Alexander Zapol who comes by pen name Semyon Khanin was born in 1970. He is a poet who writes in Russian, author of the books Tol’;ko chto (2003), Vplav’ (2013), and No ne tem (2017), a translator of Latvian and American poetry into Russian, and editor of numerous poetry collections of Russian and Latvian poets. He compiled the anthology Latvian/Russian Poetry. Poems in Russian Written by Latvian Poets (2011). Khanin’s books have been trans- lated into Latvian, Czech, Ukrainian, Serbian and Italian. He is one of the key members of the multimedia poetry project Orbita, which is a creative group of poets and artists whose works create a dialogue between various cultures and genres (including literature, music, video, and photography, among others). His poems in English translations were recently published in the compilation Hit Parade: The Orbita Group (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). 

***

I was riding my bike, the one that got stolen afterwards

with my girlfriend, the one I broke up with a year later

along that street that got completely rebuilt

to that café—later on it simply closed

we were happily rattling off our thoughts and our legs

now there’s a pizzeria where the café used to be

I even go there sometimes

and order a four-cheese pizza

they bring it to me and the knife strokes through the pizza

remind me of spokes on a wheel

just like that: bike spokes—knife strokes

but just now, when I was riding on my bike

with my sweet girlfriend

along that well-known street

to our favorite café

I didn’t stop to think that with every push on the pedals 

I was also driving the world into entropy and chaos

although the pizza wasn’t bad at all 

 

Translated from Latvian by Kevin M. F. Platt