THIS IS HOW SOVIET SOLDIERS DID IT

Kat Mulligan

Consulting the distance, he smoked, cigarette pitched against his thumb

and shrouded by the curl of his fingers.

This is how Soviet soldiers did it, he told me, when

midnight hung like laundry over the battlefield

and, after a day of firing verdicts into enemy souls,

the light of a cigarette could not be an executioner too.

He said that snipers lay in wait for soft pleasures,

for the lambent flicker of upset nerves, and who can say if that’s true?

We were haunting a suburban parking lot, full century gone

from the troughs of wounds that irrigated our motherlands,

and still he smoked as if he were in danger of fertilizing the outskirts

of some Cossack village. Of sending himself, ruined, back to his mother.

Gazing, he created his mythos of smoke, did not look at me

but sometimes sang Russian torch songs in my name

as he stationed himself, ushanka-clad, in the woods with his rifle,

beckoning deer that were too shy and sparse to be beckoned

and daydreaming of absorbing bullets with my photograph

on the outskirts of some Cossack village.

That miserable parking lot was no Odessa. He wanted romance

where there was only a fifty-year hiatus from the draft

and the occasional war drawn up in a Washington skyscraper.

Ranking senseless, heroic death above his visa to this concrete sprawl, hungering

for the salt of Europe, for his body to be sown and scythed within the same field,

receiving only this bootleg midnight and the freedom to smoke in peace.

His fingers blotted the flame from the distance’s sightline,

though no one sought vengeance against our soft pleasures—only his mother

to whom he would return in ruin for having concealed his whereabouts,

the hand that uprooted him from the field he could have romped in

until collapse.