Motley Kamuka

I searched Oksana on Reddit, because I'd thought Oksana Zabuzhko would come up, the author of the Ukrainian novel I'm reading, but instead I got the photo of a nurse who got her legs blown off by Russian bombs in Lysychansk. You can watch her husband dance with her at her wedding . You can watch her rehab . More rehab . There's another Oksana who died, she was an actress . Another Oksana is a sniper . There's a woman in my neighborhood who is Ukrainian, who has a son my daughter sometimes plays with. She's a nurse. Different fate. She works long hard hours and takes a long subway ride. A woman from Honduras has a son her sons age, and they play a lot and she watches both kids. She cleans offices. Her husband is Mexican and works in a restaurant.  Where is it safe? Where is life good? "...in general all that Ukrainians can say about themselves is how, and how much, and by which manner they were beaten." p. 115 "And where there's no beauty--how can...

Tonight, terror will probably come. Hot shivers—of lovemaking or vomiting. Foreboding debauched coupling Or death's cry--shake the ailing body. Rupture, rupture--all ligaments, nerves, veins: My defenselessness is now so total, Like an overt call to evil: Come! I've already seen myself as a building In which an orange rectangle burns   in the night, a bare window, With planks across the chest And bottom of the abdomen, like for an X-ray, And the rock, the one to shatter the pane Already lies there, waiting for the hand. (p.92-3 from FIUS) I see the spaceship from Star Trek: Discovery. Cleveland Book's spaceship disassembles, and reforms to fit through things as it flies. I think that is how we must all be, shattering and reassembling in impossible ways. The novel with the word "sex" in it is  Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, but it's mostly about disappointments sexually, sexual pain, and frustrating and failed relationships of a poet with a painter, as it relates ...

Another parent in the park who I talk to every once in a while, when she is not working as a nurse, is from Ukraine. Her husband understands English but has more trouble speaking it. They send their son to Ukrainian school to help him learn the language and it's really helped him in school because he hears the language at home, but he doesn't study it formally, until recently. He also has upgraded his preference for his name to go from Vollo to Volodymyr, because the heroic president has the same name. So the other day it occured to me to read a novel by a Ukrainian and I came up with Zabuzhko. Ordered it from the library and poof, it was ready for pickup at my local branch in no time. Ubi panis ibi patria means home is where you feel comfortable. I read it in Oksana Zabuzhko ’s novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex . The narrator is a female poet with a sexually adventurous nature, though she doesn't romanticize sexuality, she just articulates it. Despite the title it’s not e...