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This article is taken from PN Review 277, Volume 50 Number 5, May - June 2024.

‘What I Haven’t Written’
Translated, with an afternote, by Sasha Dugdale
Galina Rymbu
poems of love, poems of desire, poems of the first touch.
poems about the real, the geography of freckles on your body
and how our son talks in his sleep and more generally about the dream logic of speech
poems of the real: the plum cherry and how its overripe fruits fall at night on the roof, and we shudder

poems about the Carpathian mountains, and if we lived there, and how one day we will go there again if we can get through the checkpoints on the edge of town, and the way time flows differently (there)
about the house with the fairy lights lit by a generator
about paddling pools filled with green water in the yards in autumn
and how the trams stood in a line, bathed in sunlight on Lychakivska Street

poems about people who chip the Soviet murals and frescoes from walls and yet they carry those strange images and their traces inside them, like tattoos on the mind
poems about tickets to other worlds which still need to be invented, poems

of defence poems of vulnerability
poems about being afraid
to fight and ashamed not to
about the hole in the rucksack where you keep meanings that have come loose.
for you: poems of rage and tenderness. poems of anxiousness, sudden tears, cognitive
bias. the effect of psychotropic drugs and how they create poems

poems that resist the image, that ...


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