(This poem originally appeared in Chronogram Magazine and appears with kind permission from the author)

Dreaming Odesa

I summon the Black Sea breathing gruffly liked a caged animal,
an old-world dame clad in black night gasping for air,
cinched across the waist by the Lanzheron Beach with blinding white stairs.
I summon Atlantis holding up the globe on Gogol Street.
It is tender blue speckled with little yellow stars,
the colors intoning, thirty years before the War, that “все буде Укра—на.” 1
I’m eating apricot ice cream by a tasteless monument
to a lion tearing apart flesh for his young.
Every hour in the park, the booming radio deafens me
in a plea not to forget a war such as not even my mother had witnessed.
Yet this fear is exhilarating, like light
that changes a room when you least expect it.
How the Cathedral Square seems to blossom at night,
the night which swoops down on us from chestnut trees
like a strange bird: enormous, delicate, glistening.
Sometimes old women peer at me from courtyards
lined with chestnut trees. They chuck shells
from sunflower seeds while they mutter old spells under their breath.
So much of my childhood seemed to take flight
in passageways, doors, tunnels to another world.
Everything was foreign, everything was familiar.
For many years I’d watch the scaffolding go up
on a building across from Cathedral Square.
When we left for the States it was still in shambles.

II.
With his missing fingers and World War II ID,
my grandfather would break through long quays
to buy milk with tiny yellow papers that passed for money.
I remember how packs of butter would just say “butter”
and bread was “bread,” a Platonic ideal without variety,
though the three-kopeck roll was an ochre shriveled ball
like an old woman’s hand while the nine-kopeck one
was glowing red and speckled with poppy seeds.
When I devoured a treat of coffee and milk
compressed into a brick, the sweet milky taste
combined with bitterness as if to distill
something essential about my Soviet childhood.

III.
I taste Odesa, the tiny crawfish wrapped in newspaper,
the fire-baked potatoes at our dacha,
the parasitic snails my friend’s husband would fry and grind to a paste,
the forbidden pierozhki my grandfather bought me in secret,
the hot bread I tore into pieces and ate on the bridge
as I rushed off somewhere with a friend long gone, the sweet cherries
she brought all dangling in a chain
I had to undo with my mouth open
trying to catch the wonder, the promise,
my face colored vermillion from the effort,
the pits thrown carelessly on the ground
the shadows from the heavy bridge ornaments
buoyant in summer light
just like our sprint through the city
before we knew my family would leave the country
that my friend would die twenty-one years later
that the warm wind coursing through Odesa
would still to a halt, like the ethereal dust mites
flickering in the summer light that makes up childhood.

—Natalya Sukhonos

1 “Everything will be Ukraine,” a phrase attributed to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on September 30, 2022Journey through Ladoga