
Maria Malinovskaya

Maria Malinovskaya
Translated by Sarah Vitali
*
women with stomachs ripped open
are unloaded into the cast-off bodies of cars
everyone says
they died before their time
the time that drags
them out of itself by the legs
and still drags on
the water rat speeds along the gutter
its ribbed little head flashing above the water
the proboscises of desire cleanse
the surface of a naked body
disgorged by the outpour
they use them to catch fish
in those very same waters
and sometimes dredge up dead bodies themselves
silence takes root
the rat in the spout sucks in its cheeks
they scrub the women’s stomachs clean
but find no trace of a child
each one adds a tunnel
to their interconnected voids
i don’t exist is a confession
punishable by law
after that it’s not worth asking
so what will happen to me now
the only thing more terrible than live birth
is live life
exposed
every moment
the sleepless tic of the sun
cracked open in boiling water
quiet reading round a spiral
no one remembers on deserted corners
how a dead man was ushered into life
how a live one from the other side grew deaf
and lost his caution
stumbling into their children
adults recoil
as if seeing their own ghosts
Maria Malinovskaya was born in Gomel (Belarus) in 1994. PhD-student in Contemporary Poetry Studies at The National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. Author of two books. The first one, a documentary poetry project and collection Kaimaniya (2020), is based on authentic speech of people suffering from mental disorders. The second one, The Movement of Hidden Colonies (2020), includes both lyrical and documentary poems, for instance, her ongoing documentary poetry project based on testimonies of French–Ivorian clashes survivors. Malinovskaya’s poetry has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines and translated into English, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Polish. Participant of the European Poetry Festival, the Nordic Poetry Festival. Lives in Moscow.
About wellbeing:
In my view, poetry and wellbeing have a very complex relationship. Poetry is a search for wellbeing because, ideally, writing a poem is the only way for a poet to feel right, even if the poem is self-destructive. On the other hand, today poems very often perform an (auto-) therapeutic function and tell about body/trauma. It becomes a progressive way to make some problems of modern society visible. But the more such poems appear, the more it becomes just a trend and starts serving another purposes. So, in my opinion, poetry and wellbeing will always have this attraction-repulsion relationship, and this is what makes this pair always relevant for poetry of any age, regardless of whether it tells about social inequalities, body, trauma, politics or love.