Dmitry Kuzmin founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets in 1989. Since 1993, he has headed ARGO-RISK Publishers (about 20 titles of present-day Russian poetry yearly) and since 1996 has edited the Vavilon Internet project, which includes an anthology of present-day Russian writing. Since 2006, he has also been editor in chief of Vozdukh (Air), a quarterly poetry magazine and of the first Russian magazine for gay writing, Risk (1996-2002). He was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize (2002). A selected poems and translations, It's good to be alive, was published in 2008 and won the Moscow Count award for best debut poetry collection. This semester, he is a Visiting Professor at Princeton University (Spring 2014).
Alex Cigale's poems have appeared in Colorado, Green Mountains, and The Literary reviews, and his translations in Cimarron Review, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, and PEN America. From 2011 unill 2013 he was Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan. Born in Chernovtsy Ukraine, he lived in St. Petersburg before immigrating to the United States.
Alex Cigale's poems have appeared in Colorado, Green Mountains, and The Literary reviews, and his translations in Cimarron Review, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, and PEN America. From 2011 unill 2013 he was Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan. Born in Chernovtsy Ukraine, he lived in St. Petersburg before immigrating to the United States.
Dmitry Kuzmin reading the poem at the PEN World Literature Festival and Bookfair in May 2014.
This is how I fuck you in the ass and in the mouth. Catullus 16 On the day of the Russian literary assembly, called together at the behest of the Office of the President by the descendants of famous writers, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Sholokhov, and Solzhenitsyn (three of the seven descendants turned out to be fake: a widow, a daughter-in-law, a third cousin thrice removed; particularly felt was the absence of the houses of Gogol and Saltykov-Schedrin,) I thought to myself: I fuck in the ass and in the mouth your spiritual ties, I fuck in the ass and in the mouth your traditional values, I fuck in the ass and in the mouth your crocodile tears shed for the most well-read (and most writers executed) nation, fuck in the ass and in the mouth your "deeply seated sense of alarm" about "impoverishment of thought and, in consequence, bewilderment of souls" among the people, on a daily basis ravished by the official media, fuck in the ass and in the mouth your panels and empowered assemblies, your commissions and committees, your banquets and buffets, I fuck in the ass and in the mouth your familial pride, you're the geese from Krylov's fable, fit only to be roasted on a spit. And in the evening, my beloved boy comes to visit me, a dreamy writer, but who collapses in exhaustion every night after a twelve hour work shift in a footwear store, and night and morning through, I fucked him in the mouth – but not in the ass, in the cunt – transsexual boys have a cunt, kissed him all over, starting from his neck and moving lower and lower, careful to avoid the not yet heeled after the mastectomy sore nipples, imbibing with my mouth between his legs, forcefully grasping his hips, so that he, twitching from the unbearability of pleasure, not bump his head against the bed's headboards, hugged him, sapped of tension and rolled up into a fetal position, and hummed a lullaby, and whispered in French words of love, and with the late November dawning of a new day, hopeless as everything else in Russia, I thought to myself: one must not fuck in the ass and in the mouth spiritual foundations, one must not fuck in the ass and in the mouth traditional values, one must not fuck in the ass and mouth the hopes and aspirations of Russian intelligentsia, elbowing each other in long lines before the metal detectors that they may do their little jig to please King Herod while complaining that no VIP passes are being handed out to the living classics: it is unhygienic – to stick your dick in that rot of festering putrescence, you could contract a wretched disease – inflamed patriotism of the cerebral membranes, syphilis of the spirit, a patriarchy of the sexual and print organs, no, comrade descendants and your bedfellow degenerates, you'll have to pullulate on your own in your cadaveric pus; I'll be saving my member for my beloveds, for my cherished mouths, the cunts precious to me, my favorite bottoms, living and undefiled, purified by the hygiene of love. I bring to the attention of the investigative authorities of the Russian Federation and of the other institutions of establishmentalized lawlessness functioning on the territory of my squalid nation: the present text is not liable under statute 6.21 of the RF legal code regarding "administrative violations of rights" even though it specifically cites "appealing to non-traditional sexual relations"; it is not intended for dissemination among minors. Anyone underage who inadvertently acquires it must immediately discard the read materials and banish any thoughts: an exemplary minor dependent of the Russian Federation, a future exemplar of a citizen of the Russian Federation, a future model writer of the Russian Federation, future model descendant of a literary figure must be occupied only with the mouthpieces of authority, that they may listen to decrees, and the anuses of authority, that they be gainfully engaged swilling them, and the cantrip with which the Russian Federation will swiftly be awash in a subject of the Russian Federation must not pay attention to at all.
Previously published in print, in Eleven Eleven 17, Journal of the California College of the Arts.
