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Spring 2015 |

Letters to Sappho

By Anzhelina Polonskaya

Translated from Russian by Andrew Wachtel

I’m writing letters. To you. We spoke about them half the night.
Years pass.
Nerves are shot.
No one can be brought back.

You can scream as much as you want.
Cover the lamp.
You can lean up against a tree trunk
and wait things out.
How much sky and air out there!
But nothing to breathe.

Your inner rain’s soaked everything—
your legs have stuck to your skirt hem.

bare legs, with thin streams of tendons.

Anzhelina Polonskaya
Anzhelina Polonskaya's book, titled A Voice, appeared in the acclaimed Writings from an Unbound Europe series at Northwestern University Press and was shortlisted for the 2005 Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. She has published translations in Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, the Journal, Poetry Daily, AGNI, New England Review, Literary Review, and elsewhere. She works as a poetry editor for Russian Switzerland.    Andrew Wachtel's most recent published books are The Balkans in World History (Oxford UP, 2008) Russian Literature (with Ilya Vinitsky, Polity Press, 2008), and Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2006). He has translated poetry and prose from Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, and Slovenian. Currently he is working on a project relating to cultural nationalism in central Asia, particularly Kyrgyzstan.
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