Odesa, City of Odysseus
by Olga Livshin
baptized by a Russian empress, phantom, father,
women selling strawberries and sarcasm, sunburned crowds
thirsty for a sip of sea: who returns to you now?
My pockmarked cake of the opera house, city
shaped like a cry that all its native writers left, beehive
attacked for being alive: when can we return?
My friends who stayed, who sighed and disobeyed,
write their Ukrainian histories. My friends
who would never leave but saw their names
under “to be eliminated,” in their native Russian,
friends who gave up peaceful old age, seaside edens
for exile, who now speak to Odesa in pixels—
why must every Ithaca become a battleground?
My castle in the air, murdered passersby
dissolving in the air, in family tales, in recent days.
My pet perils, pogroms in a coffee cup,
windows open at two AM onto cheap dance music,
acacia’s sweet tongues, never-leaving fear.
City of ochre light, city hit
by the mafia that created it,
can you return to yourself.
Olga Livshin’s poetry appears in AGNI, Poetry, The Southern Review, and others. She is the author of A Life Replaced (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019) and translator of Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).