Svetlana Litvinchuk

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Beetroot

The beet is my extra organ, the secret ingredient
setting me apart in this parking lot of a suburb.
Beet is my permanent placenta, umbilical pulsing
when I wince, which is every time I hear on the news
that the sky births more warplanes everyday.

I uncoil this root and find it stretching all the way
across the Atlantic. I feel the taut tug of the universe
on it. Over time it has learned to stretch to remain
flexible. My great-grandmother nods from the other
side and I see it is still bound to her.

She visits often in dreams, says she’s proud of the woman
I’ve become, of the way my tongue still rolls the R’s
so that my words sound broken, of how I cook with one
hand and sew with the other. I tell her I don’t like doing
either one, but she says life is about doing things you don’t
like, and doing them well.

The trick is to polish the chain connecting your hips
to the oven so the grease doesn’t stick. I kept the oven
empty for so long my mother worried that I’d removed
my reproductive organs, but I was just waiting until
I didn’t have to carry my whole family across the line
at the bank every Friday.

I have mashed potatoes in my thighs. They keep me
grounded. I open the hips to achieve that coveted
hourglass shape to complete the optical illusion that
I’m the kind of girl whose ready to become your mother—
I mean, to meet your mother—

but actually, my hips sway like this because I’m busy
stirring my cauldron, fellas. I got a whole ocean in here
because my papa was a fisherman who drowned in vodka.
Most of the ocean is black as the midnight sun. The blue
is just your own reflection, which is why people see
themselves in my eyes, why they have empathy when
my homeland is bombed.

When our boat arrived in America they said throw
overboard your whole language, with its too many
consonants, too many vowels, too many unpronounceable
letters with no sounds of their own. I think the silent
letters must be feminine, because that’s what girls like me
were taught to be in my homeland. How else do you learn
that silence always alters the thing standing next to it?

When I arrived, everyone tripped over my name. It tied
their tongues into knots like my long braid. I let them
chop it in half because they said I didn’t come all this way
just to be an inconvenience.

One day, when I fished that braid from the sea I found
it still tied to a birch tree in a meadow. When I held it up
to my ear like a stethoscope, all I could hear was the planet
crying. They called me a hippie communist so I shook out
my pleats. They looked at my curls and said, what a shame,
they’re girl-pretty not guy-pretty. Men want it slick and smooth.

When I was ten I started shaving my legs. My mother
said not above the knees, that hair eventually falls off
on its own when you’re 50, and something else I don’t
remember about the importance of waiting. I busied
myself by studying and following the rules until one day
I stopped wearing shoes as a form of protest.

They banned me from the library like a dangerous book,
then the cafeteria. So, I stopped eating, lived off the smoke
between my ears. I learned to use a calendar to track changes
in my thigh gap, jumped off rooftops topless and dropped
acid on baseball diamonds until I reached home base
and the boys said what took you so long, didn’t you want it,
you looked like you wanted it.

There were a lot of things I didn’t want. So my mother
took me to the doctor and I swallowed a pink pill every
day, even on the seven days around the full moon.
When I grew up, my bare feet carried me to the forest.

I walked around reading to butterflies and developed
the curious habit of falling asleep in tall grass prairies
until one day the wolf found me and said, let me teach
you all the different languages in which a girl can howl.

Svetlana Litvinchuk is the author of Navigating the Hallways by Starlight (Fernwood Press, 2026). Her poetry has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Rhysling Awards. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, New Orleans Review, swamp pink, Redivider, Moon City Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Lake Effect, and elsewhere. Her essays and stories have appeared in ONLY POEMS, Astrolabe, Plant-Human Quarterly, Apocalypse Confidential, and elsewhere. She is the Events Director for Chill Subs and a columnist for Sub Club. Originally from Ukraine, she currently tends her garden in Missouri. Her work engages with themes of immigrant identity, feminism, ecology, climate grief, motherhood, and family relationships. Find her on Instagram @s.litvinchuk or at www.svetlanalitvinchuk.com.