Portside

Echoes from the Odyssey

By Oksana Maksymchuk   

When the air raid’s over

I still hear them: sirens

airing their wings

on the ghostly boulders of buildings

swelling out of the morning mist

War is warm this year, yet

they’re wearing icy armor

each feather frozen —

a cut-throat razor or

a delicate rounded coin

with a protruding spine

Merciless, guiltlessly 

unabating, sirens 

sing when I close my eyes

stinging them from the inside

with icy quills

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. In the recent years, she has been splitting her time between Chicago, Budapest, Warsaw, and her hometown of Lviv, Ukraine. Connect with her on her website www.oksanamaksymchuk.com.