Nasim Luczaj is a writer and translator based between London and Glasgow. Her pamphlet HIND MOUTH has appeared in the Earthbound Poetry Series, and her work has been included in the anthologies PROTOTYPE 5 (Prototype), the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and Virtual Oasis: An Anthology of Human–AI Responses (Trickhouse Press), among others. She grew up in the Polish Carpathians.
@nasimluczaj
From I love you like this morning: Letters from Georgia O’Keeffe (Nasim Luczaj) to Alfred Stieglitz (Georgia O’Keeffe, Nasim Luczaj)
Italicised lines are taken from My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz:
Volume 1, 1915–1933, ed. Sarah Greenough (Yale University Press, 2011)
San Antonio, Texas. March 14, 1918
Your letters—why you know I like them
but it occurs to me that you need taking care of—
only how am I to do it? You think I’m any good
at staying put, here on my blink of earth, so slipshod?
I who let the sun’s mute witchcraft conjure tumours
under my arms, moles over the wrist; I who pick veg
and let it fall apart all on its own; whose bedtimes are erratic
as the spaces between blades of grass? I start shaking
when your letters come, imported from so far away,
woven tight as baskets to keep wine in, miracles
with handles. I can access them like a tiger’s sorrow—
it seems there in the eye’s design, but what do I know?
A tiger wouldn’t see it that way. What the hell does a tiger see
anyway, how many colours of meat? A sheep
distinguishes all kinds of green, sees the sugar.
Meanwhile I can’t get through to what you mean
to me, break it down into view. I hold the page
always as if it were to blow away, its intentions clenched
as seeds, and wonder how come you mean all this,
how come I take it so to heart, everything you send me
imprinted on the millings of a tree neither of us has ever seen
grow. Lately there’s all this talk of boundaries—
everyone starts to set them. They lie around us,
rinks of jelly, their collagen beckoned from dead hooves.
I don’t know where I want mine. If I can even walk.
My mattress lies right on the floor, so I’m left
with only sky. No curtains—I’ve peeled the room.
Your letters cloudlike around me. Sunsets feel similar
but don’t stay on the floor. I learn how they’re just scattered
blue, improved by dust, smoke, eruption. I lay myself bare
and ask what’s good for us. We’ll have to see, won’t we.
Alcalde, New Mexico. May 17, 1931
Anyone with a desire to paint ought to be poisoned
by the age of twenty—the years we spent together
speak for themselves. I spent a few sitting beside you
in a skyscraper, and I felt sad for the sky, its increasing
rate of scrapeage. How come not a skylicker?
I remember seeing the buildings softly, like tongues,
the only muscles you can survey each morning,
the muscles that get to see daylight. The rest
is a mystery. The glass does not rest. You took me in.
In memory of Józek Petka
His wife called me sikorka, tit,
as in the bird with the blue
head and lime belly. She took
care of me sometimes.
She was always smoking
and had to push the haze away
with her hands to see
as if the smoke were a lake
and those hands were oars she used
to get her point across.
Sometimes we hired her to clean.
She once stole winter boots
we’d set aside. We didn’t fire her.
One day, a day before any
I can remember, Józek decided
to dig a pond behind his house.
It became bigger than the house itself.
If someone grabbed the log cabin
from above and put it down
inside the pond, the log cabin
could be buried there.
That can’t be why he dug it.
I’m not sure what the reason was,
if any. He used only a spade to make
what at first just looked
like a big bite taken out of soil.
Then came the rain.
He let us use the pond
whenever we liked. My dad would cover
himself with mud, smear me too.
Then we’d wash it off in keen splashes.
My aunt filmed us do it once,
and I asked how the birds knew
where that hot country was,
and I asked the mud I was slapping
here and there what it thought.
Eventually Józek sold the pond.
The new owner chased me away once
and I felt exactly like a deer.
Soon a thorough fence appeared
and fish swam around
to become money.
His wife died first, lung cancer.
Now I read that he is dead,
found on the bank of the mostly
switched-off stream. Farewell.