A. Z. Foreman

Portrait of Marina Tsvetaeva
 
To see steel heights with eyes gouged into lyric 
and blow the songs of love through Roland's horn 
it took this syncopated, shunned, chimeric 
daughter of Moscow fucked by being born 
Romantic in an age of the machine-
-gun, hammer, sickle & swastika that stole
the clean laugh from her guts. So from unclean 
archaica to jeweled slang she twanged the whole 
shebang and gamut, an identikit
of tempers. Her stacatto songs could shoot
like starlight through a world that rhymed on shit, 
shot her husband and starved her to the end
of her rope. There was no one to attend
the funeral when she hanged herself. Salute. 

A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator, poet and immedicable language-acquisition addict currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His translations from Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Modern Occitan, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Old English, Old Irish and Yiddish have appeared in sundry publications including Metamorphoses, ANMLY, Blue Unicorn, Asymptote, Brazen Head, and the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. His translation of Saint John of the Cross’ “Dark Night of the Soul” has been set to music by Christopher Marshall. He also sometimes writes his own poetry if the weather in his head gets weird enough. The most important fact to note is that if you have a dog or even a tame pet fox he would very much like to pet it.