Две головы

I design branding for German clients and I write poetry in Russian and they really do feel like different modes. The design work requires a particular kind of precision, knowing exactly what a font communicates before the viewer does, what a colour holds. The poetry is the opposite of controlled output. I start writing and find out where it ends. I left St Petersburg in 2022. I'm in Berlin now, Neukölln, and the Russian community here is a specific thing: people who left for specific reasons, which they mention and don't mention in equal measure. There is a Russian-language literary reading that happens in a bar near Boddinstrasse every six weeks or so. I've read there twice. The second time went better. I write in Russian because the language contains things I can't find in German. Not untranslatable words, that's a cliché. More: particular rhythms, a relationship between a sentence and what a sentence refuses to say. My work has appeared in a Berlin-based Russian literary journal called *Зеркало* and in an anthology of émigré writers from 2023. I'm working on a long poem about the Neva river that is also about other rivers. I know it's not done yet.