What are You Looking At?
You are looking at a beating heart. Red Square, the front yard of rulers, named for its loveliness. You are looking at a plaza of lock-stepping uniforms and a few demonstrators. And tourists. Above them, the minarets of St. Basil’s, its onion domes disquieted by a huddle of limping babushkas holding yellowed posters and red flags in their withered hands. They are listening to a man holding a megaphone. How they bend their ears to the east, latch on to a phrase pregnant with solution. The pensioners want their meager monthly rubles. They want their borscht topped with dill, a sprig of parsley. A meat bone, perhaps. They want potatoes freshly dug. A sturdy pair of shoes. Just beyond, Vladimir Lenin flanks the square in a granite vault. You must amble with vigilance. Keep your head down and eyes open. A dog barks. A nut is shelled. A woman with a neatly pinned chignon walks by a small troop of tourists wearing knee socks and sandals. A young artist sits naked, his head down, looking at his scrotum that he’s nailed to the cobble stones. His voice the free-world’s voice. People fill the square like nerve endings. There are breadcrumbs and sparrows pecking. Children laughing. The world is the world whether you are a nanna raised in the fields or a young man from the Arbat stepping out in good street clothes. What are you looking at? Pay attention to the crenelated walls of the Kremlin, the Resurrection Gates. Visualize the widow of a Chechen rebel, how she blows herself up at the entrance.
Carine Topal was born and raised in NYC and holds a MA from New York University. She has been awarded residencies in the U.S. and Russia, and is the recipient of numerous poetry awards and honors, including the Robert G. Cohn Prose Poetry Award and the Briar Cliff Poetry Award, Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, and others. Her chapbook, Tattooed, won the Palettes and Quills Poetry Chapbook Contest. Topal’s fifth collection, In Order of Disappearance, was published by the Pacific Coast Poetry Series in 2017. Carine’s new book, Dear Blood, will be out in February 2025. She lives in Southern California with her husband— in the desert and by the sea— and teaches poetry and memoir workshops. (Photo courtesy of Scott Mitchell)
