SHŌ POETRY PRIZE RUNNER-UP: ELINA KATRIN
Beach Day with Tsvetaeva
“Everything pushes me to Russia, to which I cannot go.
I’m not needed here. I’m impossible there.”
—Marina Tsvetaeva writes from Paris in the 1930s
A fusion of inspirations and sinews—I call out to you,
Marina. Forgive my rapture with your verse, my absence
of rhyme and rhythm. An abase, a crime against literature.
You won’t avow our connection. August spits me out
to shore, and I think of how the back-and-forth of it all
stripped you of color. Your last name flowered only
to those who spoke Russian, and those who spoke Russian
uprooted all the lives you ever wrote. Marina, I fear becoming
American. Whiter than a Wonder Bread loaf. In emigration,
you longed for the country that once was, not the country
you saw emerging. You clung to Russian like a writer
to the last cigarette. I came into being in a language that has no
word for bread’s insides. Я тоскую по тебе, Марина. Nobody
here can translate “toska” just right. Maybe you’ll get a good
laugh out of this. You can fall in love again in this country
but when lovers say your name, you won’t know to turn
your head. You can teach the tongue their alphabet, learn
to imitate their sound, but you will never feel the barred sand bass.
A striped fighter hiding among the reefs, the barred sand bass
will always be just barred sand bass. A congregation of letters.
Do you read me now?
I cast the rod into the ocean and nothing bites.
AUDIO
About this Poem: Reading Marina Tsvetaeva, I found so much kinship with the poet, even though her life in emigration was so different from mine in immigration. Then, suddenly, the sheer act of comparing our experiences existing outside of Russia felt absurd to me, the inherent ridiculousness of comparing my life in America to the extent of Tsvetaeva’s suffering. I wrote “Beach Day with Tsvetaeva” almost as an apology letter to the poet, a medium that allowed for honesty, and the contrast of our lived experiences could be slightly more justified. The poem begins with “a fusion of inspirations and sinews,” which is a line I imperfectly translated from Tsvetaeva’s “Рас-стояние: версты, мили…” (“Di-stance: versts, miles…”), a poem she wrote for Boris Pasternak when she was in the Czech Republic and he lived in the USSR.
This poem was selected as the runner-up of the Shō Poetry Prize for Shō No. 9 and is forthcoming in Overwintered (Trio House Press, 2027)
Read about the Shō Poetry Prize here, or view past recipients and honorees.
Elina Katrin (@elinatkatrin) is a Syrian-Russian immigrant writer. She’s the author of Overwintered (forthcoming from Trio House Press in 2027) and a poetry chapbook If My House Has a Voice (Newfound, 2023). Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. A recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Lambda Literary, Vermont Studio Center, and Periplus, she works and organizes with Mizna as an Assistant Editor. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA, with a dream and her cardigan.
