Two Poems
Irina Mashinski
translated by Maria Bloshteyn
On the Outskirts
The closer to the subway, the noisier and brighter,
the puddles grow wider and shallower,
the streetlamps more pointless
Jupiter rotates swiftly and is hence everchanging,
Saturn, on the other hand, is so light,
give it water, it floats
Poetry fills up drums canisters garbage cans…
Poetry fills up drums canisters garbage cans
lakes bogs artificial reservoirs
ponds up ponds
landslides down slopes
dragging hamlets behind it
from the russet loins
of a volcano
splashes out onto a plateau
or else
a cart with its belly pressed into the ground
its wheels square
rolls
down
a damp forest’s edge
gaining speed
here we go,
here we go,
it’ll be a doozie
the tracks thaw in the sun, walls
shimmer with a tarnished silver la poesie
the word wants to fill itself
and yet it cannot
like a trick glass double-walled
all the way up its throat
Irina Mashinski is a Russian-American poet and essayist, the author of eleven books. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015). Her work has been translated into several languages and has appeared in Poetry International, Plume, The World Literature Today, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. Her first book in English, The Naked World, is forthcoming from MadHat Press in April 2022. Irina Mashinski is online at IrinaMashinski.com.
Maria Bloshteyn came to Canada from Russia when she was nine. She received her PhD from Toronto’s York University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (University of Toronto Press, 2007), the editor of Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War (Smokestack Books, 2020), and a translator of several books of Russian prose. Her articles appeared in scholarly and not-so-scholarly journals and her translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015).