The traffic will be bad. Not your typical Friday night. I’d say you should leave at 3 a.m., but everyone will have that idea. Bring water. Granola bars, peanut butter, crackers. Shit, you’ve camped before, you know what to do, I’m the one who’s clueless. But I’m good at people, and that’s what we need now. Take I-70 West, then 57, then 64. County Road J. They’re not going to attack Perry, Missouri, not right away. That’s where Rebecka lives. Her parents, high school sweethearts who grew up dirt-poor, made their fortune in the highway construction business. Now they live in their dream house with a John Lennon-autographed Sgt. Pepper album cover, a 1950’s-style ice cream parlor, and a fully stocked bar. Her father rides motorcycles and drinks salted caramel whiskey like iced tea. Her mother rides motorcycles and watches Hallmark movies, for which we must forgive her. The bunker is just a decorative touch. But Rebecka told me I’d always be able to use it. We can trust her. In college she wrote a poem where Santa Claus was a serial killer. When I last saw her five years ago she was wearing wide-brimmed hats and running an antique shop, though business wasn’t good. She has a perfume collection and a pet boa constrictor. She doesn’t check her email anymore, rarely answers the phone, but I promise she’ll take us in. So get going. Bring your parents’ wedding rings in case everyone simultaneously stops believing in money. Bring Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – it will keep us human. Bring The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz. He’s Polish, and he warned us that what happened there would one day happen here. Like everyone else, we will live for as long as we can, but let’s try not to become monsters in the process. Rebecka will be waiting. She is Baba Yaga, she is the Virgin Mary, she is gray-eyed Athena, determined to do whatever it takes to keep Odysseus safe. We’re going to be in deep shit if we get there and...but no. She’ll be there. In February 2022, when the first blasts hit Kyiv, I texted her asking if I could use her bunker when the war came here. Though we’d not talked in years, she replied right away: yes.

Jeannine Marie Pitas is a teacher, writer, and Spanish-English literary translator. Her most recent book of poetry, Or/And, was published in 2023 by Paraclete Press. Her most recent translation (co-translated with Jesse Lee Kercheval) is Uruguayan poet Mariella Nigro's Memory Rewritten, published in 2023 by White Pine Press. She lives in Pittsburgh and teaches at Saint Vincent College.

Rachel Monosov questions power structures, the meaning of freedom, and space in relation to movement in her multidisciplinary practice. She treats the political sphere with a poetic hand, using materials loaded with meaning and symbolic cues speaking to identity and socio-economic history. Monosov’s work has been included in exhibitions at Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Art Institute of Chicago,Palazzo delle Espozitioni in Rome; and in Biennales: 11th Bamako Biennale, 13th Biennale of Dakar, and the Zimbabwe Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. She was awarded the German Academy in Rome Praxisstipendium. Rachel Monosov works and lives in Berlin.