***

Maria Galina

Translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Anna Halberstadt

Here’s the radio playing “On a Workday Noon”

Here’s the sun hanging almost at its zenith

Here’s the spinstress on the roadside

Pulling and pulling the threads

 

And from the roadside wafts the smell of sweet clover and gasoline, 

But she goes on spinning since she is beyond reason.

Just look at yourself, spinstress, you're such a mess,

All of your skeins are different colors. 

But we need identical shirts,

Khaki-colored uniform berets

Your colorful threads are tangled and overlong

We need short ones, sorry.

 

Saws and tiny hammers are clanging in the hot air - 

The cumulative dot-dot-dot of interjections, tiny ellipses

A blue moth is turning his compound eyes

To a young neighbor who accidentally grazed his shoulder,

Watermelons are warming on the counter, 

And short shadows nestling close to sagebrush bushes. 

 

This is too hard, it’s impossible to bear.

 

So take out your  talyanka and play us bye-bye slavianka

O underground accordionist in the  iron stove's hot gullet

And here comes this hottie in Gucci or Versace

Let her run along the formation shouting and crying something

 

A bus rolls up, and a baba with an enormous bag

Pushes her way through, she is called a bitch,  

Because they barely managed to dodge her

A woman with a kid and dude with a briefcase,  

And from the roadside wafts the smell of sweet clover and gasoline,

More and more short threads, more and more dirty-green ones,

And grasshoppers in the withered grass are marching in formation,

Morphing as they go into something completely different.