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Wednesday, March 02, 2022

MY UKRAINIAN FAMILY

by Margaret D. Stetz




Sucking beer from bottles
shattering bottles in fists
punching drunk
strangling sober
seeing crucifixes as waste
of iron nails
better pried out and rammed into skulls
the Chernobility
of radioactive men—
torrents of blows
gales of curses
whipping winds
into a male-strom
pulverizing bodies
flattening weapons
sweeping clear
field city nation


Margaret D. Stetz, who is Ukrainian American, is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware. In the past year, her poems have appeared in journals such as Review Americana, Existere, Mono, A Plate of Pandemic, West Trestle Review, The Adriatic, and also in the Washington Post