Nicole Yurcaba
I Have the Urge to Embrace My Inner Trash Panda
There’s something about a trash bin piled high with cardboard boxes and discarded IT cables that makes you contemplate your mortality. After all, we die & enter the Eternal Dumpster. Is it the unknown’s (im)possibility? What landfill with the cardboard boxes populate? Which dumpster diver will claim the discarded charging cables’ copper wire? Who will slice their palm on the dumpster’s metallic smile? What foul fluids leak from the dumpster’s bottom? And where is that fluid going? Give it two weeks & this gel pen with which I am writing will find its home in the dumpster, too. Rest in piece(s), Supernova Pink. Last at this time, I pitched into a decrepit, spray-painted purple trash can the final bouquet of two dozen multicolored roses my ex sent me the week he dumped me after he fucked his psychology colleague after we had walked hand-in-hand through a psychedelic art gallery & he told me he didn’t want to die & didn’t want anyone else & couldn’t imagine a life without me & didn’t want to use a walking harness on our future children.
I bet if I crawled into that dumpster that’s just sitting like a squatter in a halfway house outside my office window and dug beneath the sliced cardboard, the broken mayo jars, the snake-like wires & smashed computer monitors I’d find those roses.
Or, maybe, that’s me just realizing that even a dumpster can be half-full.
Even Translated into English, You Do Not Understand
what he means when he says you better come back to me he not yours you not his keep lying to yourselves disbelief denial disbelief denial what is real yet cannot be yet is & the sun’s shining in his eyes as he says it but he won’t lower his sunglasses he keeps his eyes on your face & one week later as you swim blue-green aegean waters you think about how he looked at you as he sat across from you at a table & how when you confessed when i’m with you I try to act like a lady, not an animal & he held his burger in one hand smiled asked am i an animal? you said no but you wanted to say all men are but you laughed mutter something about your father your father traveled to greece traveled to san antonio & your father said nika, don’t ever marry—a husband will take you away from me & you tell this man-boy-man-friend my father never wanted me to marry & you recalled one night ten years ago when this man-boy-man-friend stood in a hotel weeping confession i love you too much to use you for a one-night stand & half-hour later he drove through a thunderstorm to his house & emailed the next morning: i love you too much to use you for a one-night stand but i’m sorry i left & now he’s sipping an unsweetened tea: for example, if I talk to daniel & I tell him I met a woman & she’s the one—I don’t have to explain & you don’t understand you don’t understand you readjust the napkin on your lap & you giggle & say tato told me once he’d pay any man who wanted to marry me five-hundred dollars to not marry & this man-boy-man-friend stops chewing swallows wipes his mouth smirks—
I’d have told him
he could keep
his money.
Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, New Eastern Europe, Euromaidan Press, and The New Voice of Ukraine. She is the author of The Pale Goth (2025), Have Your Eyes (2025), and Hutsulka (2026).
