Portside

Unsteady Topography

By Oksana Maksymchuk

Even inside a war

I’m still at work 

making life delicious 

Mutinous pastries rise and fall

like a tidal wave

in the makeshift oven

we’ve assembled out of loose bricks

in the communal yard — 

a collective poem

In a room across the street

now and again, I catch a glimpse of

two elderly neighbors

making love

LED light glowing above them

like the moon

Standing in the full 

glare of the war, I’m a surface

reflecting its awesome light

shadows emerging due to

the unusual features

of my own darkened soul

I’m a sucker for sweetness

delicate, frothing streams

creaming the landscape  

Yet inside me, mountains crumble

craters open on the papery surface

tall load-bearing cakes 

break into a scream

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, forthcoming with University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK). She is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian. Her poems appeared in AGNI, The Irish Times, The Paris Review, The Poetry Review, and many other journals. She co-edited an anthology “Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine,” and co-translated several poetry collections. She is a recipient of the National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, and other honors. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. Born and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, she has also lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, and Fayetteville, Arkansas.