Lake Effect, Volume 26: "Victory Day"

Victory Day

Moscow, Russia

By Karina Borowicz

In the park old people
are waltzing. Distant music
sizzles from a loudspeaker
hung on a tree. Eyes closed,
an old woman spins slow circles
around her invisible partner.
The smells of spring—bread,
pollen, blackened meat.
The young in their tight clothes,
talking with urgency into cell phones.
They’ve been told to remember
a war they never knew
by parents who were conceived
as a way of forgetting.