A Poem by Boris Dralyuk

Jonah

Was this the end? He couldn’t rightly say.
There was no light. He lost all track of time.
If there was rumbling, it was too sublimely
steady to discern. Senses betrayed him.

Except, of course, there was the mealy smell
of his unlucky neighbors. Scales and slime
stuck to his fingers, too. He thought the climate
was hellish, even for a fish’s belly.

It’s true, at first he did give in to tears,
but these soon mingled with the brine and dried.
And in the end he grew to like the calm.

He hadn’t written anything in years,
but something in the rhythm of the tide …
He offered up a little psalm.

Boris Dralyuk is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is co-editor (with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski) of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution and Ten Poems from Russia, and translator of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Review of Books, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, First Things, The Georgia Review, Subtropics, Raritan, and elsewhere. His collection My Hollywood and Other Poems will appear from Paul Dry Books in April 2022.