Unsteady Topography
By Oksana Maksymchuk
Even inside a war
I’m still at work
making life delicious
Mutinous pastries rise and fall
like a tidal wave
in the makeshift oven
we’ve assembled out of loose bricks
in the communal yard —
a collective poem
In a room across the street
now and again, I catch a glimpse of
two elderly neighbors
making love
LED light glowing above them
like the moon
Standing in the full
glare of the war, I’m a surface
reflecting its awesome light
shadows emerging due to
the unusual features
of my own darkened soul
I’m a sucker for sweetness
delicate, frothing streams
creaming the landscape
Yet inside me, mountains crumble
craters open on the papery surface
tall load-bearing cakes
break into a scream
Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, forthcoming with University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian. Her poems appeared in AGNI, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, The Poetry Review, and many other journals. She co-edited an anthology “Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine,” and co-translated several poetry collections. She is a recipient of the National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, and other honors. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas.
