I was almost two, and it was altogether a more innocent time, when my family immigrated from Kyiv to Chicago. Reagan was the president-elect, and Disco Demolition Night in Comiskey Park only a few months in the rearview. In those days, my babblings came out in Russian...

Agua-viva means jellyfish in Portuguese. More often than not, we don’t see jellyfish, we feel them: they sting our legs or arms, they burn our backs and stomachs, their acid licks at wounds that we never knew we had.

I felt Fénelon’s hands on my shoulder and pushed him away violently. He had traces of tears on his sunken cheeks from lamenting his lost virility. He was in a bad way. I took all his money; I left him only...

If I was writing about trash, I needed to investigate its history. The Covanta incinerator in Newark burns five miles from my house. Beside my office in Queens is the landfill buried under Flushing Meadows Park. I learned that the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of garbage...

Snowed in during a storm in January 2024, I found myself reading Byron. I was idle and concerned about early signs of dementia in my dad, and needed something to “withdraw myself from myself,” as Byron once proclaimed was his motive for writing. I knew and liked some of Byron’s shorter poems, and was familiar with his “mad, bad, and dangerous” persona...

On the 6th of October—after almost a year of war—tanks surround Jabalia camp for the second time, attacking hospitals and preventing anyone from entering or leaving. People flood into our area laden with belongings...