Reading Russian Poetry with Grandmother 

‍I can remember hours with Eugene
Onegin next to you. That summer's brows
hot in a blue Ushanka hat had been
glaring us all that week into the house.
I called salt-veined Eugene a prima donna. You knew. Much as you understood Tatyana growing roots into pain at what was not
and would have been. We cried till I forgot your cringing at Tsvetaeva's twisting lasso around the heavens' neck, and Voznesenski painting in blotchy grammar like Picasso.
We sat and read till Eugene murdered Lenski, and the book slipped out of your sweating hand for reasons only now I understand. 

‍To a Girl after the Psychosis Ends 

‍Wait, wait, Tamara. Please don't disappear. Come back and lie with me in Rock Creek Park. I'll tuck a yellow leaf behind your ear
and we'll watch white clouds slowing into dark. You were not real. But did you want to be?
We can pretend. We played on Laurel View. You danced beside me in the Baltic Sea
whose waves were even choppier than you.
We made such plans between the earth and sky. Our legs were tangled on the air. We were
two knotted stalks of world. I am as sure
as your hair's red. Come back, Tamara. Lie beside me, to me. Till the sun burns blue,
I don't want to forget this kind of true. 

Published 5th March, 2025.

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A. Z. Foreman is a poet and translator pursuing a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His work has appeared in sundry publications including ANMLY, The Los Angeles Review, Asymptote and Metamorphoses as well as anthologies like the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, "A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba" (Saqi Books) and "Before the Cameras Leave Ukraine" (BlackSpring Press). His translation of Saint John of the Cross' "Dark Night of the Soul" has been reprinted widely and set to music by Christopher Marshall. Most importantly, if you have a dog he'd love to pet it.