Volume 78, 2026
DOI: 10.18422/78-2723
© Göttingen University Press

Feeling Sonnet 22.

Eugene Ostashevsky

Berlin is green. It is made up of old growth and new growth.

A fire took place here, a conflagration.

It’s called conflagration because it started with flags.

A flag is a mark. If there’s a mark, there’s a market.

I come from the market, make dinner, and engage in struggle.

It is a struggle to get my daughters to sleep. They sleep on bunk beds.

The bunk beds are contemporary. They come from Ikea.

They were transported by trucks. My daughters are transported.

There is a herd of unicorns on the rug below them. They come from
developing markets.

In markets that are already developed, philosophers say that unicorns
do not exist.

There’s only one step from the remarkable to the marketable, and the
unicorns have taken it.

So say the people of developing markets. But the philosophers do not
hear them.

A marketing campaign at the airport says this city is Done with walls.

A ring of barbed wire around the airport ensures safety.

Acknowledgements

from Eugene Ostashevsky, The Feeling Sonnets  (Carcanet and NYRB Poets, 2022)

About the author

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator whose writing is described as “translingual” because of its focus on linguistic multiplicity and interference. His latest poetry collection, The Feeling Sonnets (Carcanet / NYRB Poets, 2022), examines the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt (KookBooks, 2017), it won the 2019 Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. He first moved to Berlin as a fellow at the 2013 DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.