Introducing Poems from Taurus:
| Attachment: Virtual Matryoshka Dream Over Dream from The Scrapbook of Yevgeny the Robot Arm |
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A few years into the millenium, I was staying in a hotel in St. Petersburg, a converted apartment just off of Nevsky Prospekt. Mine was one of several small, steamy rooms around a shared bath. Each room had a single, springless bed and a tiny desk.
It was almost the summer solstice—white nights—and after tossing and turning in the light, I went down to the breakfast room for kasha and a hard-boiled egg. When I got back upstairs, I noticed that the door to a room near mine was wide open. The room looked as if it had been abandoned in haste.
Strewn on the floor were heaps of papers with Cyrillic writing, some typed, some in a hard, jagged hand. I started gathering these papers up, I'm not sure why. Since I didn't know Russian, I took some pages down to the desk clerk
Shaking his head and shrugging, he translated slashes of handwriting:
Have city. Have bull. Bouncer—Rock Club Winter. Robot arms? What is this? Arms in love. Russian brides, radium watch dials. These are sold. Have movies, matroschkas, personals. Borealis. Ball lightning . . . Ok. Ok. Is good. A bull-gargoyle. Comes to life. Sometimes a god possesses him. A model. Mysterious. Name: Europa. Bull meets girl, and all hell breaks loose.