Summer 2023 | Poetry
olga mikolaivna
enter for memory &
fractures / fragments / fractals
a lack.
what, then, is placed in the space made available by lack?
to attain recollections, to move backwards in supposed time.
where there was once a tomb, flowers sprout. mausoleum dedicated to a passing futurity. a
hoary definition.
tomb.
tomb.
tomb.
tombochka in russian means a shelf, or a chest of drawers.
packed away.
an erasure.
in soviet movies depicting world war II, in the throes of horrors and heroes of red army war produces, a scene takes place in a subway stations. of people haunted, haunched bodies. shawls through air strikes. safety of the underground.
succumbing to destiny.
fred moten: “the line is broken; the passage is overtaken; becomes a detour; it is again as
glissant says, unknown; it bears a non-violent, unavoidably violent overturning, a
contraptual swerve, a voluntary
submergence way on the outskirts of assent,
it performs a rhizomatic voluntarily, roots,
escaping from themselves without schedule
into the outer depth.”
waiting becomes an absence.
and the train isn’t arriving.
no timetables anymore.
no schedules to follow.
a pause, a laceration —
utterance
murmur
an utterance: disappearance into air
murmur: a piece of sound echoing
murmur: a soft, smoky essence.
fred moten: “discovery troubles things. his
murmurs bury things to uncover them. he
makes things prettier.”
an utterance: “ a continuous piece of speech, often beginning and ending with a clear pause.”
i utter.
not the void. the air. holding speech. the utterance in air. bouncing, percussion off tree tops into thin air. thin air. thin air.
thick air / thin air. speech falters into air. my words stretch out into air. silly and cautiously. my words. my words.
i attempt to make sense with words.
deformity of place. a deformity of expectation. formless, a void.
to deform — extend familiarity onto the unfamiliar, the strange, forlorn, and foreign.
formerly projects, former projects. words on a page. [return to —> when life turns into projects. when projects turn into life, and the inextricable chaffing of the two in unison, an untidy process, left unsaid.)
a meandering, a twisted traillll.
TRIAL.
to return.
to return to the underworld, to return to a borderless state, against progress;
the return. a winding back. going down to the river. an embankment.
a detour.
Originally from Kyiv, olga works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. Her work is surrounded by, and surrounds, memory, dream spaces, inheritance, (dis)place, and the construction of language. She cofounded and co-curated desuetude press and her first chapbook cities as fathers is available through Tilted House. She is currently getting her MFA in creative writing at UC San Diego.
olga recommends : The Autobiography of Language by Mirene Arsanios, Dead Winter by Matvei Yankalevich, Of Being Numerous by George Openn