Glass Shards in a Diamond Mine, by Kikimora Morozova

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Forty-something years ago, a small group of nine-year-old girls in St.Petersburg, Russia, placed precious candy wrappers, two handwritten notes, a patterned silk hair ribbon and a shiny glass marble into a small dirt hole in the ground in a city park. This was their sekretik, or little secret, covered with one clear and one green bottle-glass shard to protect from dirt and with dirt itself to protect from onlookers. Much like squirrels, and to no one’s surprise, by the spring, they forgot the location of the sekretik. When one of the women moved to the United States almost a decade later, all of her secrets gnawed through the cracks in the glass and she passed them onto her children in the form of a handbook on the distinguishing of natural diamonds and glass forgeries. The children fell in love with kaleidoscopes and tektite.

Glass Shards in a Diamond Mine is a debut collection of secrets, in poem form, which examine what it takes to cherish the memory of a person, living or dead. The secrets in Glass Shards in a Diamond Mine use both rapid-fire, internally inconsistent descriptors and highly structured narrative stanzas to quick-change between challenging and embracing order, linearity, defeatism, hope, and unconditional love. In the highly chaotic environment of the chapbook, poems beckon a reader to wonder how, in the absence of generational remembrance or a detailed logbook, to keep track of their own sekretiki, lest they begin wiggling free.

Kikimora Morozova (they/them) is a Ukrainian-American computational biologist, software engineer, and poet from Brooklyn, NYC. Glass Shards in a Diamond Mine is their first chapbook and their work explores remembrance, loss, queer identity, wartime, and home through the lens of interpersonal connection. Outside of writing, Kikimora enjoys programming, pixel art, and thrifting.