Poem of the Week selected by David Lawton:
What I felt most strongly coming through in this week's submissions for Poem of the Week, after almost three months of lockdown caused by a pandemic, and a national crisis bringing daily protests, is NEED. The need for comfort, personified in Vanessa Chica’s “Sunday/Monday.” The need for comfort. Both to give and to receive it. Food figures as one of the needs in this piece, and also in SaraEve Fermin's “Ode to Veselka.” It is a need that unites family, and accesses the traditions of their ancestors. Marina Kazakova's Poem of the Week “I Think About Your Hands” celebrates our need for love and beauty. The simplicity of physical beauty made profound in the beauty of art. I hope that they can bring you all comfort, as they did me.
Poem of the Week
Marina Kazakova
I think about your hands
I think about your hands.
Besides your hands,
there is not much else
I like to be preoccupied with.
I have been reinventing them,
I
have become your hands,
they
have become my gestures.
I always wait for them to move somewhere,
nowhere in particular,
just somewhere,
to unsettle my focused imagination.
I try to like them modestly,
but yet each time
I can’t resist to slowly
lie down,
to turn into the piano
under your fingers,
to play the symphonies
heard hardly by anyone
except my pillow and me.
What I think about your hands
is inexpressible—
I think your hands
are letters of love,
are music notes,
are the white swans
of Pyotr Tchaikovsky:
they choreograph over my lake
a never-ending story,
a whirling tsunami of Mars,
a heart-stopping waltz,
particularly, when the strings
enter pianissimo…
Later developing into
staccato-allegro-forte—
your swans are flying over my shoulders
when I carefully trap them
in a kiss.
***
Marina Kazakova is a Russian-born, Belgium-based poet and performer. She was a featured poet at great weather for MEDIA’s Spoken Word Sundays reading series in December 2019.
Honorable Mention
Vanessa Chica
Sunday/Monday
after Claire Lee
Sunday
Number of times I ate or thought about eating: 9
Number of Fat shaming posts I encountered: 6
Number of times I worried about breath: 15
Number of black people killed by police, too many
Black Lives Matter Infinity
Number of times I washed my hands: 12
Number of times I reminded my family to wash their hands: 12
Number of times I thought of the loved ones I can’t visit: 5
Number of times my 7 year old student who would spontaneously hug me throughout the day
sent me messages: 17
Number of times I thought about the death of my father, my friend’s aunt, my co-workers mother, the 18 year old who was starting college next fall and the 5 year old boy from the Bronx: 12
Number of deep breaths I took to fight off anxiety: 60
Number of videos I watched on TikTok to forget: 10
Number of hours I sat in the yard holding rage on my lap: 10
Number of hours I sat in the yard holding gratefulness on my lap: 10
Monday
Number of times I ate or thought about eating: 13
Number of Fat shaming posts I encountered: 12
Number of times I worried about breath: 20
Number of black people killed by police, too fucking many
Black Lives Matter Infinity
Number of times I washed my hands: 14
Number of times I reminded my family to wash their hands: 14
Number of times I thought of the loved ones I can’t visit: 7
Number of times my 7 year old student who would spontaneously hug me throughout the day
sent me messages: 23
Number of times I thought about the death of my father, my friend’s aunt, my co-workers mother, the 18 year old who was starting college next fall and the 5 year old boy from the Bronx: 22
Number of deep breaths I took to fight off anxiety: 240
Number of videos I watched on TikTok to forget: 30
Number of hours I sat in the yard holding gratefulness on my lap: 12
Number of hours I sat in the yard holding gratefulness on my lap: 12
***
Vanessa Chica is an educator, writer, poet, playwright and fat activist, who believes there is strength in vulnerability and is getting stronger everyday.
Honorable Mention
SaraEve Fermin
Ode to Veselka
How even after a full day of baking memories warm into my heart, your instant nostalgia wrapped me in the finery of an Eastern European lineage I know so little of. The skim of grease on my chicken soup, how it tells me this is homemade and in that moment I became a woman hungry for the women in my family, how we don’t talk to each other. Bless the kitchen efficiency, wartime relic, how I know I will come here when my grandmother dies, how close my family has been dancing with death, my whole life. How the Hungary in my lineage will go on to claim so much more than a country, so of course we praise the restaurant. Bless these four walls, sautéed onions and how everyone will leave smelling like the same good belly, no shame in the peasant ingredients. This alchemy we’ve never questioned, only grateful for the fire that softens potatoes and sears fat. Bless the waiter who is too busy to learn my name but not too busy to smile when I say ‘O, it smells like childhood’. Bless my love for remembering all the details—‘Don’t bring up Nick and Nora’ he said. ‘They hate that shit.’ And I smile, of course he does the research, orders the Salted Meat Platter, lets me eat half of his pierogies. Bless the love that remembers all the details.
***
SaraEve Fermin (she/her) is a poet and epilepsy/mental health advocate from New Jersey. Her newest book, Trauma Carnival, was published in March of 2019. Follow her on IG: @saraeve41
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