—Sergei Korolev in Kolyma Gulag, 1938—1941
This is how Stalin fed us in the gulags: cold
and hungry, we became our own fuel. My legs,
sour pickles bloated with air, the Crab Nebula
scuttling through purple scurvy blotches reaching
to my ankles, starved for any stellar dust to pull
into its hot mouth and form a star. By my
stigmata, I became my own savior. Shoveling
glacial dirt for mass graves wasn’t hard, but
thinking about it was. The nightmare recurred less
and less the more nights I spent sleepless: my baby girl,
Natalia, breast milk on her mouth, sleeping across my
wife’s elbow. The secret police storming our flat like
an autumn flurry of leaves, beating me with black asps,
kicking my face with a boot worn down from Russian
winters. The sock seeped out like a snail from its shell,
sliding over my tongue. They called me a traitor and I
disappeared like snow in a kettle. I was guilty
of sabotage because someone said so. And no
matter how many letters I sent Comrade Stalin,
he never wrote a word back. I worked all day
on tea, a sugar cube, and a slice of stale bread—
a potato sometimes, if I got lucky. When my teeth
started falling out in a trickle of anemic blood,
I’d spit them out and try to think about something else.
We got breaks from the mines when boxcars
arrived with piles of bodies we’d need to bury.
First, we searched their mouths for gold or silver
teeth, snapped them off, and gave them to the guards.
Then dug. Once, one of my canines fell out into a
clean bullet hole on a broad man’s back. The
bloody spit was an ice-fishing hole freezing
over quick as the shadow of a plane passing by—
My tooth in the solid flesh glistened like veins
of metal in mines. The Milky Way was bright
as frozen milk that night. One day, I promised myself,
I’d replace my teeth with gold glinting even brighter.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 3.
John-Michael Bloomquist lives in the DC area with his wife and their needy black cat, Zbigniew Herbert. His poetry has been published in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Third Coast, The Southeast Review, White Stag, Heavy Feather Review, Aquifer: The Florida Review, and many others. He volunteers as a Solar System Ambassador with NASA/JPL. He can be found at www.john-michaelpbloomquist.comSee all items about John-Michael Bloomquist
