Poetry Suite by Gala Mukomolova
“The back of a truck one woman starts Black sky too blurred for stars”
Poetry by Gala Mukomolova
From a larger work, Centrifuge, in parts.
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Your body, mud-wet field
Struck one stone one stone
you're home home
Who taught you to?
Who put you where they wanted you?
Once, you thwacked a ball far field, uncatchable, white, hot as a sun
snaring your vision. The sky, each of your socks,
seared a pastry ridge into your shins
and you ran.
Things don't fall apart. Things hold.
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II.
The back of a truck one woman starts Black sky too blurred for stars.
Eight of us, the dark
basement of a house, artists’ retreat. We wade
through beer bottles, sweat-stained furniture
What counts as the first time? Just the tip?
Her cunt: blue bruise throbbing.
She turned away from me, would
not uncurl.
(last night's party, tonight's party)
what she remembers is what he told her.
Another woman starts to cry and skips her turn.
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IV.
What wasn't dangerous? We all heard a woman ran in one side of Central Park and did not come out the other. Polish Mike liked to sit at the Juliard squares, waiting. We’d come over and smoke. You didn't need to know his age; you didn't even need to pay him. My friend gave him head at my 15th birthday party. I don't remember what I saw. Some girl said he spent a lot of time on the swings, alone. That was supposed to redeem him.
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VII.
Night bed stained with your absence, a young prince pulled me
onto her.
She wasn’t you, couldn’t have
just days ago, mouth fixed hard with leaving, you spit
out: you never fucked me last month, not once.
What I wanted: my body beheld.
Shirt in her fist, I heeled
house-broken, hovering
animal
waiting for her master to come.
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X.
I've been to Riis beach twice. First time? Preteen, flat as the surface of a lake. But the ocean! Wild there—unkind too. Aunt Anya was with us. Wide bank of cellulite: her behind. Her face? All nose and grimace. Twenty years my mother's senior, she was terrifying. Once, Anya dragged me apt to apt, each full of Babas playing lotto—betting nickels. Riis Beach? Right, that. A large wave came, undressed me. I was pulling my top on
There's nothing there for fuck's sake, Anya laughed, slapped me in my nothing.
A decade later I returned. Someone called it a gay beach. I saw some dicks hanging, dykes marinating jerk chicken. I took a walk by myself and found a seashell, blue lightening whelk, large as my hand.
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Gala Mukomolova received her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in a variety of journals including Indiana Review, Drunken Boat, PANK, and Muzzle Magazine. She has resided at the Vermont Studio Center, the Pink Door Retreat, and Six Points Fellowship: ASYLUM International Jewish Artist Retreat. Nowadays, she impersonates an astrologer for The Hairpin and practices slicing deli meat
as thin as she can.