Giedrė Kazlauskaitė, born in 1980, studied Lithuanian literature at Vilnius University, where she tried (and still might succeed) writing a doctoral dissertation. Her first book was prose, her second - poetry. Giedrė's third book, written together with Father Julius Sasnauskas, presents commentary on the gospels. Since 2010, she was served as the editor of the weekly cultural periodical Šiaurės Atėnai (Athens of the North).
Anna Halberstadt was born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania. At the age of eighteen she moved to Moscow to study psychology at Moscow State University. She immigrated to New York twelve years later and earned a degree in social work. Since 1980, she has worked as a clinician, teacher, and administrator of mental health clinics. Anna has published many works in the field of psychology but has found poetry to be a more adequate and condensed way to expand on the same themes—growing up as a child of Holocaust survivors in a country still struggling with past trauma, living in three countries (Lithuania, Russia, U.S.), and immigration. Her creative work has appeared in Bluestem, Forge, Amarillo Bay, Cimarron Review, St. Petersburg Review, Tiferet and Mudfish, and in translation in the Lithuanian journals Literatūra Ir Menas and Šiaurės Atėnai. She lives in New York with her husband, the artist Vitaly Komar.
Anna Halberstadt was born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania. At the age of eighteen she moved to Moscow to study psychology at Moscow State University. She immigrated to New York twelve years later and earned a degree in social work. Since 1980, she has worked as a clinician, teacher, and administrator of mental health clinics. Anna has published many works in the field of psychology but has found poetry to be a more adequate and condensed way to expand on the same themes—growing up as a child of Holocaust survivors in a country still struggling with past trauma, living in three countries (Lithuania, Russia, U.S.), and immigration. Her creative work has appeared in Bluestem, Forge, Amarillo Bay, Cimarron Review, St. Petersburg Review, Tiferet and Mudfish, and in translation in the Lithuanian journals Literatūra Ir Menas and Šiaurės Atėnai. She lives in New York with her husband, the artist Vitaly Komar.
Meaning of Life
Running in the Park
Dresses Waiting for Their Hour
Meaning of Life
To go somewhere, to see something. A WOMAN ON THE BUS ON THE PHONE If he is at least, well-to-do, then automatically–an idiot. I doubt if he agrees to go with her to a so-so show. Here I stand, Martin Luther. Oh she is so classy, that bows descending in air on vertical viola strings-funicular cables form her Cartesian coordinate system. She could be working as a therapist trying to have young women articulate their life goals. If I were born in Ancient Greece I could be a potter I'd be interpreting eyes looking into themselves. If I were born before the revolution maybe I'd be a libertine, servicing Napoleon's men (only war turns these shmucks into men.) If I were born over a hundred years ago, in a Žemaitė story I wouldn't have lasted longer than twenty five, would have died from appendicitis. What would I want to do this weekend? Watch some stupid movies on TV, weep when emotional tensions reach catharsis, knit. More than tomorrow, I wish I had lived yesterday.
Running in the Park
Snails on the road: some smashed by cars and bicycles. Still can't run by them indifferently, I tear them off from the asphalt, push them aside, interfere with their karma. I'm really afraid of them bypassing me. Mom's silk dress: brown, with polka dots I used to hold on to it before I was born. I used to count the dots, but did not finish counting. Like acacia petals they are in the ground: they. It seems, I've experienced all kinds of feelings, I no longer desire people applauding, a locket with a lock of hair, a knight to fall in love with me and a gold cage for a talking parrot, in which I could sing; Stroking (including against fur), shoes with Achilles' heels. Instead of counting polka dots, I am dialing letters slowly in an old fashioned phone dial, and it helps to annihilate senselessness. I no longer desire many things, that I used to long for so much– I no longer need the sea, foreign countries, a home, some type of music- I can do without it altogether. I no longer want to learn languages, to meet Interesting people, live like a exquisite hetaera or a noble ascetic. I no longer need children, feel more distant from them and closer to the useless Internet isolation. I no longer buy those books , that I was dreaming about; delicacies that I could not afford to buy. I no longer get nosebleeds from playing the flute. Great passions are all in the past, nothing grandiose under the sun will take place: knowing and understanding also seems like breach of privacy. I no longer desire to love God with an open heart, I don't doubt His existence, I don't observe his commandments: don't look for new stars on the shoulder-straps of my greatcoat, don't wait for the boldly arriving spring. When I jump in the river from the bridge, that I often see in my dreams looking for my symbolic rebirth, diving back into the amniotic fluid surrounding the embryo, going back into the womb and getting baptized again— I desire only to feel: I am alive and water is washing over my soul.
Dresses Waiting for Their Hour
It's so banal to congratulate on birthdays repeat wishes in the Teletubbies manner show off by attaching emoticons. You can't stand stuffed animals, even shiver with disgust in the shopping center, having to cross this department of love corpses, the shelf with childhood caskets. Dresses from fabrics, that are almost extinct flower petals and leaves of tobacco, wrinkled old candy wrappers, found on the road we used to dress pebbles in them, because dolls were too banal from velvet, cremplene and silk from souls of beliefs Dresses in the closet at the summerhouse. Dresses that are inherited from one generation by another, as body measurements they have absorbed the light of years and decades— plaid, or with flowers or dots. So beautiful, but the time for them did not come yet. You are still not ready, still did not change your outlook on life, you have to somehow represent yourself not through your clothes, not through your children or other domestics' beauty and accomplishments. Even the red corset, with down sown to it, from your adolescence God knows from where, maybe a thrift shop is dreaming of the time, when you buy a poodle or another cute dog to dress up. O my beloved ones, I need you to be my muses, but you are missing from my wardrobe.
