R-KV-R-Y
A Quarterly Literary Journal
A Quarterly Literary Journal
POETRY BY RICHARD WIRICK
THREE SIBERIAN POSTCARDS
MOVEABLE CITY
Centenary Italio Calvino
We were at a primitive airport in the Altai region. The man in back of me was
returning to Mongolia and put a hard-shell suitcase, end up, on the conveyor belt as
he presented his ticket. I was through already, holding my boarding pass, and the
security woman motioned me over to her X-ray monitor. Dozens of little men were
sawing timber inside the Samsonite, stripping, planing and loading the white spruce
trunks onto trucks whose beds they tightened with tiny fiber cables. These roads of
labor twined up through frilly garment pockets and zippered inner compartments.
Signs divided them. There were tunnels, pulleys, elevators bringing in fresh crews
and taking the exhausted away. Men took off their helmets and wiped their brows,
and when they resumed their faces were contorted with microscopic grimaces of pain.
At the top a leader leaned out from the balcony of a shirt collar, surrounded by
underlings with clipboards, giving directions with a stick no larger than a needle. The
woman looked at the Mongol man. He smiled. He held up the forms whose “No”
boxes he had truthfully checked for toxins, fruits and insects, liquid fuels, forbidden
items.
AWE
Goyen had never been to Siberia before, and the crisp severity of the place pooled
around him in his midnight stopover. This was the place, he knew, where trees
exploded from the unbelievable temperatures, where the ice of the rivers thundered
and pounded away at the pilings of city bridges. Standing on the tarmac in front of
the Tupelov’s engines, he marveled at the crunch of his step: the permafrost was
buoyant, alive: as springy to the touch as the rubber asphalt he had run on as a
teenage track competitor. When he exhaled, the cloud of his breath hardened and
stood suspended for a moment, then fell crashing upon his boots like puffs of tossed
up sand. This was the “breathing of the stars” he’d read of, and he tried it a couple
of times before he heard the rising whine of whatever it was coming out of the
mountains behind him. The man was running toward him out of the darkness; he
was, after all, the only one who hadn’t taken advantage of the warmth of the long,
still lighted barge of the terminal lounge. The sound had risen to a peal. He felt the
waves of it sloshing over him like an undertow. When they washed him out of the
rims of the turbine his severed hand had a single finger raised, a nubbin of wonder.
LOVED A WOMAN WHO WASN’T CLEAN
Warner had no idea the Hubshi woman would occupy his dreams, and even the half-
sleep shreds of waking life that slowly soaked him every night into unconsciousness.
He’d recognized her as a Khasbass: the Tatar cheekbones, a thin blue wire necklace
hung with yellowed wolf teeth. She ran the canteen on the road he drove to the new
Siberian geological site. He’d hung around one night after she closed and they flirted,
listened to Moscow rap stations on the jukebox, drank grain alcohol and Armenian
cognac. They’d groped each other standing up against the stockroom door. He
touched the wiry region underneath her toolbelt. The first night she appeared as if
inflated in front of his window, her face encrusted with pufferfish-like spines, the blue
necklace trailing his furniture like a kite string. Subsequent evenings had her face
assembling itself in internally collapsing and reappearing segments of silver, like an
escalator of weightless, persistent mercury. He knew a shaman had observed their
tryst. All visitors to these roads were seen as conquerors, contaminating agents. By
the third appearance, she was insubstantial, foggy, filling the column of air before his
bed like a drape of crystals. The window wasn’t completely closed and a breeze came
in. She lifted and disappeared, leaving only a tang of kerosene and piney gravel.
MOVEABLE CITY
Centenary Italio Calvino
We were at a primitive airport in the Altai region. The man in back of me was
returning to Mongolia and put a hard-shell suitcase, end up, on the conveyor belt as
he presented his ticket. I was through already, holding my boarding pass, and the
security woman motioned me over to her X-ray monitor. Dozens of little men were
sawing timber inside the Samsonite, stripping, planing and loading the white spruce
trunks onto trucks whose beds they tightened with tiny fiber cables. These roads of
labor twined up through frilly garment pockets and zippered inner compartments.
Signs divided them. There were tunnels, pulleys, elevators bringing in fresh crews
and taking the exhausted away. Men took off their helmets and wiped their brows,
and when they resumed their faces were contorted with microscopic grimaces of pain.
At the top a leader leaned out from the balcony of a shirt collar, surrounded by
underlings with clipboards, giving directions with a stick no larger than a needle. The
woman looked at the Mongol man. He smiled. He held up the forms whose “No”
boxes he had truthfully checked for toxins, fruits and insects, liquid fuels, forbidden
items.
AWE
Goyen had never been to Siberia before, and the crisp severity of the place pooled
around him in his midnight stopover. This was the place, he knew, where trees
exploded from the unbelievable temperatures, where the ice of the rivers thundered
and pounded away at the pilings of city bridges. Standing on the tarmac in front of
the Tupelov’s engines, he marveled at the crunch of his step: the permafrost was
buoyant, alive: as springy to the touch as the rubber asphalt he had run on as a
teenage track competitor. When he exhaled, the cloud of his breath hardened and
stood suspended for a moment, then fell crashing upon his boots like puffs of tossed
up sand. This was the “breathing of the stars” he’d read of, and he tried it a couple
of times before he heard the rising whine of whatever it was coming out of the
mountains behind him. The man was running toward him out of the darkness; he
was, after all, the only one who hadn’t taken advantage of the warmth of the long,
still lighted barge of the terminal lounge. The sound had risen to a peal. He felt the
waves of it sloshing over him like an undertow. When they washed him out of the
rims of the turbine his severed hand had a single finger raised, a nubbin of wonder.
LOVED A WOMAN WHO WASN’T CLEAN
Warner had no idea the Hubshi woman would occupy his dreams, and even the half-
sleep shreds of waking life that slowly soaked him every night into unconsciousness.
He’d recognized her as a Khasbass: the Tatar cheekbones, a thin blue wire necklace
hung with yellowed wolf teeth. She ran the canteen on the road he drove to the new
Siberian geological site. He’d hung around one night after she closed and they flirted,
listened to Moscow rap stations on the jukebox, drank grain alcohol and Armenian
cognac. They’d groped each other standing up against the stockroom door. He
touched the wiry region underneath her toolbelt. The first night she appeared as if
inflated in front of his window, her face encrusted with pufferfish-like spines, the blue
necklace trailing his furniture like a kite string. Subsequent evenings had her face
assembling itself in internally collapsing and reappearing segments of silver, like an
escalator of weightless, persistent mercury. He knew a shaman had observed their
tryst. All visitors to these roads were seen as conquerors, contaminating agents. By
the third appearance, she was insubstantial, foggy, filling the column of air before his
bed like a drape of crystals. The window wasn’t completely closed and a breeze came
in. She lifted and disappeared, leaving only a tang of kerosene and piney gravel.
Richard Wirick was born in the Midwest and lives in Los Angeles. He is a co-founding editor of Transformation and
his work has appeared in Quarterly West, Fiction, Northwest Review, Mind, and elsewhere. His book of short
stories, So Slow is the Rose to Open, is forthcoming in late 2005.
his work has appeared in Quarterly West, Fiction, Northwest Review, Mind, and elsewhere. His book of short
stories, So Slow is the Rose to Open, is forthcoming in late 2005.