Why we should all be entitled

I realized that I didn’t know the Russian word for “entitlement” or “entitled.” Google translate said the former was a right, while the latter had the sense of being empowered.

It seems fitting that I had no idea how to say either in Russian. If language reflects daily life, and if daily life informs language, there is an obvious fit between the daily life in the USSR and the absence of a word for “entitlement.” Which begs a questions or two.

Does “entitlement” really mean “right”? And if it does, why are we so reluctant to claim ours? It seems that whatever we don’t claim, will be claimed by someone else, because nature abhors a vacuum, or a perceived vacuum. You blink, and your right to breathe clean air and drink clean water is no longer yours; turn away for a moment, and voting isn’t really your prerogative; give in to your wish for a calm quiet life, and there goes your right to make decisions for your body; spend a few moments thinking about their argument, and here is a bullet for you and for you and for you. I am thinking that the aggression to arbiter rights far outstrips the impulse to just have a life. It’s true; if it weren’t, why would we need wars and violence?

Why does culture dissuade us from claiming rights, what is truly ours? Because culture is determined by power. And power is self-preserving. So allowing us to have the power to claim the space we need in the world strikes power as encroachment. Because power likes to control and usurp to the extent it is allowed to do so. You know what they say about power and corruption. Power for power’s sake is the same as money for money’s sake — empty and perverse. But also, well, powerful.

Is it heretical to acknowledge that there is no such thing as an organic right, that is if we don’t claim it, and commit to claiming it every day?

The young apply the language of decolonization to their lives, their brains, their beings. It actually makes sense in this context, where what is perceived not to be claimed can be taken over, which amounts to colonization. Isn’t this what happened to this continent, land that seemed unclaimed, or not claimed fervently enough, by the colonizer’s standards? Isn’t this what Russia is trying to do, though perhaps Ukraine is showing what it looks like to claim your entitlement fervently enough?

I am going to claim my entitlement here and now, my right to exist, my right to come home to the person I love, irrespective of gender; to raise my children in a religion (or absence of one) of my/their choice; to read books that I want to read; to write what and how I see fit; to believe science; to use my rhetorical skills to help those who need it. To ask for help from allies.

It’s time. They are coming for all of us. Just because you don’t have a body that can get pregnant, don’t think for a second they won’t get to you. Just because your spouse is of opposite gender, don’t think they won’t get to you. Just because you practice the right religion, don’t think they won’t get to you. Just because your skin is white, don’t think they won’t get to you. They will, and, as the saying goes, who will be there to speak up on your behalf?

Trust me. I was born and grew up in the USSR; there is a pattern to how these things go.

Please, speak up, make yourselves heard, make it known that you feel entitled, that we feel entitled, that we will not recede into the woodwork while they ransack us. Stand up for one another. There are more of us than there are of them. Save democracy. Save each other.

Her mother’s touch

She sat on a stool the shape of the world
By a balcony door once open to narratives
The air was sweet with a hint of sorrow
Of a Saturday. Or maybe a Sunday.

The woman in bed — a distorted mirror —
Clenched eyelids and fists
A stilled phantom dissolving into a stain
A black-and-white life slashed with a pen

Orphaned by letters on a legal pad
She clutched the silence
While lace curtains billowed and caressed
Her cheek like a mother’s touch

Pollen into stars

A man with no face
Fear on his tongue
Defaces history
With graffiti of blood
In an ancient land

A court beyond measure
Files “People Above v. People Below”
Verdicts in its dusty chambers
Chisels worth into skin
Like stone carvings in Peru

They deny they bleed
In terrestrial tongues
That their bodies decay
In full spectrum
That they too are dust
On a bumblebee’s wings
As it buzzes its workday
Over the petals
Of apple blossoms
Scattering pollen
Into stars

Between Worlds

My essay Between Worlds was published today at The Massachusetts Review. 

“It wasn’t my choice to leave Odesa. My father decided, my mother agreed, and so it happened. In 1976. We were lucky to get out, lucky to avoid the fates of refuseniks and political prisoners in the Gulag, lucky that my father—who lost his job immediately upon applying for an exit visa—did not get arrested for parasitism…”

What a joy to work with Jim Hicks and Emily Wojcik who nurture my work to become its best self!

Once in Odesa

Once my father brought oranges from Moscow
To Odesa
A rare bit of jubilant luck
In an otherwise terse existence
I tore the peel with my teeth
For the bitter sweetness
Once my grandmother bought a magnifying glass
In Odesa
Where I didn’t miss
What I didn’t know
I trained the tamed sun
On the wood of my father’s desk
Until it charred
Once there were gypsy moths
In Odesa
Trees whispered in thick webs
Glistening, slithering
Hordes of spines
Once I cracked some branches
In Odesa
For the magnifying glass
The caterpillars hissed
As they turned to ash
And I watched transfixed
Once the feral flames cracked air
In Odesa
And a tattered cat crunched
A mole
Once my mother took me for a photo
In Odesa
Black and white and sepia
I wrapped my arms around her neck
And cried
Once on a train whose wheels chug-chugged us away
From Odesa
As the trees outside sprinted backwards
My skin left an oily imprint
On the window
Once there was a city without air raids
In Odesa
Where waters lapped and acacias bloomed
And people did people things
And didn’t try to imagine
What they couldn’t

The best job in the world

There was this one weekday, in early spring, when winter digs in its heels, when I was out of school for some reason. I must have been in fourth or fifth grade. I have a feeling that there was some kind of an all-school performance that evening, but it’s just a feeling, one of those slippery hard-to-unfurl impressions. I loved these days off when I could linger in bed, half-awake, stretching like a cat, with no obligations.

Later in the day, I went for a walk with my grandmother, a retired doctor, to the Primorskiy Boulevard. She wore her winter coat with the mink collar, a handful of rodent heads hanging off it onto her chest, scowling, eyes propped open with some preservative, a macabre trophy of someone else’s hunt. I was probably in my black imitation down coat with the hat that looked like an astronaut’s helmet that my mother knitted for me in one of her few free moments. The northern wind lashed a few clouds around an otherwise clear sky. We sat on a bench staring out into the sea, when an acquaintance of hers joined us. As they chatted, I slid into my own daydreamy world, as I’d often done in those days.

It’s one of those moments of comfort of childhood that we all keep and cherish. It would take me years to name that feeling, my one ambition for my future, the best job in the world: to be retired. But here I am, another winter hanging on, and I have not achieved that goal. Yet.   

You get what you pay for

Red-tipped tree season
The wind cracks flimsy Trump flags
Like cheap umbrellas

Little things

And again it rains
Ashes
A bomb’s answer to resistance
Stone smashed into particle and paste

Today I saw a picture of a girl
No more than nine
Playing chess with an old man
Her big stuffed bear
Stood behind her leaning
Against the damp sandstone
Of the dim bomb shelter’s wall

Was the hand in the gravel
Gloved thinly in dirt and pebbles
Half-open in half-supplication
Its nails defiant in Rouge Fatal
Her mother’s?

What men do

I read the news
The letters swoon distorted
Ashamed of the words they form

Black type careens inside my head
Metal against bone
A prisoner’s bowl
Swept against the rusted bars
Of his cell’s door

The stench of rotting flesh
Clogs my throat
I can’t disgorge
The terrifying sound
Of what men do

This man cannot remain in power

Streams of blood glisten

Shards of bone crunch under feet

Pussy willow weeps