Poor drunk and deeply wounded humans
who believe that love cures everything.
And now they usually see that

This is your teacher-creature speaking.
Hello blue jays, twits, and squirrels.
Hello black cat, orange, tabby.

To who,
to you and myself
some identity who tells me I’m doing it wrong

The mountains loom
Large like questions
About poverty. Wages

Translator’s Note: The last protest Luis Montenegro attended in Nicaragua was on Mother’s Day in 2018. Pro-government groups fired on demonstrators that Wednesday, killing 15 and injuring more than 200. Luis stood next to a few. Not as part of any student group—a symbolic backbone of the protests—but rather as a citizen of the country and as a practicing doctor. He decided then that he couldn’t continue risking his life; he would contribute to the still-beating movement in other ways.

In conversation with Columbia Journal’s Online Poetry Editor Brian Wiora, the poet Alex Dimitrov discusses capitalism, social media, and his upcoming book, Love and Other Poems. After reading this interview, we hope you will read his new poem, “Having a Diet Coke with You” published here.

is even better than a regular Coke
because in New York the streets are so skinny
I’m always worried about my hair

This poem, Joke 3, has been taken from “And here’s the song” by Hélène Sanguinetti, and has been translated from the French by Ann Cefola.

My friend, she was telling me
How everything she owns can fit in five suitcases,
and how liberating that is.

Days we thought we’d lived before:
routines of conversation and television
shows that we already knew the endings of.

After a while, we stopped counting the dead
and let the body of the wind push us into departure.
Nothing civil about war, everything numb with distance.

When the shadow of the earth fell on the moon it was red like the cherry you left on my neck— which is another way of saying it seemed to turned purple with the night and brought with it tears from blinking against the wind—which is another way of saying it was cold like the tiles we laid down on in the Carl Andre exhibit—which is another way of saying we joined the dark spot of a fluorescent world waiting for the white walls to fall—which is another way of saying we were surprised when security laughed and said yeah, they do that too—which is another way of saying our violation was unoriginal and could be called customary—which is another way of saying the 144 magnesium square tiles had a similar energy to the wrestling mat at your high school—which is another way of saying we are still on our backs looking up and waiting for God or a referee to call the match—which is another way of saying it was a draw and we left the museum in something of a daze—which is another way of saying we felt suspended like astronauts—which is another way of saying our blood wasn’t where it should to be.

These poems first appeared in Anna Glazova’s collection For the Shrew, which won the oldest independent literature award in Russia, the Andrey Bely Prize, in 2013. They have been translated from Russian by Alex Niemi.

To my younger self, how wrong you were then
to mistake your hours for waiting,
suspicious the days were only hand motions, shopping bags,

Suppose I start a cult. Suppose I bet a son.
Suppose where the world ends my body begins,
Wombed away, waiting while Mother witches drug runs,

Whatever they are, I’m sending them your way,
right now, eyes closed for better aim,
a micro-meter sub-atomic process, plucked and

i want
to reply
about it all

Staring at these bones

in the utter rhythm of sun

they seem inevitable,

but only might have been.

It Is Too Late Now

Look at the map, the clock and the calendar.

It is too late!

Here is the crux of the matter!

This is the hour to go our separate ways.

Put simply, the wanting was for one thing only:
to plant a seed. To bear fruit. Never mind
the world was ending. I closed my eyes