“Buried in a human neck, a bullet”, a poem by Lyudmyla Khersonsky (DG 2022), was recently published in the New York Times.
Victoria Chang, who selected the poem, said that it “begins in medias res with a dead body rather than the death itself, followed by a pile of urgent questions. We find ourselves suspended in a state of unknowing. The sequence of five practical questions in rapid succession mirrors a distressed mind’s movements, before we switch to the second person and the Lord’s critique of his creation. By the poem’s end, the speaker returns, attempting to transcend the merely practical into the first-person universal of a ‘we.’ But that transcendence is only momentary. Readers find themselves returned to the matter-of-fact questions of war.” Read the poem here.
Illustration by R. O. Blechman.