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Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now


was breaking air waves the year I was made. But not in Odessa, through a white barred window,
a tenement with floors made of the cleanest dirt that side of the Black Sea.

Dora wasn't home. Who knows where a woman that age goes when she goes?
                                                                    Pulling potatoes, diamonds, out the new paved road?         
                           Breaking thermometers over mortars to cast her curing spell? A shmear to burn

the blossom, a mushroom
from a man's thigh. What she did she did alone.  Let them say we're crazy, I don't care about that.

*

It was Dora gave her daughter permission, a privacy
                                                               owed a woman in her thirties. Put your arms around me, baby never look back. And it was not love.
                                                                                             And it was not beautiful. Not a fig bursting
in the seeded cavern of her mouth. Not the quenching of a thousand fires
                                                                old as her name, Tamar, warrior queen, thrice blessed. It was
sex, simple, black bread and butter. She was a woman who needed a man
                                                                                                                  she could trust her son with.

My father: Invalid of the First Degree.  
                                                         Let the world around us just fall apart.

*

And what was left of youth stayed tucked behind them
                                                                                                          in the old wood, starched and blued
like a school shirt made to last from sibling to sibling.                             And if this world runs out of lovers
                                                                                                                        we'll still have each other.

On the velour couch, Tamara remembers: 
                                               Boris on blood thinners and me at my age?
                                               Year you were born, they said 90% chance your baby will be a monster.          

                                                Your father said           Whatever comes is ours.        

by Gala Mukomolova

Gala Mukomolova received her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in a variety of journals/sites including the Indiana Review, Drunken Boat, and PANK. She has resided at the Vermont Studio Center, the Pink Door Retreat, and Six Points Fellowship: ASYLUM International Jewish Artist Retreat. Nowadays, she impersonates an astrologer for The Hairpin and practices slicing deli meat as thin as she can.
ISSN 2157-8079
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