I like her surroundings, the gingerbread, sugar and all the halvah,
All and all manner of halvah that’s exuding praise,
When she’s in the corner and weighing out the goods.
Her fingers take tangerines by the sides, the freight
Of greenish, stepped-on, sweetly moaning pears – by the neck,
She loads the dark flesh of eggplant into the white
Flesh of rustling plastic; and the price list is born.
While the persimmon is like a mother to her, and she doesn’t look at it
And feels shame for her public profession.
I ask her a question, and she doesn’t give an answer.
I drop by like a thief, and she won’t restrain the thief.
Her weak, her cheap labor force
Is all gathered in her arms and won’t tolerate conversation.
Her father and everyone’s will descend upon us like an avalanche,
The moment she doesn’t turn out to be a virgin.
Her father and everyone’s, the elder guide,
Head doctor of an empty mountain hospital,
Where someone’s ribs, like the mother’s womb, are stretched
And fear pulls apart eyelashes that were squeezed flat.
Her father and everyone’s, he’s coming after his daughter,
Along the dark route he stretches by day and by night,
Like a stripe of fug on a train car’s walls.
When his armies make their way into the city,
And stick like a bone in the throat by Red Square,
And go along ambulance roads, easing their hunger,
Taking the fox-fur coats off the homespun poor,
We’ll wait for them beneath the mound,
Where Yulia the manager swore at her today.
[Maria Stepanova {1972- } 'Aida', from Vozdukh, 3, 2010 - trans. from the Russian by Sibelan Forrester]
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