Without Protection

Gala Mukomolova

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781566895521
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

From Russian fairy tales to Craigslist ads, stories of identity, family, and sexuality are unraveled and woven anew in poems of a woman caught between two worlds.

In poems rich with sensuality and discord, Mukomolova explores her complex identity—Russian, Jewish, refugee, New Yorker, lesbian—through the Russian tale of Vasilyssa, a young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga. Heavy with family and fable, these poems are a beautiful articulation of difference under duress.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Heroine & the Witch
• There’s always a forest I know
• Return
• On the Brighton Beach boardwalk
• We go around in a circle
• I saw a woman lunge into the pit
• Vasilyssa Comes to Call
• Body, mud-wet field
• She calls me just like I knew she would
• Received
• High school wasn’t always two towers crashing
• Tenderness
• There’s a young man, a teenager
• Found
• Vasilyssa Wants to Know What Love Is
• L. visits me for nine days
• Nor’easter and new moon
• Twenty, sunburnt at Brooklyn Pride
• I’m on the sixth floor, Jenny’s on third
• Coney Island Vasya
• I’ve been to Riis Beach
• As if it were against better judgment
• Found
• After Manuela, a telenovela dubbed in Russian
• Vasilyssa Considers the Dark Path
• He begins by sliding the edge against stone
• I ask my mother for something small
• My brother
• All night the squirrels
• Kitchen
• Good girl
• Copernicus
• Valentine
• In the New Yorker, a poem
• the voices of women who sound like birds
• The Key to All Locks Is a Fearless Heart
• Weekends with my mother
• But, like, where is the body?
• Pablo slides his finger through a hole
• First week of high school, the Towers fall
• Vasya, in Bed
• Floppy disks
• Eric lives above a small clinic
• You don’t love me, you say, and deflate
• I’ve really been working on my orgasmic meditation
• If a Suitor Should Come
• If Vasilyssa Is the Suitor
• I’m the grey skirt that trails behind me, ripping open
• A girl brings me home to nothing
• 2:00 on a Thursday
• Somebody is singing
• So long my neck coils tight
• Vasya/Venus/Violet/Violent
• Received
• Adaptation is a kind of trauma
• By water
• X
• Drunk, one sneaker over the other
• I was a warm live thing
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Funder Acknowledgments
• The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press