“History Advancing Its Great Plot”
Sonnets by Charles Martin and A. Z. Foreman
Order the Summer 2026 issue of Nimrod International Journal or subscribe today.
Today we bring you two portrait sonnets from our Summer 2026 issue. Both depict figures associated with the Soviet Union, the first focusing on an early architect of the state, the second on a major poet who transcended its boundaries. Both men ended their days in North America, the first coming to a violent end, the second to a peaceful one. Leon Trotsky was killed with an ice axe by a Soviet agent in Mexico in August 1940, but he first visited the continent in January 1917, settling in New York for just over two months, before returning to Russia after the abdication of the tsar. It was in New York that he encountered Charles Martin’s mother, then a child—an encounter the “not-yet-Commissar” likely forgot, but one that inspired a vivid and wonderfully wise poem over a century later. The subject of the second sonnet, by A. Z. Foreman, is Yevgeny Yevtushenko, one of the true poetic stars of the 20th century, who expanded the limits of acceptable speech in his native country without quite breaking them, walking a political tightrope with unparalleled finesse. At the height of his popularity, he filled stadiums with audiences hungry for his fresh voice, who knew they would not be persecuted for listening. At the time of his death in 2017, here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had lived and taught for nearly three decades, the days of the stadiums were long behind him—yet his best poems live on.
Trotsky Meets My Mother in The Bronx, 1917 Such impudence as he cannot conceive! When she met Trotsky, Kathleen was a child who curtsied badly, then flounced off to leave The not-yet-Commissar far from beguiled by this young scamp, this “Katie,” running wild, rolling her hoop on toward a vacant lot. How can such liberties be reconciled with History advancing its great plot? Will he think more about her? I think not. That iceman though, who, seven days a week hauls up these stairs boulders as they melt, will ponder sentences that Trotsky wrote. He leans the numbing block against his cheek, an icepick hanging from his leather belt. — Charles Martin Portrait of Yevtushenko He roared in stadiums. Every microphone was a cathedral. Every shout a creed. The empire clapped its gloves of flesh and bone— then took notes, smiling, on who dared to read. A tyrant made him cry Uncle, but he spat his sugar speech back out as gasoline, a poet with a passport and a hat, half-actor, half-accused. He played the scene. His anger wore a tailored overcoat. He rhymed for crowds, not comrades, though he wept for the unmonumented. In his throat a Jew, a Russian, and a liar slept. He lived too long. The silence outlived him. The thunder mutters softly: Do not trim. — A. Z. Foreman
Charles Martin is a poet, translator of poetry, and essayist. The Khayyam Suite (2025) is the fifth of his eight books of poetry to appear with the Johns Hopkins University Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, The Hopkins Review, and in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Poetry. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ingram Merrill Grant, a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and a Pushcart Prize.
A. Z. Foreman is a linguist, poet, short story author and/or translator pursuing a doctorate at the Ohio State University. His work has been featured in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, ANMLY, Poet Lore, and elsewhere, including two people’s tattoos.
Order the Summer 2026 issue of Nimrod International Journal or subscribe today.
terrific, especially old trots.