Dinara Rasuleva questions received notions of home and national identity in this poem about her relationship to Russia.

The most horrible things, remember this, are incremental.

before their paths divided, they formed, together, three glints of light and shadow moving on at last

O, it is a defeated god, approaching the dusk of time.

Not as a multitude, but as one.

nothing is certain but and taxes

Soon the volunteers will arrive

The dead don't let us go, I say to my friend Sirius, putting my father's letters in a drawer.

“She was hot, your aunt Carmen, / she didn’t look Chinese.”

My eyes fill with rowboats

I have licked the tip of evil

In Germany the statue of Marx is playing chess with the family doctor

water boils up from grouped stones, grips me.

At light of dawn I rise and make fire, / and dry in nascent fire-gleam the space where dew once pearled.

a dark stillness / goes about sowing death.

I alone / plunge my roots / and outstretch my branches.

I practiced the art of clairvoyance, / became a sorceress, a witch, a woman

I ask myself / if mother's ban / against confessing / . . . is still in place

They’re as naked as the day they were born

The wisdom gathered from those wanderings is far deeper / Than that of ancient Greece

somewhere in between the promise and the certainty of rain / the bounds of things / —all things, including you— / are blurred

take custody of my mouth

the window frames have become national borders, the doorknob a border guard.

Inert stone, atomic, / nuclear before life.

In point of fact, Lisbon was not waiting there [to greet us.

The Esplanada, thick with the scent of fragrant [DDT

The music played / on Apollo 11, it turned out, was “Georgia / On My Mind,” sung by Ray Charles.

I write to you from the red zone.

Words Without Borders is leaning into poetry's ability to fill the void of isolation.

”Amnesia shrouds a generation.”

the poem is riding a bicycle; / trembling and in haste.

I swallowed fire / And forgot you were an ocean.

Flowers will slip from a torn veil.

When a man cries / he floods himself in salt tears / and colorfast he drowns

What does he have to fear?

I proceeded with caution / Like a marble inching toward the line

silence sullen-faced fate reaches my ears

Three or four days / he hangs out in our house.

How does one grasp making / sense of timing when to hurl and when to catch?

Like a fish / in an aquarium, you are a source of distress and distraction.

In the mind, a flock of birds, feathers from an unshakable, shadowy thing.

What / are the things we need to prepare?

Upsidedownistan here.

I don’t understand how we walk around the world / ​as if there were a single way for each of us

On waking, I see my body has been rearranged.

it’s awful of me to interrupt, but I just / need you to understand how certain kinds of wounds can be useful.

There's no cloth hawker in the bazaar / willing to make dirty deals

On a mattress / amidst an armful of hair / a beautiful woman tosses and turns

Their wailing won’t let me sleep, won’t let me sleep . . .

my body, / like a spoon, here on this earth, sweetly scoops out / my brain.

right in the center, / sat the completely empty dharma throne, / richly decorated, the heart’s dream waiting / like a balloon floating through desire

I see your unfamiliar riverbank / and walk toward you.

I dare not use mortal eyes to contemplate you

If I had a spare season, I would’ve rushed to whisper vulgar words

Death is colder than a cup of water on my body, and/ Fonder to me than sand

Its scent is like infirmity, / This soul

my pact with hope is evergreen: / immense this green that makes a heart.

and now my eyes are knives slicing the night to / split the mist

She tattoos the wavering future / on the bare skinned wall.

Tell the sad stories to the sky.