All I Know

A poem by Kim Dower

All I know
is I might have a cousin
in Ukraine who’s sleeping
in the subway tonight
to escape the attacks
all I know is a woman
who may have my eyes
is hiding in her son’s
basement, her granddaughter
fidgeting in a crib passed down
from my Nana who fled Kiev
Kyiv as we say today
1922, the year Russia
became the Soviet Union
the year my little Nana
traveled to America on a ship
her belly filled with my mother
growing inside her, one hundred
years ago leaving Tayna,
her identical twin, behind in
Kiev, so bee-u-tee-ful she’d say
we rode horses to the river
recited Pushkin our long braids
perogies baking in the oven
all I know is there’s nothing
I can do but watch the news
see these faces that resemble
mine, hear their voices
feel their sorrow, a sadness
my Nana carried inside her
darkness and shame people carry
when they’re forced out
when they live with fear
when they have to flee a place
so bee-u-tee-ful, so green
their language of poetry, of music
buried, another generation of gorgeous
bones for our graveyards, all I know is
we’re all desperate to escape into a world
that has yet to be discovered.

Kim Dower, City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood (October 2016 — October 2018), has published four collections of poetry, all with Red Hen Press: Air Kissing on Mars, described by the Los Angeles Times as, “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” Slice of Moon, called “unexpected and sublime,” by “O” magazine, Last Train to the Missing Planet, “poems that speak about the grey space between tragedy and tenderness, memory and loss, fragility and perseverance,” said Richard Blanco, and Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, winner of the 2020 Independent Publishers Book Award Gold Medal for Poetry. Nominated for five Pushcart Prizes, Kim’s work has been featured in numerous literary journals including Plume, Ploughshares, Rattle, The James Dickey Review, Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry.” Her poems are included in several anthologies, notably, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, (Beyond Baroque Books/Pacific Coast Poetry Series,) and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles, (Tia Chucha Press.) She teaches poetry workshops for Antioch University, UCLA Extension Writer’s Program, West Hollywood Library and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.