Mirror
Mirror
In the mirror of my country
I see the self I’m swift becoming,
dogged by denial, cynical and numb,
worn thin with fear about accounts unbalanced
and teetering twenty years in the future
when I am old but unready and the choices
will be at their most harrowing.
In the mirror of my country
I see the shadow of death,
escaped from its valley and roaming
free in the background, just behind my graying reflection.
It is now acceptable, even welcome company
and only vestigial visceral dread sustains
what once was called
love of life.
When the language of our leaders
and our erstwhile digital pals
and our neighbors with their garage doors closing
renders Armageddon with such juicy fluency,
it is hard not to hear ourselves read into the script
and see ourselves in the frame,
motionless and compliant
and waiting for the end.
Who speaks these words
of blustering estrangement
from other humans, other nations,
other habits of mind and body?
Who postures, playing influencer,
shooting craps with souls on the line,
unaware that the loss is inevitably our own?
Why do I feel the cold of the dice
in my own hand?
In the mirror of my country
I am looking at my lips downturned,
my gaze flat and unfriendly
and filled with loathing, not for the country I see
but for the self that cannot rouse itself
to do
something.
I cannot see a way out from the mirror of my country,
and among my many fears is
the possibility, strong in sense and scent,
that this is me.
– Greg Blake Miller, April 7, 2026
Pelican Refueling
The Storm and After
Ice and Incense
In the hammering snow and brutal ice they gathered to make their stand,
hoping to protect this street, these friends, this dream, this home, this land.
False warriors were all out in force in their fine play-acting garb;
state news rang out with lies and hate and snark and bile and barbs.
In some churches, pastors buried gospel and took Christ’s name in vain.
They had the choice to choose their way; they chose the path of Cain.
All through this land and many more, the holy Word is scorned
and used to load the guns of war, the lamb of peace now horned.
You can’t love your neighbor as yourself but tear her from her child,
can’t say you love the stranger then expel him to the wild,
can’t follow paths of incense when in truth they’re really smoke,
can’t claim you’re fixing anything when all the things you broke
lie in pieces in the streets and shattered on the plain
and you rage at every living soul that goes against the grain
and your concept of the sacred law is the one the tyrant winks,
the one he changes night and day and every time he blinks.
Devil, loose your arrows with blessings from your king;
the rich are lining up in droves just to kiss the ring,
but there’s one man in a ballcap, one woman in a car,
a million folks in waking dreams, one wish upon a star,
one storm of conscience in the head, one tightening of the heart,
one roiling sense deep in the gut that we should play our part.
It might be on this winter road or in the voting booth,
but time has come to pay our debt to the bank of truth.
I sense the people will not quit,
sweet madness in their hearts.
I don’t know how the protest ends
but this is how it starts.
– Greg Blake Miller, January 28, 2026
Illustration by GBM, 2020.
Take This Blue From Me
“The Orange Dome” in Red Canary Magazine
On January 24, as I watched the images of Minneapolis on TV while editing a book about a faraway but everpresent war, the drumbeat of a poem took shape. Many thanks to Joe Donnelly, Victoria O’Campo, and the team at Red Canary Magazine for creating this stirring graphic and publishing it in such a timely manner. (Photo by Chad Davis, Wikipedia Commons, for Red Canary) See the poem on the Red Canary site, along with other terrific RC offerings, here.
Greg Blake Miller discusses “The Kuleshov Effect” and more on the Ocean Bridge podcast
Last month, Ocean Bridge—a remarkable group of novelists, poets, journalists, publishers, editors and other creatives from Ukraine and the Russian and Ukrainian diaspora—invited Svetlana and me for an online “author’s evening” focused on my novel The Kuleshov Effect (Эффект Кулешова) and other projects I’ve got in the works. What a privilege and pleasure it was to spend a couple of hours on the “Bridge” speaking with and reading for these extraordinary people!
The recording of the session is now up on YouTube, complete with some old photos and even a song… The caveat is that most of it is in Russian, but I read in English at these spots: 18:24 (The first scene in “Kuleshov”), 43:23 (how the American student Tom Benjamin winds up with a litter of kittens in Saint Petersburg), 1:34:17 (where I actually sing Tom’s song for Kira), 1:39:30 (about Tom’s mind-bending journey to the symphony to listen to Shostakovich), and 2:19:56 (my recent poem, “Phantom”). For the Russian speakers out there, there’s lots of fun conversation and intel on how the book came to be, and Svetlana Miller reads several of the chapters in Russian, from Kira’s point of view.
Many thanks to everyone who attended, with a special hat tip to the poet and peerless captain of Ocean Bridge, Gari Lait (author of Confluences); editor extraordinaire Oleksiy Kretovich; the wonderful writers Marina Dyachenko (co-author, with Sergei Dyachenko, of the Vita Nostra series), Dmitry Bykov (Дмитрий Львович Быков, VZ: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Making of a Nation), and Alexei Nikitin (Victory Park); the scholar Victor Shtern; and the founder of Freedom Letters publishing, Georgy Urushadze (winner of the American Association of Publishers’ 2025 International Freedom to Publish Award)! #FreedomLetters #globusbooks
To watch this episode of “The Ocean Bridge,” please click the image above.
I hope to bring this book to an English-language readership soon!
The Ninth Chime
My short story, “The Ninth Chime,” has just been published by Red Canary Magazine, an award-winning journal dedicated to human rights, protection of the environment, and long-form storytelling, both fiction and nonfiction. Many thanks to the journal’s incomparable editor, Joe Donnelly, and outstanding managing editor, Victoria O’Campo. This story, part of a book-in-progress called Turn Up the Radio When You Speak, is very close to my heart, as it brings together impressions of the Soviet Sixties, contemporary Putinist Russia, and, sadly, the strange authoritarian leviathan looming just over the American horizon. But it also, purposefully, occupies a world all its own—one that any of us could wind up living in…
Tertz lay on the cold brick looking at the white sky. Did he know what he was looking at? Maybe he saw it only as a flash before darkness, or blank paper before the typewriter ribbon, or the emptiness of pain he could no longer feel. Maybe he thought he was alone on the square, unaccompanied despite his best efforts. Because who can bring themselves to come to the square for such purposes on such days?Continue reading “The Ninth Chime” in Red Canary Magazine.
– GBM
A Diplomatic Epistle
Dear Homeowner,
In response to your grievance, initially filed 11 years ago and periodically amended, indicating that your neighbor broke into your home, killed several of your family members, moved into four of your rooms, and began raising your children, we have held substantive discussions with your neighbor and respectfully request that you officially cede the deed to said rooms, surrender the larger baseball bats with which you have been defending the remainder of your house, commit to the principle that, when under future attack, fewer of your family members will attempt to defend it, and withdraw your application to join the Neighborhood Watch. Please respond with your agreement by Thursday.
Respectfully,
The Association
VP:dt
On the Centenary of Marlen Khutsiev
I wrote this poem for one of my heroes, the great film director Marlen Khutsiev (1925-2019), way back in 2009. Today, he would have turned 100. I always wished I would have sent this to him when he was alive.
The Author, Open Source
To Marlen Khutsiev
You promised yourself to certain principles—
A probing awe of the present,
Humility before the past and future.
You promised yourself that when you turned your head,
Or craned your neck,
Or just held still,
You would try to see in things all that they give you to see,
Neither stopping at the surface
Nor injecting the image with alien fashion and fad
And making of it a symbol of something else,
Some popular present
Or politically preferable past.
You promised yourself to capture the image
In all its integrity,
To make its present into a past
And send it on
To those who would use it
In ways you would not have imagined.
It’s no small task to release the catalogue
Of one’s sight
To the busy minds
Of a new and otherly-comprehending generation.
But maybe, if you were there to see,
Their use of your awe
Would gladden your soul.
—Greg Blake Miller
Reentry Shock 