Dzvinia Orlowsky
Drums
Childhood, fortunately, offered compromise. I became a Beatle. My mother cut my horse’s forelock to match my bangs, tied a satin cravat around his neck, and punched holes in my father’s Tyrolean hat for his ears. I starred beside him, imagining songs about eyes and hair and all small failures of gravity.
For a drum set, my mother suggested wrapping rice paper over old cooking pots, but I wanted the real thing—bass drum, snare, tom-toms, cymbals, high-hat. One evening, my father arrived with a red snare drum—the now new color of his love, red the color of geraniums my mother threatened to plant if he decided it was only fit to be a pot.
~
“Page one: ‘About Your New Snare Drum: How to Take Care of It.’” Care for it? It would travel in cabs, on planes, through rain and snow.
Page two: “How to Hold Your Sticks.” Like forks. Awful! Each strike felt like two mothers correcting my hands at once.
Page three: “Listening for the Beat of the Train.” I tried—boom, boom—but the shuffle faltered. Boom-Boom-Boom-BOOM. The drum replied plainly: no magic, no mastery. I hit it limp, easy, but the sticks clattered from my hands like discarded chopsticks.
~
Touring
Still, I played. On the polished floor, in the barn, in the hayloft café, my small, red drum shouted back. I was a Beatle. My horse beside me. My hair messy, my bun a hen’s egg I could never fully hatch. The sticks thumped, my legs kicked, my heart raced, until one day the snares took on too much body and lost their snap.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is author of seven poetry collections (Carnegie Mellon University Press) including Bad Harvest (Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry) and Those Absences Now Closest (Brilliant Books’ Most Brilliant Books, 2024). Co-recipient of two NEA translation fellowships, her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from Ukrainian have been finalists for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize and a 2025 PEN America Literary Award. She is a founding editor of Four Way Books.