Lucía M. Polis The Poetry of

You do not feel, you do not feel
Any more, high heel
Of which I have lived in fear
For forty years, small and meek,
Barely daring to breathe or speak.

Mommy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I could see——
Trinket-laden, a bag full of junk,
Ghastly bronze with the nose turned up
Stuck like on Izzy D.

And a head in the freakish Pacific
Where it beats bruise black over sea
In the waters off pretty Vancouver.
I used to pray you’d let me break free.
Akh, ty.

In the Russian tongue, a Ukrainian town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars
But the name of the town is known well.
My Cossack friend.

Says there is no way to mistake.
So I always could tell where you
Take your shot, seek proof,
I could never talk to you.
The tongue stuck to the roof.

It stuck in a crowded chant.
Ya, ya, ya, ya,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every Russian was you.
And the language obscene

A machine, a machine
Rubbing me out like a mutt.
A mutt to Moskvá, Ashdód, Van C.
I began to talk like a mutt.
I think I may well be a mutt.

The snows of Sibír’, clear St. Pete’s vodka
Are not true or pure of cut.
With my mongrel ancestor and my weird bákht
Y kolóda tsygánskikh kárt on hand
I may be a bit of a mutt.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Ve-Ve-Es, your beliberdá
And your wild beehive
And your Slavic eye, bright green.
Bronemát’, Bronemát’, O She——

No God but the workers’ seal
So gold no stalk could shoot through.
Every man adores a nomenklatúrschitsa
The pump in the face, the thump
Beast thump of a beast like you.

You stand at the blackboard, mommy,
In the picture I burned of you,
A lie in your eye instead of your smile
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black woman who

Bit my pretty pink heart in two.
I was eighteen when they buried him.
At twenty five I tried to live
And get far, far, far from you.
I thought even Nihon would do.

But they put me into the sack,
With my lips stuck together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A woman in red with a Das Kapital look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said, I do, I do.
So mommy, I’m finally through.
The red telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one woman, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said she was you
And drank of my blood forty years——
Much longer, if you want to know,
With Daddy and my little bro’.

There’s a stake in your chic red heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Mommy, mommy, you viper, I’m through.