Minsk (concrete object)

City of apparatchiks, thinking in unison. Wheelchaired, patriots are crossing Victory Square to beg kopeks from matryoshkas who wear skirts short as a summer night in St Petersburg. Sparrows perch on Red Army statues, boy soldiers with grenades, no shoes. Murals clutch their sheathes of wheat and gaze into snow while photographed lynch mobs are smiling, in museums, into history. The KGB shuts another school. The president is forever here, blinking airspace empty as the synagogues, empty as the daylong drinking of old Soviets, windswept as apartment blocks howling concrete into the echelons. A bus driver is mumbling into her third language. ‘The situation’ she rasps, ‘is excellent. We are trying hard not to lose hope.’