Nagorno-Karabakh: May, 1988
Death has an unfamiliar face,
a face of a drunken, unshaved man;
red bulged eyes, bad breath,
strength, muddy boots, AK-47…
Begging for mercy – logs in the fire:
burn, baby, burn;
scream, woman, scream;
cry, old man, cry…
It’s over now; it’s in the memory
of our god-forsaken earth…
Afterword: June 1994
In the street in front of a hotel
two children are playing;
a boy of five, rachitic,
and a girl with a toy pistol:
they are playing on a serious note,
and the little boy,
rather petulant and unwilling,
is told to stand up
against the piss-stained wall;
he can’t understand that he is then
supposed to fall down;
the girl shows him how –
with all the experience
of her seven years…
Lazar Trubman is a college professor from Moldavia, one of the republics which comprised the former USSR. He immigrated to the United States in 1990, after spending four years as a political prisoner in Northern Russia. He was assigned to Arizona, where he taught the Theory of Literature and Roman languages for twenty-two years. In 2017, he retired to devote his time to writing. Since then, his poetry and prose appeared in Forge Magazine, The New Reader, Kissing Dynamite, Bending Genres, Lit Mag, and others. A collection of his poems and prose is forthcoming from Adelaide Books in July 2019.
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