Michelle Dashevsky
For Audi
we were uncertain.
we soared to water.
we undressed.
beneath an impossible sky,
we drenched ourselves
in summer.
raspberry-tongued and wild,
a coterie of two.
how the lake beckoned
our sad shimmering
to its cool.
one night we concluded together, that
a girl dissolves only when
she is alone in carrying
the carnage of her countries.
we drank this until we could survive on it.
we ran in.
the moon pink, the sky blushing,
the golden water glowing
and glowing.
underneath an impossible sky, we swore off the dissolving forever.
you laughed and it was an incantation, all your teeth showing.
to make one’s home in a particular place or with a particular person;
to live:
to linger with you in the briefness of water—
to become daughters together. of the darkening sun.
Michelle Dashevsky is a 2021 graduate of the University of Rochester, with degrees in Comparative Literature and International Relations. She was the recipient of a Young Memory Fellowship (2020) for her poem “in the red-violet dust of an utter destruction”. Her writing is fueled by questions surrounding her ancestors and her identity as a child of Soviet-Jewish parents from Ukraine. She is currently working on a documentary poetry cycle and photography project about intergenerational Soviet-Jewish identities passed down through lineages of women, as this is what currently fascinates her the most. She loves photographing her friends on film, sunset swimming, and reading next to open windows in the rain.
Liminal Transit Review 