Mantis 19 (Spring 2021)
Multilingualism
Ekaterina Bogert
Californian
Irretrievable time:
Scars translated into charm,
And loneliness crushed by the distant planets.
We will borrow unrepeated times from everyone and everywhere,
Will take our nothingness with us, and share it with no one else,
Tucking it in our sleeves rolled up to deafness of the night,
Eyes emptied by completeness of forever.
Inexhaustible time:
Charm grated into scars.
When my magic disappears from your sight,
We will sit in our chairs and discuss
The materiality of things
And observations of the other people:
Look, some shining Californian
Leaning on a rail and
Entranced by life:
His Lamborghini blossoming in valleys
A little motor humming in his greening heart,
Rings fluttering off his hands
Son
Submerging into sweetness of the afternoon:
Faces fogging up,
Like plankton, swelling in the windows:
The souls are motionless, and any touch - unpleasant,
The rails of my hearing are wrinkled by the rain,
Falling through the undertone
Into the dint of shadows,
Splashes of the sun.
Dissipated Graces sitting in their homes
Hanging in the air, drinking
Sluggish blood of poems
For generalizations, and for saturation.
For pleasure, and for good digestion:
Life for the sake of life,
And dying for repeating -
I am hiding in the thoughtless movements as though naked,
Not hoping anywhere,
Recreating endlessness.
In a moment - in a decade -
In the depth of rains and drowsiness of afternoons
An uninterrupted flow of a child
Is washing me away.
The child climbing me as though a stem,
A twisted stem, up to the throat bud - and up, up, up:
Bud captured by the child’s hand.
Son,
Pinching off the stiffness of the jaw
From the stiffness of the moon,
I softly laid the vines of lovers flesh under your feet
But didn’t say a word about life:
I haven’t learned to talk,
I’m choosing what to say,
I don’t know what to say,
Wrapping up my love to you with quietness:
The scales of my tongue locked up like rainy scales.
Garden
Starving garden:
Fall has cracked, its generosities split open.
I died a thousand years ago,
My corpse enlaced by airless eternity:
Leaking a gloomy shadow,
My stomach knitted by the sun, split open, in a meadow.
And here I am, in present tense,
The new, alive and poor, dense-
Mouthed, with a rusted look, and plans
Divine:
Dragging my imagination with me.
Evening shining with pale nietzche rays,
Warming all the earthly things
The ancient haze
Of the human brain has spied-up and burned away.
All the abysses are curled up by strangers’ flesh and wings,
For me.
Strangers’ quiet nostrils
Breathing air into mysteries,
For me.
Blind, unripe wounds in my chest
Hissing greedily like roses
Stuck behind a fence.
EKATERINA BOGERT is a Russian poet living in the United States, where she moved in 2014 to pursue a master’s degree in Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ekaterina has been writing poetry since a young age, and her first book of poems Youth 1:0 was published in 2019 in Moscow, Russia. Ekaterina lives with her family in California and works at Stanford University. Ekaterina’s poems are influenced by music, visual arts and cinematography.