Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Vasyl Makhno - SOLA MUJER*

Translated from the Ukrainian by Orest Popovych

They are - musicians, a soccer team
heavy bracelets - rings - Che Guevara t-shirts
their music a ballad - shalalala
while she has lipstick smooched off her lips
and a tattoo snaking on her shoulder

They play the hits of new compositions:
saxophone, trombone, their sounds - like mosquitos
she senses with the body of a female
the stare hooked upon the stocking on her calf
like a crow's claw

she joined them only recently
ordered coffee - and was caught unaware by nightfall
she seized upon the rain - like a knife -
and the guitarist - seized the music that appeared in his dream
with the strings of her legs

behind her are studies in the capital - three years
parents who once discovered Marxism
shadowy affairs bright paths - you're a student
white tile warm jacuzzi:
Simon Bolivar, Lenin and Stalin

the dumbbells smell of wine and coffee
a song with vile words and motif
she opened her tail like a royal peahen
but amidst love sex and play
a condom just in case

she picked up the motif like a feather
she was picked up by a real war
dilated nostrils - the whiff of cocaine
for the revolution in the south of the country
for the stench of cow manure

for the fact that life - it's love and percentages
for the fact that she's still forty - and not fifty
catching ultrashort waves
the news hisses about murders and narcotics
and her Volkswagen-Passat won't start

*A lonely woman

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