Read More: A Q&A with Elina Petrova
Peace Lilies
not lilies quite.
My garden angel
guarded them
forty days
since your mother’s
celebration of life
till eight
flame-shaped leaves
became flowers – unscrolled
white sheathes
showing wicks
of spadices in a Roman urn
from Overstock.
I’m not a symbolist. An egret
is not a messenger, and lilies
don’t bring peace
or at least console.
But what’s given in days of loss
is worth watering.
You said he was a redhead
when he served in Vietnam —
your estranged cousin who left
these potted lilies in the sanctuary.
If not for such silent gestures,
that day in a crowded church
would’ve been lonely.
Even lonelier than my mother’s
funeral in Ukraine
when first snow powdered
an alley of granite monuments
and, walking behind me, poets
talked eloquently about
something I can’t recall,
as the angle of tombstone angels
I was passing
tilted
in a white dimension of endurance.
I would’ve collapsed if not
for the touch at my elbow –
a mitten of my childhood friend
I had forgotten through years
of her night work-shifts
when she handed
the headlamps and safety kits to coalminers.
She was with me again.
It was snowing. She was with me
in the white dimension I recall
as I water the peace lilies.
A Slice of Bread
You haven’t talked to me for thirteen years since
I blew out the candle of your last night on the earth —
let your pain leave. Last months on morphine
when we dwelled within the half-lucid, half-psychic
ward of your dreams, I still hoped, chopped onions
for sour-creamed tomatoes and my twelve-ingredient
borsht, pressed your sheets, waited for a chopper
to Kiev and, from there, for a military plane from DC
that would take you to the Bethesda Institute of Health.
Those were days of the Orange Revolution, when
more polished liars succeeded cruder ones. For two
years of our descending the staircase of cancer,
our phone rang only with calls from a former Kremlin
colonel (deserted to Maryland) who promised to help
us with a medical visa. He was not in his right mind,
but I didn’t know how to discern. We waited as,
attached to me, he sent us responses to analyses
from DARPA, and we believed they were as real
as the Americans who strolled along Khreshchatyk.
One drizzly evening, when you lay — skinny
in a cotton nightdress — amidst crosswords you
fully solved even with a metastasized brain,
you had no appetite for anything and asked me
for a snack you might still enjoy. I went to
the kitchen to dry my eyes, cut a slice of white bread
and spread butter on it with the thought that I would
have died for you in any cruel way if that could help
and that I loved you even if you never taught me
how to express it. I spread butter, choking
on the unsaid, and brought it to you casually.
It has been thirteen years since then, but I can’t
forget how you ate it and said, “This bread
is exceptional. I never tried one tastier.
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Waltz
After your birthday dinner, you said life Subscribers can read the full version by logging in.
didn’t turn out the way you wanted.
Then, who wanted the way it turned out?
If no one, why did it turn out that way?
I wanted a son, summers in a fishermen’s
village, and an endless book where seagulls
would dispute the catch of memories
until silence dims the coral ashes of a shore
and other planets rise — with methane rivers
that cleave their blue craggy surfaces
and geyser vapors that form into frozen particles
the size of our house, rotate on a carousel
of orbital rings, gravitational ripples.
At night I hear not only cicadas and alarms
from distant parking lots, but the silence
whose interpreting is my gift on Earth.
I enter it — a swimmer, who used to long
for a lonely blue lap, a lover who’s learned
thousands of paths to almost unsharable joy,
quiet ratios of musica universalis. […]
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Until 2007 Elina Petrova lived in Ukraine and worked in engineering management. Currently she assists in a Houston law firm. After her debut book in Russian, Elina published two poetry books in English: Aching Miracle, 2015, and Desert Candles, 2019. Elina’s poems have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Texas Review, Chicago Quarterly Review,North Dakota Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, Porter House Review, California Quarterly; anthologies by presses of Sul Ross State University, Lamar University and elsewhere. A film presenting her poem at the 2023 Miami Chroma Film Festival won in the category Best Cinematic Poetry.
“Peace Lilies,” “A Slice of Bread,” and “Waltz” originally appeared in The Notre Dame Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, and Porter House Review, respectively.
Read More: A Q&A with Elina Petrova