Poetry / Julia Kolchinsky
:: Tell me it gets easier ::
every new parent asks,
It doesn’t, I say bluntly & something
inside us shatters a little, not
hope, too large, uncontainable
in the body, like sky or the layers
of ocean my son knows
are named sunlight,
twilight, midnight, abyss, & trenches,
the further down
the closer to war. Tell me
it gets easier, they ask
to hear difficulty or darkness
are temporary, but the depths
are endless not because
they do not end but because
we’ve never reached the bottom.
In water, the difference
between float / sink / swim / drown
are matters of breath & motion,
little to do with light & everything
with ease.
Endurance a resistance all its own.
It doesn’t, I say again, my face
reflected in the shallow sink
that just won’t drain.
It never gets easier, I exhale.
We just grow used to bearing
difficulty. We hold our breaths
long enough
to reach the surface.
.
:: When a friend texted to say her son’s fish died & the child won’t stop wailing ::
I told her if my son had a single wish he confesses would bring our cat back from the dead though he was only a year old when I found Ele P. Hant motionless in his litter box even in death the cat named elephant was the most respectable animal refusing to sleep in my bed for a whole week the way he had for eleven years & my one-year-old spent most of his life pulling & smacking & chasing the cat with hands the opposite of what we think is love but what does a child see as tenderness? none of us remain children long enough to know & I asked how long they’d had the fish? more than a year she said pandemic pet meant to help her son through absence & if not replace grandparents & playmates at least give him someone to watch through water & it must have helped teach him how we can love without touch & this morning I write to see how they are doing her son was inconsolable she’s worried what this means for bigger human losses & I said my son is only afraid of two things: getting a shot & losing me all other pain abstraction I say our people make every loss catastrophe & every death all death & Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote we are all walking cemeteries carrying our dead inside us but she writes there has been no mention of the fish or its death & kids are resilient I say we are resilient I say resilience & every time the word distances from its origin “an act of rebounding” jumping back resilience meaning not survival but our ability to exist that much more distant from one another
:: The day after the longest day of the year::
is longer & hotter & the sun
rises as if it knows it will refuse to set & solstice is a lie from an elsewhere language meaning “to stand still” when really my son wakes with an urge to whirl & keep whirring knowing no stillness & in a single day he has too many highest & lowest points for even his own must-know-the-exact- count-of-everything brain to quantify & I am crying in the car again with his little sister strapped in her car seat the hour of daylight seems a whole-day long & she asks Mama, please play “Astronaut in the Ocean” because it’s big brother’s favorite & he’s not here after his solar flare hands struck my chest the way meteors have pelleted the moon for eons & she’s so used to being pocked there’s no pain anymore just pressure & dent we’re underwater & I don’t hold my breath or breathe & no I say to my daughter trying to explain another’s sadness to a three-year-old who knows only her own & screams hot tears I want “Astronaut in the Ocean” & the sun turns liquid at the wheel & I scream too & we’re both sobbing now the sun rising higher & for an instant through the windshield glare & winding mimosa blooms Arkansas’ unbearable heat catches in cement & the sun swims still in the road ahead & I give in & play “What you know about rollin’ down in the deep? . . .” & our tears start to dry in all that wet sunlight & she asks Are you happy now, Mama? & yes I tell her I am & when I come home & for a split second
of radiant stillness my son wraps hot around me I’ll tell him I am happy knowing the sun keeps burning & he cannot stop long enough to ask
From the writer
:: Account ::
These poems come from my forthcoming book, PARALLAX, which deals with parenting a neurodiverse child on the autism spectrum under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, my birthplace. The book is an account of taking care of the many bodies depending on mine, while continuing to take care of my own through the act of writing. As my now eight-year-old expresses his own fascination with death, violence, and the grotesque, my struggles with parenting overlap with processing present-day war on the same black soil that took so many of my ancestors during the Holocaust by bullets across territories of the former Soviet Union. These three poems take on the exhaustion and non-stop momentum of parenting. Poetry has become a way of both processing and escaping from the overwhelming experience of your whole self being needed wholly by someone else, and in some instances, of your whole self being subsumed by the needs and desires of others. These poems are my way of connecting back to my own voice. My song. My body. My wholeness. They are a way of creating and reaching out to a community of fellow parent poets to remind us: we are all in a version of this beautiful struggle together, and even when it feels impossible, we will get through it. And even though it doesn’t get easier, we get stronger and more able to bear the difficulty. We are here and will continue to be here for our children. And the page, the poem, the lyric impulse, this will continue to be there for all of us.
Julia Kolchinsky (formerly Dasbach) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023). She has two forthcoming books, PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist of the Miller Williams Prize selected by Patricia Smith, and When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. Her recent awards include Hunger Mountain’s Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, Michigan Quarterly Review’s Prize in Nonfiction, and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine. Julia is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.