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022), an anthology of short fiction to support Ukrainians during the war.