Venya Gushchin
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Three Poems
sonnet for cincinnatus
my cincinnatus you do not require
sonnets, yet they this one comes as yet
another, caught, the ageold wave and still
sign stiffly panting after signifier,
making a point of without making a dent in
the graphosphere’s arid hills:
i want the air to be a page i want
the air, a film of heat upheld unheld,
to hold my fresh and arbitrary lot
of fragments
vain attempts to freshly tell
a
beach hence the fragments hence the sonnet
comes apart the parking lot the hardest
working eyelids my cincinnatus your
eyes hold the first and whole and first
beneath your lids hence i
supply you only all
that’s secondary
July 23, 2023
latecomers
about the reservoir you make all nouns
obsolete. pronouns became irrelevant shortly before, when
hand took hand took face took hand took neck took lips
took arm took cheek took lips took shoulderblade.
the sleeping dome
obscured still comforts, intoning that the shiftless
resignation to cliche is merely
recognition, the way we recognize
ourselves in other latecomers to the park.
the park is over after all like the need to make
distinctions in the dark, we all limp
behind the end of history. but you
upon abolishing all substance aim next glint in your
eye to add another post-
the lampposts
wink as friends, neighborly lawns gently nudging
ribs: won’t you look at
those two
February 13, 2023
begun on an airplane
a crush is a religious sort of feeling.
the one’s afar, approached and only reached
in arches, contemplation, smoke. indeed,
as reached, the one is promptly dragged to being
both for and in. i sit with my window, feeling
objective, like the poem is not invented,
but comes discovered, its old form slowly
summing to zero in late august. what started
as a thrifting of scholarly robes has pulled
the canopy from our dirty mirror: i am not in
love. keeping time across measure lines, i am
all duty leaving for others the chance to unite
theory with praxis, icon with lips
August 20, 2020
Venya Gushchin is a poet, translator, and PhD Candidate in Slavic Languages & Literatures at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on the late styles of Russian Modernist poets. His translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Elizaveta Mnatasakanova have received the Columbia University Slavic Department Pushkin Prize. Blockade Swallow, selected poems by Olga Berggolts translated by Gushchin, appeared from Smokestack Books in 2022. Most recently, his translation of Yevsey Tseytlin’s Rereading Silence was published by Bagriy & Company. His writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Full Stop, Jacket2, Impostor, and elsewhere.