Jessica Ramer
Mash Note to Dostoyevsky
Turgenev called you the nastiest
Christian he had ever met.
Critics despised your pious
submission, not knowing
our prisons are coiling gyri,
the very stuff of God.
We must submit.
At the Siberian katorgi,
floggers plied their trade, spoke,
voices choking, of their calling,
swallowed saliva as other men do
when talking about cunt.
Flayed by Siberian hell and divine
epileptic ecstasy, you had no skin,
throbbed like a five-foot abscess
of interictal irritability.
Yet, I loved you after your first
twelve sentences, studied Russian
to roll your words over my tongue,
created dialogues for us because
you knew. You knew.
Jessica Ramer is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has appeared in South 85 and The Keats Letters Project. She was a summer 2017 resident at the Alderworks Alaska Writers & Artists Retreat.
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