The Shade of Your Light and My Serpentine Wounds

Poems of Nuraiym Kossybak

Nuraiym’s poems speak into being a series of landscapes set against a larger background of a spacetime narrative with Biblical themes and a Yuri Gagarin fused with Jesus-type figures as both the speaker and the speaker’s beloved. The language is lovely: 

You are a Star Rover. And I am

a verse. I disappear, immerse

in the song in your ear. Still,

you hear my whistle

hover in your pulse.

In her translanguaging, Nuraiym constructs images reminiscent of the Soviet 60’s narratives and the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, in particular, the Symbolist narratives. Her prosody is characterized by internal rhyme, a song-like rhythm, and word play.  If writing poetry is difficult, then it is especially difficult to write a love poem, and Nuraiym is certainly successful in this endeavor:

Where we cannot touch

lies the golden serpent.