silvasque tenent delphines

an orchard of my sentences i sowed

for you admitted spring in august, budding

long after you had gone and coming so

ungainly that i dropped my pen a sudden

twitch i had lost my right. you laughed your palm

to chin my chin to palm when

night there was nothing left to whisper on

the ear and now the poem can begin

to flood syntagmas maples turning branches

and palm hip indistinguishable from

you dolphin you slipping trunks or

my fingers, and sheets and blot and come

undone as we have beaches briefly sober

enough let’s start the world crossing over

August 28, 2020

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Venya Gushchin is a poet, literary translator, and PhD Candidate at Columbia University, writing a dissertation on the late styles of Russian modernist poets. His translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Elizaveta Mnatasakanova have received the Columbia University Slavic Department Pushkin Prize. Blockade Swallow, selected poems by Olga Berggolts translated by Gushchin, appeared from Smokestack Books in 2022. Most recently, his translation of Yevsey Tseytlin’s Rereading Silence was published by Bagriy & Company. His writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Impostor, KinoKultura, Jacket2, and elsewhere.