a pretty girl hands out cigarettes near the metro,/ but smiles at me for free—/ and there’s nothing anyone can do about it./ and only me, I’m the only one who thinks / everything’s bought and paid for,/ I’m the only sad asshole who thinks that, / even if not everything’s bought and paid for yet,/ not everything’s stamped out,/ even if you can still win some kind of prize . . More…
the summer before last/ I got lost in berlin/ this was in/ Tiergarten/ I found myself/ in an absolutely empty square/ and all around was forest/ and the square was empty/ I saw a guy/ riding his bike/ and ran over to him/ and asked in english/ how to get to the center of town/ he was really happy to see me/ because he turned out to be a russian immigrant/ he got off his bike/ and started giving me directions More…
Anisa and I/ were at a party/ with, for the most part,/ the young bourgeois intelligentsia—/ designers, journalists from popular magazines,/ and so on,/ and Anisa admitted to me afterward/ that she’s bored by such company,/ and I said to her, “Not to worry,/ before long you’re going to see something/ straight out of Dostoevsky,/ with no chaser” More…
Those who once left for the West/ for stability/ for a normal life for their children/ to get away from this trash/ this Soviet mindset—/ are returning today to Russia/ where the local diumvirate has created a more or less/ decent environment for the middle class/ and reasonable conditions for business. More…
The wife of an activist who died under strange circumstances,/ though more likely than not it was an accident,/ says to me that she literally finds herself shaking/ from everything that’s going on, the arrests and the interrogations of activists . . . / I’m sure you know the story of N, she says./ A labor activist, they planted drugs on him, he got five years. More…
