Singer by Valzhyna Mort

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend April 16, 2014   Singer   Valzhyna Mort

A yoke of honey in a glass of cooling milk. Bats playful like butterflies on power lines. In all your stories blood hangs like braids   of drying onions. Our village is so small, it doesn’t have its own graveyard. Our souls, are sapped in sour water of the bogs.   Men die in wars, their bodies their graves. And women burn in fire. When midsummer brings thunderstorms, we cannot sleep   because our house is a wooden sieve, and crescent lightning cut off our hair. The bogs ablaze, we sit all night in fear.   I always thought that your old trophy Singer would hurry us away on its arched back. I thought we’d hold on to its mane of threads   from loosened spools along Arabic spine, same threads that were sown into my skirts, my underthings, first bras. What smell   came from those threads you had so long, sown in, pulled out, sown back into the clothes that held together men who’d fall apart   undressed. Same threads between my legs! I lash them, and the Singer gallops!    And sky hangs only the lightning’s thread. Like in that poem: on Berlin’s Jaegerstrasse Arian whores are wearing shirts ripped off sliced chests of our girls. My Singer-Horsey,   why everything has to be like that poem?              Copyright © 2014 by Valzhyna Mort. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Soviet soldiers brought Singers en mass from Germany during World War II. These sewing machines were so popular as trophies that today most Eastern Europeans, including myself, still hold on to the conviction that Singer is a German company. My mother’s uncle got our family’s Singer from emptied German quarters in Minsk at the end of the war.” —Valzhyna Mort   Valzhyna Mort’s most recent collection of poems is Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). Born in Minsk, Belarus, she lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches as a visiting professor at Cornell University. Most Recent Book by Mort   Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) "Artificer" by Czeslaw Milosz "Wave" by David Keplinger "William Dawes" by Eileen Myles Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit poets.org   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038