February 15, 2013
by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
We heard the risen, ragged sun caught fire:
first, a shadow charcoaled over Chelyabinsk
and turned the air to gunpowder, then
a constellation of ignited smoke
cinched onto clouds and swam across the sky –
foreign rock transformed to shining yellow
walleye, shedding its molten scales of gold
over the unsuspecting, frozen ground.
We missed it all: the shattered glass and panic,
the ‘end of days’ written in Russian
blood on snow, the moment when the whole
of earth turbined onto herself, begged us
to let her go. We used to read “Old Earth
is dead,” not knowing that the sky would fall.
This is the first section of a five-poem sonnet sequence titled “After the Stars Fell.” The sequence opens with an epigraph from Oscar Wilde’s short story, The Star Child, which reads: “ It slipped down the side of the sky, passing by the other stars in its course.” The entire sequence will be available in the Fall issue of Rust+Moth.
About the Author:
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, Nashville Review, and Consequence Magazine, among other journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, has been selected as the winner of Split Lip Magazine’s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and is forthcoming from Split Lip Press later this year. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine.
