My dearest Papachka,
You would know me if you held on to memory without the hippocampus. I hope the contents of your memories were transferred after your short stay with us, your family. I have red hair & your eyebrows framing my almond-shaped eyes, like yours — calculating danger. Are you living another spontaneous life? I am —, in the imagination.
Your lovers are dead. My mother has found happiness with a pianist.
Who are you with? Are you allowed to network outside the immediate circle? You had differences with you mother. She kept my mother in the snow. You love uncle Mitya endlessly. Are you with him? And your father, the listener?
I am in touch with your sister. She uses a desktop computer. She lives alone in Coney Island, the Atlantic steps away. She wants to give me the other half of your letters —, the ones you mailed her from Rome. Each envelope stamped with Michelangelo. Your instructions on mailing yourself a parcel from Kyiv to Rome were helpful to her. I didn’t know you to be so practical. You spent too much money on whatever you could get your hands on. Did you visit the museum at the Vatican after you picked up your own parcels at the post office? I have seen the Sistine Chapel twice. To the amusement of angels.
How do you manage your moods? Do you meditate?
I write when the moon is neediest. I wrote a poetry collection collecting you, but I can’t publish it. The earth is dying. I miss foraging for mushrooms in our Russian forest.
The River Styx is in a climate crisis. It’s frozen in parts that take one’s breath away. How will I be conducted to you?
At parting, I am consoled by writing. Please let me know if you have trouble reading this letter. It is composed on a laptop, my penmanship is difficult to make out. I cannot make sense of it, it represents the void. Do you go to Einstein’s lectures? He must have figured it all out, but god doesn’t care.
You don’t write! I will wait —.
Your hayis,
P.S. Write me on Mondays, it’s my lightest workday.
Stella Hayes is the author of two poetry collections, Father Elegies (What Books Press, 2024) and One Strange Country (What Books Press, 2020). She grew up in Brovary, a suburb outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Hayes earned an M.F.A. in poetry from NYU, where she taught in the undergraduate creative writing program and served as poetry editor and assistant fiction editor of Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in Image, Poet Lore, The Poetry Project, Four Way Review, Stanford University Press, and Spillway, among others. Hayes is a contributing editor at Tupelo Quarterly.