All night the phone rang.Bread loaves aped gravestones.When he found poems written in blood, he could only scream them.No musician knew how to carry weight.But always, always the memory of that sweaterfalling off her shoulder. Like it or not,she was an icon, a postage stamp. The sweaton her chest, the friendliness of her handspatting an usher’s back in a bombed theater… Valentineshung on every tree, replacing the decomposed executed.It was hard not to think of yourself as a ghost—still, somehow love continued to tighten its biceps.He drank a milkshake made of ground-up doors.How quickly the fog moved in.
Postwar
Anton Yakovlev
Feature Date
- April 23, 2022
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Copyright © 2021 by Anton Yakovlev.
(upstreet)
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Anton Yakovlev’s latest poetry chapbook is Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018), winner of the James Tate Prize. He is also the author of Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017) and two prior chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, Measure, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and elsewhere. His book of translations The Last Poet of the Village: Selected Poems by Sergei Yesenin came out from Sensitive Skin Books in 2019. Anton co-hosts the Carmine Street Metrics reading series in Manhattan and the Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow reading series in Rutherford, New Jersey. He is a former education director at Bowery Poetry Club.
No. 17
Richmond, Massachusetts
Founding Editor
Vivian Dorsel
Poetry Editor
Frances Richey
Associate Poetry Editor
Meghan Dunn
upstreet is an independently owned and published, nationally distributed magazine. It was founded in 2005 by Vivian Dorsel, formerly Managing Editor of The Berkshire Review for eight years, who selected the members of the editorial staff for their love of the written word, their high standards of literary judgment, and their desire to offer a voice to prose writers and poets who might not find publication opportunities in more mainstream journals.
upstreet number four was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Anthologies category of the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards.
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