Pure Poetry

by Oksana Maksymchuk

From an ever-greater distance
I begin to see
what seemed obvious
and thus, not worth mentioning

What formal paucity
caused me to weed
around words and phrases
I dreamt essential?

What orphic urges pushed me
into creating formulae
for all
that I most desired?

Training my soul
to consume
only the rarest of things
beyond the divided line

I barely divined
their materials:
fine mortal tears
raw, wounded matter

Angry, unsatisfied
I ask: what has this diet of
purity and abstention
done for me?

Are the sounds uttered
by a head severed
in sacred violence
thereby sweeter?

Are the stanzas clearer
for the absence of
blood, semen, phlegm—
betrayed as hints, as traces?

Now that the muse
is upon me, how do I take
the measure of business
so unmistakably human?

Vanya killed Dima over
the spoils of war: a Bosch
washing machine, a Gaggia
coffee maker

in the kitchen of women
they executed and left out
in the front yard
like spent equipment

Must we write a poem
about this, o Muse? How
do we even begin? Аnd
once begun, how to—

can you?—
go on, etc.

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, forthcoming with University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian. Her poems appeared in AGNI, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, The Poetry Review, and many other journals. She co-edited an anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and co-translated several poetry collections. She is a recipient of the National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, and other honors. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas.

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