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One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations by Gala Mukomolova

Cover Art: Lena Gustafson
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer

Paperback, 33 pages 

May 15, 2018, ISBN 978-1-936919-59-8

 

about Gala Mukomolova

 

Gala Mukomolova earned an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work has appeared in PEN, Poetry, PANK, Vinyl, and elsewhere. In 2016, Mukomolova won the 92nd Street Y Discovery/ Boston Review Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations, was released in 2018 by YesYes Books and her first full-collection, Without Protection, was released by Coffee House Press in 2019.

One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations by Gala Mukomolova

SKU: 0100055
$14.00Price
  • Winner, Vinyl 45 Chapbook Prize!

    Honorable Mention, Eric Hoffer Chapbook Award, 2018

  • Yes, I rode out west

    Yes, I rode out west with the girl I loved.

    There will be those who say I did not love her,

    I could not drive I was her passenger and

    packed apples, so much water, read her books

    aloud until the road got dark.

     

    She lived a body in my body. A pack of studs,
    my hand on her thigh, I traced each route
    along our paper map we’re almost        there almost.

     

    Long past when I was wanted I wore her ring and

    counted golden hay, the herd thinning, the clearing

    where, in August, the sun bounced off unmoving flanks.

     

    Edge of Pine Ridge, a dock with private cabins, I pressed

    my tongue to her ass the way a young girl might

    take a pressed flower from her diary and place it

    in her mouth. I was the mouth her mouth found

     

    in any darkness, I knew her, her sadness

    wormed a hole inside my throat. Each powwow

    we ate fry bread, not her grandmotherʼs

    but close. I touched the white stone face

    of Sitting Bull, monuments riddled with bullet holes.

     

    Crow fair, my poetry traded with a man

    for a painting on a patch of fur.

    This a story I know, she said. This is the archer,

    his horse, his four directions.

    This was an animal once, I thought. This is the story of a 

            body.

    A young boy cupped his hands, a stirrup, we got on.

     

    Each night my throat a pocket, grave for horses

    I want to tell you how I loved her but

    a field flooding.

     

    No. A white horse. No I wanted to wash up mythic and

            heavy

    so heavy she couldn’t lift up even one leaden leg.

    Much less claim me.

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