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You are here: Home / 48 / Personal Credo

Personal Credo

48, Poetry by Oksana Maksymchuk

In the face of evidence, cursor on
the text, I declare my belief

that the earth is a flat round

people on the outer rim safer than
people close to the center

that the world’s made of parts

people from our part safer than
people outside it

that a body’s made of surfaces

outer surfaces may implode
get consumed by the inner

that diseases are sent by a god

they come in a jar
wrapped in a coil of snake

bat patagium, a rat tail


Oksana Maksymchuk is a poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her poetry appeared in Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Sugar House Review, and other journals. She was awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently, she co-translated Lyuba Yakimchuk’s Apricots of Donbas and Marianna Kiyanovska’s The Voices of Babyn Yar. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University.

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Call for submissions for issue #51, as well as our poetry and micro essay contests. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

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