Mandelstam is Dead

MICHAEL JULIANI

Snow is falling on Moscow as if the Black Sea 

overcame the sky. Infernal thought-dreams 

of water becoming land. You pull apart the wrists

of your coat, stamping across the expanse 

of your new boiler-room kitchen. 

Nadya holds you still and sews them back together with curses, 

just like me, my friend, the fingerpricks 

of salvation in love. There are informers counting the cold

buildings by their bombastic stupor,

stupid Russia, stupid Slavs cowering together

over the blip of propane that illuminates the whole country 

with its smell. Take those indelible images 

out of your poems, dear siblings. The bitchpack 

loves to swallow those tithes, like schoolboys 

rushing to learn their Greek third-hand. 

Lovers of poetry emit the dead gaze 

that probes the city tracking some new kill.   

MICHAEL JULIANI is a poet, editor, and journalist from Pasadena, California. His work has appeared in outlets such as BOMB, Los Angeles Times, The Conversant, Truthdig, Blindfold, and the Huffington Post. The editor of three books by the filmmaker and photographer Harun Mehmedinovic, he earned a BA in Print & Digital Journalism from the University of Southern California and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

The Adirondack Review

SUMMER 2017