PERMAFROST DRIVE-THROUGH
I met him because he was staring at tennis balls.
Too sick to meet on a Friday afternoon,
he’s 22 and day drinks.
Where does darkness leave off,
and light begin?
It’s not a poem. It’s a shark in formaldehyde.
And you will therefore realize the possibilities of accomplishing the same thing
by means of the principle of polarity. When it comes to
beautiful, useless men—
if I don’t hear from them
I will email them
that there should be an ocean but there isn’t. Just as there isn’t
a name for this planet.
We don’t have a panel about permafrost, but the director of graduate
studies seems to think so with beveled eyes.
Not to worry. A disco is starting by the milk station,
its hundred-candle stochastic
halo slice.
I’ve never driven over a cloud before.
Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is a doctoral student in the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. Her translations of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka were released with World Poetry Books in February of 2023. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, and Colorado Review, among other journals.