Svetlana Litvinchuk

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Unsettlement(s)

I didn’t know yet, that you were dying, Dad, when you said
you weren’t feeling well, per your custom of drinking
in anticipation of my arrival. The sun was still buried below
the horizon when you canceled our fishing trip, again.

On this last visit before our final one, the tackle box was still
in my lap as we watched the news—you hurtling curses at Black
Lives Mattering and immigrant crossings and me sipping coffee,
trying to heed mom’s usual pleas for peace between us.

I remember saying the wall has already been built, Dad, can’t you see
it between your beliefs and mine, in a language you apparently forgot—
so much lost in translation across the generations in an immigrant
home.

I remember asking: how can you—perpetual foreigner—
side with the oppressor instead of the man still rolling his r’s,
the one who also raises chickens in his backyard, who, like you,
earned the ache in his back?

Are the honorable hands not the ones tan from labor, are they not
the ones still working to throw off the shackles of the masters
who seek to sanitize the country with their dusty money?

Don’t you wonder, Dad, about the definition of criminal
when it applies only to calloused palms, never to starched collars?
Don’t you wonder, Dad, who the money is printed for?

Now I sit at the lake fishing without you and think about
how you would have voted for this a second time, a third,
I hurl objects at this wall the way you taught me, wondering

how you couldn’t see whose hands raised this wall in our home,
between history and future, between the living and the dead,
I wonder are you listening down there, Dad, when I ask
whose hands will be the ones to tear it down?

Svetlana Litvinchuk is the author of a poetry chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024) and a forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Navigating the Hallways by Starlight (spring 2026). Nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and a finalist for the Slippery Elm Poetry Prize, her poetry appears in ANMLY, swamp pink, About Place, Strange Horizons, Rust + Moth, Sky Island Journal, Arkana, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor of ONLY POEMS and a Guest Editor for Rockvale Review in 2025. Find her on Instagram @s.litvinchuk and www.svetlanalitvinchuk.com