My Moscow Stalin’s baroque apartment block dark hallways dot dot dot
I am a child I’m nine I’m coming home from school past the three huge garbage bins
a semi-colon of my day rats huge rats are everywhere around the dump I’m scared
The elevator’s trapped in its old cage
a wounded lift a maimed spittoon
a cabin caught in broken quotation marks
where strangers piss on the caricature
of Marx or Lenin to watch the drops of urine
roll down their cheeks
It’s dark
The light bulbs saw their natural end
fly up the dark stairs grey dirty hyphens a long and scary escape
then on the second floor a casket no it’s just a lid upright by the door
stands like an exclamation mark the casket’s now stuffed inside
who died there on the second I thought they were all young
a Russian funeral begins at home a casket on the table in the room
like the last meal
it lasts one whole day and night
Dark
Shock
Stop
Run
quick up the stairs to the third and magic floor Apt 76
I am nineteen I’m making out between the second and the third
the windowsill is w- i -d -e the radiator’s hot
his hands are questions marks
I’m holding on to brackets no more sex
Shock
Stop
Run
quick up the stairs to my third and magic floor Apt 76
I’m twenty nine slash pregnant just a little
the elevator out of order my body out of whack
I’m carrying grocery bags my mother asked for something sweet
shit I forgot about it the hormones playing tricks
Mom 73
her age will never match Apt 76
she’s sick but I don’t know it yet
this story is full of holes
so let the holes holler
from dot to dot
my baby is four months she’s staying home on the third and magic floor
I’m dashing down the stairs out the door into a rickety decrepit van
off to the morgue to pick my mother up
I am an orphan now parenthesis parentless unprotected I’m next
and now I am holding onto something I’ve always feared to touch
let it be period enough of commas
the van is grey the traffic light is amber bumps
a black cat crossed the road no-no the cat was grey ok
the coffin jumps and I hold my mother’s frozen legs down with one hand
my other hand is holding the pine lid I have a splinter in my thumb
how dumb how clumsy how insane
quotation marks we’re almost there mama it’ll be alright you’ll see
I’m going to hold you tight
let go of me
a crowd of your friends the Donskoi Cemetery a crematorium smack in the middle of
Moscow downtown cathedral of apostrophe and dot dot dot
three little clouds of smoke above the chimney are flights of stairs to our third and magic floor