By Olga Maslova

Featured Art: Athens Photo Project

Sometime last century in Kharkiv, father
and I fled the melting August pavement,
bribed the conductor of a sold-out train.
He jammed us in the luggage racks,
and we took off to the Black Sea.

The moving furnace spat us out somewhere
in Kerch, the easternmost town in the Crimea
two hundred miles from sandy beaches, magnolias,
and pine trees,
streets lined with vendors selling buttered corn
charred shish kebabs and chacha. Predawn Kerch

was drab and empty, last night’s drunks
scattered on the streets like seals in their puddles,
seagulls feasting on rotting fish. At the port
we made a deal with a captain of a cargo bulker
Father paid the fair with his life stories, and kept
the crew awake.

I sat 12 hours next to the cockpit
                                                            staring
    at the horizon changing colors
                                                                    from pink
                                to blue
                                                   to pink again
                        to black

till the evening Yalta embraced us
like an old friend at the party:
a little tipsy, a little horny, determined
to dance all night
under shooting stars

                * * *

An arctic snowy owl arrived
in the south of France last Wednesday
3000 miles away from home. Her baffled face
was captured by the paparazzi. British scientists
as their rituals dictate, had offered an explanation:

It’s all about the lemmings:
The owl was following the lemmings
The spike in the lemming population
had lured the hungry bird

There is one person
who really knows what happened—
the captain of the Greenlandic freighter
the stowaway had boarded, heading south

But he won’t tell

                     nor will the owl

                                   nor the lemmings.

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Olga Maslova is a Ukrainian-American writer and theater designer. Born and raised in Kharkiv, Ukraine, she holds a BFA in directing from Ukraine, an MFA in dramaturgy from SUNY at Stony Brook, and an MFA in costume and set design from NYU, and she is a 2021/2022 Fulbright Fellow. Olga is the librettist of several large-scale vocal works: an opera, Black Square, an oratorio, The Last Day of the Eternal City, and an art song cycle, Venetian Cycle, all with composer Ilya Demutsky. Olga’s poem “Tokyo Prepartum” won a second place in the Frontier Poetry Ekphrastic Poetry Prize. Olga’s poetry has appeared and is forthcoming in New American Writing, Plume Poetry, The Coachella Review, Strange Horizons, Passengers, ONE ART, Milk and Cake Press, and others. She teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.