9. A Composite Fold-In Poem

The fullest application of Kushnir’s method combines contamination, syntax haunting, multilingual interference, formal breakdown, political critique, and reader activation within one poem. The poem becomes a multidimensional field in which no register remains isolated.

Form 27-B: Application to Continue Existing

Please print your name in the space
formerly occupied by the orchard.

Do not use ink.
Ink may interfere with the migration
of approved machinery.

Question 4: Have you ever been known
by another weather?

Yes.
I was rain before the census.

Question 5: List all dependent persons,
animals, shadows, and unfinished verbs.

My brother,
two goats,
the word returning,
a voice behind the wall that keeps saying
na-dom, na-dom, domara—

Attach evidence of residence:

one key
three receipts
a photograph of the kitchen
before it became coordinates

For office use only,
the applicant has been planted
at a depth of six administrative inches.
Water thoroughly.
Do not permit memory
to accumulate near electrical contacts.

I certify that the above statements
are true to the best of my—

best of my—

bst m—

bsmara dom dom dom—

SIGN HERE:

I sign with the orchard.

The form rejects the signature.

The orchard continues growing
through the rejection.

This poem begins as an application form but gradually becomes agricultural, geographical, intimate, multilingual, and formally unstable. The orchard occupies the space intended for a person’s name. Machinery migrates. Weather becomes a former identity. Dependents include animals, shadows, and incomplete grammar.

The phrase “the word returning” makes an unfinished verb into a dependent entity. The invented language “na-dom, na-dom, domara” includes the recognizable Russian root “dom,” meaning home, while moving into fictional sound. The voice seems to be calling toward home, naming home, or attempting to construct it linguistically.

“Before it became coordinates” folds a family kitchen into bureaucratic geography. The home has been transformed from lived space into mapped information. The applicant is then “planted” at a bureaucratically measured depth, merging human administration with agricultural instruction.

The certification clause begins to malfunction. Letters disappear, and official language dissolves into invented sound. The form’s instrument damages itself because it can no longer contain the applicant’s experience.

At the end, the speaker signs with the orchard. The signature is not a legal name but a place, history, ecology, and memory. The form rejects it because the institution cannot recognize that form of identity. Yet the orchard continues growing through the rejection.

The final image embodies Kushnir’s political and poetic theory. Institutional language may reject what it cannot classify, but poetic language does not disappear. It grows through the fracture.