Over Tea and Tears: for Ukraine
We welcome you to Bracken’s special publication series, Over Tea and Tears: for Ukraine, dedicated to creative responses to the war against Ukraine. On no set schedule, we’ll publish works across various genres including poetry, prose, translation, and visual art from creators in the US, Ukraine, and abroad. We hope this series, curated by Editor Jed Myers and Guest Co-Editor Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, will offer, as writing and art can, ways into and transformatively out of the reality we’re faced with from our varying degrees of proximity to the atrocity. May these works help us reckon more openheartedly with what is happening in Ukraine, so that we become more empathetic, and inspired to continue taking action to help those suffering at the hands of injustice and violence at home and across the water.
For this series, all submission fees and donations are being contributed to helping those in or departing Ukraine whose lives have been disrupted by the war.
by Carey Taylor
Look at Yaryna’s smile, the way her head leans into his cheek, hiding half her face. Look at her dimples, straight white teeth, military green babushka, camouflage jacket, one eye half-open…
by Lee Ann Pingel
In the West, where I live,
the sun has set on Easter Sunday.
On this day, the men who followed Jesus
hid, afraid, behind locked doors.
by Elina Sventsytska
I’m reading the news – and suddenly,
something’s wrong with me:
claws are growing out of me,
fangs are growing out of me…
by Susan Solomon
I do not know if the actual window is still in existence, but it was just one piece of overwhelmingly gorgeous art…
by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
Today, Twitter is full of news about mothers. One is
dead, another in remission from an aggressive cancer, and
in Mariupol, a maternity hospital is bombed.…
by Romana Iorga
The city is a cage of dead doves
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
A city of fogs and strange consonants
burning a hole in the sky…
by Erika Michael
You bear your life on your back
like a snail, in the cells of your gut,
silently piled. But we need those
chronicles concealed within…
by Lyudmyla Khersonska
where, she asks, are my irises,
the purple ones, yeah, but especially
the yellow ones. have you seen them?
they were tall, stuck out their little tongues…
by Margo Berdeshevsky
Still alive this dawn but why
aged-flesh lover of peace why
naked in her useless skin
standing
by Jennifer Stewart Miller
The war criminal dreams he’s locked
in a windowless room with a hoard of mothers
The war criminal wakes up foaming…
by Katrina Haddad
They said the orcs have entered Oleshky.
I'm saying “orcs” so as not to upset my son again
with “the russians.” He’s been trying to fall asleep…
by Danyil Zadorozhnyi
Inheriting a political regime
like a feral dog twice the size of your house.
These leviathan-states devour each other in the black sea of history…
by Oleh Kotsarev
it’s embarrassing really but I have to confess
that I slept through the first time
(the second time too, though that’s beside the point)