Dualism

DUALISM

- by Anfisa Osinnik

I say bird
You say song
I say sea
You say anchor
I say road
you interrupt me: road home.
Your body is surface,
surface without secrets, without tides
my body is secret,
shipwreck to all your ships
you say bird
I say bullet
You say sea
I tear down the word with the wave.
You say road.
The sea has no roads.

* * *

translated from the Russian of Anfisa Osinnik (b.1957) by Johannes Beilharz

Anfisa Osinnik was born in Siberia, Russia, and studied at the Maxim Gorki Institute for Literature in Moscow. She has been living in Rancho Viejo, Veracruz (Mexico) for fourteen years. Her first poetry collection in Spanish, Dialectos del Fuego, was published in Mexico in 2003.