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.