Aging (Fibonacci Sequence: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89)
none
1(one)
1(ego)
two (I)
I 2 threeeeeeeeee
5 school, ruled 2 three
hate math 8/5 parents split divisor 3 & me
bad teen luck black eight-in-hole no triskaidekaphobe call five ringtones call.
now lucky legal drink I’m old-gold-rolled ready-to-hold I stick on 13 so play vingt-et-un tonight with me.
still 13 in the soul getting old with a balding working luck. 34 is dirty floor & still behind, & the legal drink now a double, hit me hit me & no! not prime.
Fivefive, now fivefive, finally loving the mother/other/the 21-still-angry child & forgiving the serious careerist, so knowing, so sure, so 34. Take our bald inner luck as it comes, let’s leave the dirty floor alone (why are these aches okay ,why are these losses, these losses, so possible to endure?) Five years plus ½ century, decoding while eroding, ofivefive.
89 am I 8 or 9? The young ones are 34, my children 55. There are 13 pills in the morning, 13 pills at night. But what, exactly what might happen next? A working soul and another season’s turn, what else did I ever have? This word is greater than my numbers, the poésie of my self. I take the garbage out and set it on the street with joy. Tell me your secrets: I am the one who truly wants to know. Lemniscate, I move toward 
today.
Larissa Shmailo’s poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, Drunken Boat, Fulcrum, Rattapallax, and many anthologies. Larissa’s chapbook is A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press) and book is In Paran (BlazeVox Books). Her poetry CDs with music are The No-Net World (SongCrew) and Exorcism (SongCrew). Larissa translated the Russian transrational opera Victory over the Sun, contributed translations to the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive Press), and recently translated a Russian historical-linguistic bibliography of Bible translations into over 80 languages of the Russian Federation and other Commonwealth of Independent States.
Listen to Larissa’s poetry with music by Bobby Perfect and Manny Molecular here.
Larissa’s continuing series of mistranslations of the Joseph Brodsky poem “New Life” can be read and heard at Drunken Boat.
