Katryn Ligachev

The Sound of Coughing

I thought I tempted fate
(burglaries, cancer, true love!)

but no: I just stated a falsehood
(cold soup, rent, mildew)

(Not my) Motherland

windswept, crunched leaves
flickering like eyelids

with your tongue
I'll amputate my troubles

and leave a hot raw cave
into which you pour
(forever on credit)

these foreign names
female names

and in the midst of it all
an ingenious metaphysics
or do I mean "ontology"?

for this is the fascination
(this and the concept of my underwear)
of anonymous, unknown Russia

Hanging

mute women
with their edges snapped off
converging hungrily on the buffet

I get my knives out by the fountain
to drain rivers of sucrose

hanging above the lobby of a fine hotel
are eighteen heavy carcasses

my meat
my meat
my mother

Later, I'll bathe her stamped flank
by the settling stretch of the ocean

CP

Katryn Ligachev doesn't do much other than write. She will get a job when the food runs out.