Nobel

I didn’t expect the Nobel Prize for Literature to be given until next week. But I woke up this morning and found out today was the day and I remembered last year how I was rooting for Svetlana Alexeivich and figured I’d root for her again. I even looked at my copy of Voices from Chernobyl on the shelf and thought I should take it in my purse, like that would be the charm, but decided to do what I could to care a little bit less.

I was glad I hadn’t been anticipating it a whole week, and it would just be a few hours. And bingo. How exciting. Alexievich won. She said she was ironing when she found out. I haven't been as pleased since Herta Müller won in 2009, and before her Wislawa Szymborska in 1996. I am partial to Eastern Europe, and women writers. 

Voices from Chernobyl is a great and devastating book. I took it from the library at my mom’s house, a couple years ago, and later decided to buy it. 

By chance, last week I found out DMQ nominated my poem “Newlyweds, Ukraine 1986” for Best of the Net. It’s a found poem and the source text is the prologue to Voices from Chernobyl.

Newlyweds, Ukraine 1986
Poem found in the prologue of Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

I don't know what I should talk about—about death or about
summertime. Who’s going to explain how the mouth wants

a kiss, and a flame the whole sky? At first there were little
lesions in the morning. They came off in layers—white film, 

a transparent curtain. Then burns like black handkerchiefs
came to the surface. The trolleys stopped running, the trains. 

They were washing the streets with white powder. No
one told us a coffin could be built from a loaf of bread.

Barefoot in his formal wear my love squeezed into bed.
There was an orange on his table. A swollen one, pink. 

He smiled: “I got a gift. Take it.” The nurse was gesturing
through the plastic film that I can't eat it. It had been near 

him a while. Not only could you not eat it, you shouldn't 

even look at it. “Come on,” he said, “you love oranges.”