Valerie Bandura’s past seeps into everything she writes as though consumed by her history – and that is not a criticism: she makes us consider our own position on society’s fragile limb by haring her own. Born in Odessa, Ukraine she fled the Soviet Union during the Jewish expulsion and those experiences and surface somewhere, somehow on every page. Her writing is strong, acerbic, fragile in its own dangerous way and yet every poem comes out sounding like a song: there are so many types of songs and Bandura seems to have heard or imagined them all. She treads on the quaking ground of familial absurdities – madness, birth, camouflaged love in all its permutations.
JEWS FOR JESUS
I wish Jesus cam to my sister on the electroshock table
as he had to Saul on the road to Damascus,
watched the wad of Vaseline ooze from the black
rubber nodes they strapped to her head
as they tried to shock her bad brain
into a good one, wish he’d been there
to watch her lip curl into a snarl
over the gag of the wooden bit,
the leather straps strain with restraint
as her back arched in the healing
of the electric pulse, a strobe
that blinded her into a three-second coma
from which she was to have risen converted
rather than fallen unconscious and stone still to the floor.
FUN AND GAMES
Ruddy like a sow, my Soviet preschool teacher
threatened to strap me to my chair
unless I finished my lunch so thoroughly
she could see at the bottom of my empty bowl
the enamel shine like a medal, even if it meant,
and here she pressed her flushed face in mine,
that I’d have to sit there all day ‘like a traitor.’
Who knows if some kid’s mother who knew my mother
told her we were ‘one of those Jews’
shipping out to America any day now
when she corralled the children
like steering a crowd into a plaza
to point at the protestor on hunger strike
set on proving who is in charge
as they wait for a sign from the top
to go ahead with the execution
so that all may again be at peace.
CESAREAN
You did not muscle down the tight dark walls
of me, or wrestle the fist of my pelvis, your bone
against my bone, to set yourself free, didn’t behave
as your genes told you to be:
Sicilian, Cossack, Irish, Jew: who labored
to get out. It turns out,
you were the American
we came here to be, too busy
when the time came, playing with yourself,
they had to come at you with a knife
to wake you up
to get you out of me.
These visceral poems burn like branding irons into our memories. Valerie Bandura is indeed a poet whose presence is indelible – once her poems are read, digested. Grady Harp, November 13
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