Photograph by Galina Rymbu. “Mama Writes. I Writes,” presented below in English translation, is a new poem by Galina Rymbu, a Russian-language poet from Lviv, Ukraine. As admirers of Rymbu who have translated and written about her stylistically and politically daring poetry in the past, we are happy to be able to share it with the American reader. The poem presents what today has become a common script for Russian-language communication between people being bombed in Ukraine and their relatives—often older relatives—back in the Russian “Federation.” In this script, the person writing or speaking from Ukraine is conveying their experience of being at the receiving end of Russian military aggression, while the Russian relatives engage in downplaying, doubting, and gaslighting. Themselves the objects of years of coordinated propaganda by the Putin regime, the Russian relatives accuse the person under fire in Ukraine of misrepresenting their lived situation and of engaging in propaganda on behalf of NATO.…