Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
On the 100th Day of War in My Birthplace
Winner of the 2023 American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Judged by Brian Czyzyk
The rhododendrons keep blooming
despite the blood. I don’t dream or touch
my husband. The toilet’s
been collecting a black rim
at water level no matter how often
I scrub. My son refuses to sit until it’s gone.
My hands smell like my great-grandmother’s
last years in this country, though her childhood
in Bila Tserkva must have smelled similar, ammonia
mixed with goat milk & wheat before famine
took them, or lilac & spilled oil, when she’d steal
away to the city. Before war
took the city too. My children scream
as though they know
what’s happening. I ask they use “inside voices”
in Russian. There’s no direct translations–
home voice, damashni golos’ I say. My tongue
hurts my mouth. I don’t eat or clean
my body. I claw at my scalp to find
unintended gifts my children
left behind–lime playdough, floss, an uneaten
french fry. Their bodies use mine
as treasure chest & waste bin.
I stopped listening to the news in the car
since, “Breaking, active shooter inside
an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas” echoed
on the way to my son’s therapy appointment.
I blast 90s pop rock, “You’re a god and I
am not and I just thought that you would know”
recalling how my son asked why people go
to church when he saw 21 chairs with 21 sunflower
wreaths outside of one, To pray to God, I explained.
Why? God doesn’t exist, he said. Some people
believe and it helps them, I clarified & he asked,
Do you? reminding me the chairs & wreaths
mean someone died or many someones. Dead,
he repeated, churches mean dead. Sometimes,
I believe, I said, Other times...
I spend $5.75 on a latte & count
the Ukrainian flags I pass on
Crouchwood, Longwood, Brentwood, Kenwood.
It’s been weeks since my last donation & I’ve stopped counting
our dead. Do you speak Russian? My son asks
every stranger. No? Why not? I do! My mom’s from Ukraine.
They always say how sorry they are
for my country as though they were the ones
at fault, & maybe, we are all to blame.
The checkout clerk at the Kroger has cotton
in her ears the way I was forced to as a child
on our transatlantic, immigrant flight, soaked
in eucalyptus or iodine to prevent
ear infections. Her name tag says, Maryna,
& when she hears me speaking to my daughter,
A familiar language, she says, I’m afraid to ask
where you’re from. She exhales relief, tells me
her mother is in an occupied territory, It’s been
85 days since we’ve spoken. She rings
up our ice cream & hopes
I’ll come back. The vanilla melts
on the way home & the children throw fits & want
more sprinkles, longing for solid to stay
solid. Sitting on the closed toilet lid, hiding
from their screaming, I am still
born in a country named outskirt, a city
named river, on a street named goddess
of the hunt, born in a government-assigned
apartment where our balcony was my preferred
place to sleep while my papa sang
inappropriate songs about alcoholics treating their dogs better
than their women & a neighborhood Baba
would shout-up from the courtyard,
He’s ruining the child with that language.
Now, I sing my children to sleep
in that same mother tongue, in their American-
born beds. I hear my son’s echo,
If I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. I tuck them in
& pray, wordless. You’re my sunflower, my son whispers
in English, tugging at my hair
like petals & wishing don’t die, don’t die,
even if he doesn’t believe, don’t die,
he reaches, not for god,
but whatever language
is closest to Mama.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: 40 Weeks (YesYes Books, 2023), Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), and The Many Names for Mother (Kent State University Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and AGNI, among others. She is currently working on a poetry collection as well as a book of linked lyric essays, both of which grapple with raising a neurodiverse child with a disabled partner under the shadow of the war in Ukraine. She is the author of the model poem for “Dear Ukraine”: A Global Community Poem https://dearukrainepoem.com/. Julia holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently the Murphy Fellow and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Hendrix College. In the fall of 2023, Julia will join Denison University as Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing and relocate with her family to Columbus, Ohio.