When the World Stopped Touching
May 4, 2020
Dear Luisa,
Cut me, my son asks, every time
he sees a big knife in my hand,
It'll hurt, is my way to deter him,
but he just asks harder, Please, Please,
nu pazhalusta, I want you to. Should I be
worried, Luisa, pain as welcome
as pleasure? The other day,
he fell off his bike, cried out,
I'm bleeding, and when there was
no blood, he found broken glass
to dig into his palm, See, he pointed, I am.
It's not just sharp things, Luisa.
Anything acute will do, Is it hot? He asks
about sweet mandarin tea, boiling
pasta water, the buttered skillet or blue
inside of flame. He doesn't
wait for answers, reaches out
to touch what he knows
will hurt him. Is touch
inherited, Luisa? It must be.
His want no different
from Babushka’s resistance
to doctors' hands, her sciatic pain
bad enough, she can’t get up
some days, and still refuses
massage or pills, lives inside
a willing ache and says, It’s not
so bad. No different from the part
of me that longs again to be split
by childbirth, to feel my body
come apart, like when his father’s
hands noose my neck and I ask,
Do it harder. Please, Please, I want you to.
May 5, 2020
Dear Julia,
My son has no fear
of pain or death
he hurls his body off
the top of the staircase
arms out like wings
30-pound body propelling
into the air like a feather,
his bones that of a little bird
just learning to fly
before he crashed into the wood
floor so hard I thought I’d have
to take him to the emergency room
his mouth doing that thing
that mouths do when they are
in so much pain they cannot emit
sound only the shape of sound
and yet eventually the wind
came back into his lungs
and he screamed what I imagine
the same sound of Icarus when he too
realized his body was made
for falling. My husband
holding him like a baby finch
that tumbled out of its nest
it’s not broken, just bruised
May 7, 2020
Dear Luisa,
My husband wants me to stop
asking how he's feeling, startled
by his every groan or crack
or heavy sigh, Stop asking
what's wrong, you know
what's wrong, he says.
And I do Luisa, to list
the ailments would take
too many lines and far
too much worry I promised him
I'd try to quell. But aren't we
made of it, Luisa? Worry
passed down from my mother
who I call more times a day
then I have children, every
morning and every night, no matter
the hour or else she assumes
something terrible has happened.
In her mind, it’s always terrible
until my voice reassures her
I'm still here. Worry, burned,
inherited in flesh: my lips
and wrists, my collarbone, the backs
of my knees, under my breasts,
volcano, he calls my body,
loving and fearing it
at once, worried I will burn
him too. He was coughing
the way a fire starts, smoke
rising from the basement,
the sound of his chest, his throat
tearing open like the gut of fish
or the belly of a hunted doe.
I crept downstairs, silent, until
the coughing stopped.
I snuck back up to bed, not asking
a single question, but wondering
if after ten years of marriage, a life-
time of unspoken worry
is something we can bear.
May 20, 2020
Dear Julia,
My great grandmother
Vera had a lily-white braid
and a pink peony bush
that bloomed in front of her apartment.
These are the only real memories I have
of her and I have been uprooted
for the 9th time this decade
moved to a house with a pink peony bush
in the yard. My history is told
by women standing in front of peonies
balled up tight like a fist
until they rupture
body torn open
in the sun.
May 23, 2020
Dear Luisa,
I've been thinking back
to that time we shared
vareniki, campot, and those rye
toasts, each with a different
smoked fish from a lost part
of a childhood neither of us
really recall. Remember how
we counted abortions, compared
whose ancestors had gotten more
and why, as though they needed us
to justify a past that asks
for no forgiveness. You and I
are only-children by choice
or circumstance. I've felt
nauseous for days now,
so this morning, I bought
the only milk gallon left
and a two-pack pregnancy test.
Life wants to grow, Luisa,
despite itself. My husband's body
broken everywhere
besides this. The president said,
if abortion clinics can stay
open, houses of worship
should open too. Faith,
its own unforgiving scalpel.
I already found the closest
clinic. Already read about
the ways it can be done.
We try to write a tomorrow
different from our parents',
but the page is sand on the banks
of our red or black or dead
seas, and no matter our marks,
water or wind returns it, always,
to blank sand. So when
no blue line appeared,
I called my mother. I told her
how much I want to be near
a body of water stronger
than history, told her,
how much I miss her arms.
June 28, 2020
Dear Julia,
Today I drove for an hour completely by myself
listening to Alla Pugacheva sing one million roses
turning the volume up so loud that it hurts but
I’d rather be buried in a pit of roses
than soil, this is the nightmare I’ve had for years,
my great grandmother’s face in the moonlight
digging myself into a depth that I cannot
undo. She used her own hands as shovels
and this is a detail that is unconfirmed
but I’ve seen it so many times
at night, nails full of dirt. This is a glimmer
of an attack. If you stop paying attention
you will miss it and Julia, I have tried so hard
to stop paying attention
so that I can live and yet
I am smelling dead
flowers everywhere,
here in this car
driving from horror into horror
memory into body
unable to go back.
Note: Poets Luisa Muradyan and Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach came to the United States as Jewish refugees in the early 1990s; descend from Holocaust survivors; and are raising young children themselves. They have been sending each other poems (structured as letters) as a way to process the overwhelming experience of parenting, writing, and existing in the unprecedented time of pandemic. These letters are a part of their in-progress book-length collection, When the World Stopped Touching.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019); Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2022. Her recent poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Julia is the editor of Construction Magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philly with her two kids, two cats, one dog, and one husband.
Luisa Muradyan is originally from the Ukraine and holds a Ph.D. in Poetry from the University of Houston where she was the recipient of an Inprint Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Fellowship and a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship. She is the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press) and was the Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from 2016-2018. She was also the recipient of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the 2016 Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. Additionally, Muradyan is a member of the Cheburashka Collective, a group of women and non-binary writers from the former Soviet Union. Previous poems have appeared in Poetry International, the Los Angeles Review, West Branch, Blackbird, and Ninth Letter among others.