Anton Yakovlev [USA / Russia]

 

Haven
 
At midnight, the cashier read aloud the Times:
a new rat-like animal has been engineered alive.
The cashier watched the customers, lonely,
but they just squeaked, “That’s disgusting!”
 
He has stood behind this counter enough
to fathom their famed open hearts:
joy at milk cartons when they are the right color,
exact change when hurry pats their back,
“Have a nice night [and maybe free food tomorrow?]”
 
In cameo epiphany, every week and a half,
he switches languages to greet some
late-night visitor from his old piano realm,
bask in his past standing ovations overseas.
A night owl, you once listened to him yourself
at five in the morning, and your own life bubbled up:
 
gallows traded for rats in the cargo hold,
ninja stealth in primary-color containers.
And what if the captain always had tango on his mind?
It’s been decades, and still you paint blood on every canvas.
 
Candles with both sides sealed up
guard the porch of your doorless house.
Sprinklers soak the warden-like vultures.
The empty airport calls to you again:
you put out flowers to invite the planes, but the skies are the skies.
 
 
How It Feels
 
A giant mattress with a face hovered over city streets
singing the least relaxing lullaby.
 
An incorporeal pilot piloted a plane,
as well he should have, save for being incorporeal.
 
           The credits rolled.
                                               You were dead.
 
I ordered soft serve at the overlook.
Two spies pulled up and killed me with kindness.
 
                                               Meanwhile, you were dead.
 
If I had known to think of you then, I would have imagined
a black hole working up the courage to spit out planets.
 
            The credits rolled.
 
I fertilized grudges, snake-handled mistakes,
learned to learn then learned to stop learning.
 
                                             Meanwhile, you were dead.
 
Now my life expectancy is a movie
and your life is immune from my understanding.
 
           The credits roll in reverse.
 
In an old shot, you look off camera.
I follow your eyes, trying to see what you saw,
 
until your eyes spill out of my own sockets and roll
down the hall where the killed hang from every halogen lamp.
 
 
The Satanist of Chestnut Avenue
 
Her evenings are a parade of offerings
of fertilizer to her small community garden.
In weekly helpings of casual sucker-punching
she gives coworkers a glimpse of her badass core:
 
“It would take a true American hero to change
my mind about the ordeal of having children.”
As if she really can’t keep her phone from dying,
what with all the suitors draining her battery.
 
When her coworkers budget for a mountain
and expect, at least, the sun and the Milky Way,
she budgets for a hill, expects a hill,
and always gets a hill.
 
Incompetence leaves her seething, but only briefly.
She has never missed a suggested target.
Successful deliverable after successful deliverable,
nothing changes except the calendar year.
 
And so the American hero becomes a god
and the sucker-punching smacks of De Sade.
One day she actually forgets her ringtone.
She takes more bicycle rides.
 
She would dust off her Satanic Bible,
design a Master’s in witchcraft.
But there’s always another plant she must keep alive.
So, rage in hand, she trudges back to her community garden.
 
 
 
Author’s Bio:
 
*Anton Yakovlev, born in Moscow, Russia, is a poet and translator writing in English. His full-length poetry collection “One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean” came out in June 2024 from ELJ Editions. His fourth poetry chapbook “Chronos Dines Alone” (SurVision Books, 2018) won the James Tate Prize. His poems have appeared in over sixty journals including “The New Yorker”, “The Hopkins Review”, “Crab Orchard Review”, “Plume”, “Poetry Daily”, and elsewhere. The bilingual collection “The Last Poet of the Village: Selected Poems by Sergei Yesenin Translated by Anton Yakovlev” was published by Sensitive Skin Books in 2019. Anton is a graduate of Harvard University and works in educational publishing. He is a former education director at Bowery Poetry Club and currently co-hosts two poetry reading series in New York and New Jersey.