are these guys gay or merely
from Moscow
you enjoy Ukrainian Russian
mixing up the prepositions
hugging in the Tretyakov gallery
diluting Russian with Ukrainian
arguing about where it’s better
dear
what difference does it make in what metro we’re disguised
what difference does it make from whom we run
from a redneck with the mug of a killer and a cap saying Russia
or from young skinheads with swastikas
at Lybedskaya station
what difference what they will call our concentration camp
cause even with my teeth kicked in I can still
give you head
cause your hand broken by one more russifuhrer
won’t get in the way
of your fucking my eyeballs out
as never before
ditch them all
let’s go and fuck in queer solidarity –
at the most crucial moment I enclasp your postmodernism
with unrestrained anarchy
and squeeze it so tightly
everything that we can speak of later
non-binary
feminitives
today warmed by you and rolled
into a warm curl I feel
the small remaining burst from the firing
of your weapon
oh-oh-oh thousands of small fires
in my tiny vagina
randomly lighting up
like a glimmering arrhythmia
like the beats of my stack
all I can think about in my seat #31
of the moscow-odessa train with the misgendering
conductor is that
no scum with insignia
assuming that I am a foreign agent
no shmuck spewing out
his verbal officialese deliberately and carelessly
and then
surprisingly articulately asking in front of everyone
what year did I have my gender reassigned
no stinking fsb trash
fuckers with rotten teeth and tridents in camouflage
no bad Russian air
nor nationalist Ukrainian dream
no moustached customs bedbugs
pointing their dirty nailbitten fingers at my
anal plug what the fuck is this you’re carrying
will ever reach that place inside
where you tune me like a cello
pressing so strongly and so exactly
more and more
listening to the timbre of my rattle
up until the very point
when the small beads of tears meet
with the traces of your
kisses
Notes on this poem
Originally from the war-torn city of Donetsk, Friedrich Chernyvshov is a trans*gender person currently living in Kiev. To be trans*gender in Ukraine means to belong to a subculture, thus in his poetry there are recurring themes of otherness, unacceptability, and frustration with archaic norms and standards. The realities of Donetsk are fraught with bigotry, cruelty, and violence as it is, but especially so for trans*gender people, forcing them to go into isolation, self-willed exile, and relocation. In a sense, Chernyshov has experienced a double whammy of xenophobia and internal displacement, victimised both by the city of his origins and by old-fashioned society whose values still reign in Ukraine.
But as many young poets of his generation who were raised in a post-Soviet world, Chernyshov seems to belong more to international than national poetry. As a translator from German, he is familiar with contemporary trends in European poetry. There is a sense of breaking with the old culture, as well as traditional forms of poetry, in technique, style, as well as content. His poetry can range from extremely lyrical to harsh and abrupt in tone. In his poetry, he o%en reacts to his surroundings, mostly as an outsider in a world that refuses to understand or accept him. Being critical of both the invader and the invaded, he writes, for example, about crossing the border on a Moscow-Odessa train:
…no stinking fsb trash
fuckers with rotten teeth and tridents in camouflage
no bad Russian air
nor nationalist Ukrainian dream
no moustached customs bedbugs…
Other times he addresses ‘the Other’ with intimacy and touching lyricism: ‘your body / in the whimsical pose’. Clearly he is a poet of the Zuckerberg generation, line-breaks in his poems occurring as they would in an sms or an email, resulting in immediacy of style. Chernyshov regularly posts on social media and has a significant following in Kiev, both for his poetry and his activism on behalf of trans*gender people.
