Veteran Sleeper
Rent from DeepDyve- Veteran Sleeper
we finish the story, turn off the lightsI lie on my back, arms pressed like leavesa corpse poseI listen to him tossing heavily, settlingdown; his nostrils whistle, he lets outwhat sounds like a sob
cut off from him, I'm not alloweda breath too louda sigh too sharpif I do move, no sheet may shiftno strand of the wiry dnamay spring to life
back from the Great Patriotic Warhe still forgets he's alivehis heart is an icicle, all he wantsis to diagram bullet paths, his mindpuzzling overthe missing lines
in the North, where he was deployedthey huddled together for warmthate snowboys whose chopped-off limbshe'd stuff back into their uniformsstiffened up by blood [End Page 69]
still as a corpse, my small child's bodycrosses no boundaryposes no demandinert, like a sheet of ice, motionless so that youdon't take me for someone else, don'tstrike me down [End Page 70]
Oksana Maksymchuk writes and translates poetry. Her writing appears in Words Without Borders, Poetry International, Modern Poetry in Translation, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Orleans Review, Salamander, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She won first place in the Richmond Lattimore and Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions. Most recently, she co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, a NEH-winning anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2017). Maksymchuk teaches philosophy at the University of Arkansas.
