"Guest" by Valzhyna Mort

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 7, 2018   Guest   Valzhyna Mort

Here, where I'm dying, in a white                                                          house by a blue harbor.                                                                            —Maxim Bakhdanovich Come in, Maxim!... This is Minsk choked under a pillow of clouds. There's you: a statue in a heavy coat. Here all monuments wear coats not wool, but linden bark coats with bee fur collars. In their pockets monuments keep belts. And under collars monuments have necks. In winter shadows insulate the walls. Windows and cracks are plucked with shadows. In museums on display are coats and nooses. And water is pickle-juice. Come in, Maxim, apartment blocks are wrapped in ammunition staircases, and window-medals sparkle in the night. Every building here is a kind of bust, an elevator ascends like vomit. Of furniture there is a stump. Come in, Maxim, it's nothing like lie dying by a harbor. Take a sit on a stump. Don't cast a shadow. Keep the coat on.                Copyright © 2018 Valzhyna Mort. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "Velimir Khlebnikov wrote somewhere that the State speaks to its people through its statues. Minsk is full of statues: gigantic statues to national poets along with the granite busts of communist officials. Maxim Bakhdanovich was a Belarusian modernist poet who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five, a couple of years after his first book was published. He was lucky to die so peacefully. In exactly twenty years most Belarusian intellectuals were tortured and murdered by the communist officials. In one night in 1937, Bolsheviks shot twenty-two young Belarusian writers. The statue of Bakhdanovich in Minsk is 4.6 meters high and is made out of granite." —Valzhyna Mort   Valzhyna Mort is the author of Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). Born in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University.   Photo credit: Tanya Kapitonova Poetry by Mort   Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) "Book of Statues" by Richie Hofmann "Not marble nor the gilded monuments (Sonnet 55)" by William Shakespeare "Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Rainer Maria Rilke May Guest Editor: Matthew Shenoda   Thanks to Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Shenoda and our guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! 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