Dostoevsky’s Bathhouse

Mara Hagen

“Eternity is always presented to us as an idea that we can’t grasp, as something enormous, enormous!”

—Dostoevsky

the world is a pink bay
I have swallowed
the sun
and everything else

the silliness of a horse
running full speed in a desert
that doesn’t exist

is soul
moving away from body

Svidrigalov. a space
between carcass
and eternity…

in this room and am still hungry—

have eaten my way through
this body.

I rest in the cavity
of the thing I have destroyed

in a strange barn in the middle
of the country

I sometimes imagine it like that…
and we too, sit there
eyes of dried eel

on the vast linoleum
of the sky

How can we know? How can we know?


Mara Hagen is the editor and poetry curator of Motif Magazine in Providence, RI. Her work has been published in Ether(Bound), SolidaRIty, and The Scapegoat Review. Her chapbook, Dostoevsky's Bathhouse, is under review.


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