A Big Mug of Awesome Tea

Lemon balm from the Carpathian Mountains.
She steeped it on her Odesa balcony, letting the tea
breathe its small fragrance on her chin.

Then the air raid siren tore through the air. She said, Shoo!
and carried the tea into the back of her apartment.
There, she would edit her syllabi. The spring semester

began on Monday, rain or shine. That night, it was both.
Metal ricocheting and maniacal lightning.
An antediluvian insect digging from above.

Later, she knew, she would put her tea rescue
on display, in pixels her friends could sip at home.
Later yet, she would regret her posturing.

War was a quiz humanity had to take
over and over. She was either learning or not.
She rinsed out her cup, put in earplugs, and went to bed.

Lunardo’s Roses

A pearlescent petal crush called, in Arabic,
“Fish lips.” My friend told me about his Lattakia,
on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Roses on every street.

By the footbridge, overlooking the university,
Lunardo stood with his boyfriend, flirting.
You could still speak a common language with the world.

When war began, roses dissipated. His boyfriend, now,
an officer in Bashar’s army. Lunardo fled. ISIS murdered
both of his brothers. He escaped, again. Northeast Philadelphia’s

scarred brick was no refuge for tender gay men.
Ten miles east, at the Morris Arboretum, we strolled
when a plant trilled pinkly: Me! Lunardo translated:

Lips of fish. Mahogany Damascus roses
pleaded pleasure in the afternoon light. Are you
here, too? woofed the flower-shaped puppies

we knew nothing about. White ramblers dictated
anise to the air. Orange whiskers undulated
on roselings called Dancing in the Wind.

Lunardo stood kingly, smiled at the prodigals,
as though each flower were a small loudspeaker
as though his new country was ready to listen—

Tango With Agnes

I dance before our lord, the sink,
sponge off to fast smoothness, Earth to Agnes,
my grandmother-in-love from Texas.
When my husband and I moved in together,
she gave us her Corelle. Its indestructible mirrors
shocked my immigrant heart.

Agnes, your plates – these virtual reality goggles –
showed the Gulf of Mexico, where I’d never
been. Fast-forward to fast water, your husband
surfing with the small black terrier, smiling
on the board, black-and-white. Life, running.
When I walked up to you, you could not see, but

I said my name; you slowly smiled: Honey.
I thought this America shareable, stored
in your female hips, and mine, but I could not
even share how happy I was with my parents,
darkened as they were by history.
Lightened as they were by Soviet humor.

But you know I Corelled them towards me.
O Agnes, my apron of bubbles.
How I love your grandkid, our home. I was
and remain your faithful frisbee, a plate
launched by the Texan god
into a wonderfully rounded life.

And everything was forever, until you and I
sat at the old folks’ home, your birdlike hand
warmed by mine under your white Afghan.
I said I was expecting a baby.
You said Honey… and the golden plate in the sky
began to set on your rising smile.

Mayapple

Some words plant wildness in the mind.
Beardtongue lolls, huge-jawed,
beckoning. Its pal, Mayapple, flirts.
But in my immigrant mouth
any miracle turns to ragwort.

I am late to your naming party, Mayapple.
In May, my great-greats planted beets.
The syllables are donated, like the wool
sweater, my fourteenth spring,
stained with a strange, perfumed sweat –

I am in a relationship
with somebody else’s dead.
O, to know ladybird beyond the nickname
of President Johnson’s wife!
My Colorado-raised love

wants to know, too. He plugs our care
into the search engine. Together, we glide
after the word’s Scottish, Southern roots.
It bobs, glowing, in our mouths like toothpaste.
Ladybugs protect crops, get fat on pests. Farmers

pray to Virgin Mary–that Lady in the sky–
to defend their life’s work.
Ladybirds arrive in the shared room
of our heads, weighty as any avian life,
orbiting my darling’s tall warmth.

O, to love you, Ladybird, to pass
as anyone who only wanted to pet
leaves and fur with phonemes
bequeathed by strangers blowing raspberries –
May-ap-p-le! – three hundred years ago.

Olga Livshin’s work is recently published in POETRY magazine, the New York Times, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, and other journals. She is the author of the poetry collection A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (2019). Livshin co-translated Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and A Man Only Needs a Room by Vladimir Gandelsman (New Meridian Arts, 2022). As a consulting poetry editor for Mukoli: A Journal for Peace, she reviews poetry from conflict-affected communities across the world, with a focus on Eastern Europe.

Image: Matt Lavin, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons