My great-grandmother would approve
I think, in bed, a naked chest pressed
to my dressed back, my thighs shut tight
like blinds refusing to let the darkness
out or light in. Is this okay? he asks
about the shape we’ve named
spoon, about his arms corseting  
my breasts, his breath too hot
and longing on my neck. Is there a touch
under a thinning sheet that doesn’t plead
for more? A mouth that doesn’t ask
or crave? I’ve kept this fast since
her body first couldn’t, withheld myself
from water, food, and flesh. I’ve wanted
to be loved since being named
for the man who was not
my great-grandfather by blood, but by the desire
she came to know only after loss—after surviving  
the war in evacuation; after returning to Kyiv
to find her partisan husband missing
without a trace, rumored to have been shot
at Babyn Yar or by the SS or dragged far
into the woods; and after working nights
in soup kitchens to bring home
stale bread, ladling borscht to Soviet
soldiers who couldn’t save her
children’s father but dared reach up
her skirt. And after such survival, she chose
to fast yearly and marry again, a man
who’d never fought. I imagine his hands
were soft and her flesh famished and that
she loved him. A pity, she told me when
I was sixteen, that I had not been
kissed, her lipstick and nails bright, unbitten
red even in the nursing home. I want you to know
love in your body, she whispered, and he
doesn’t have to be Jewish. She left an outline
of her mouth along my jaw then. I imagine
my namesake would have kissed her
there too, hard, hungry, unkosher, but in love
enough to turn touch holy. 

—Julia Kolchinsky

Poet’s Website

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