The Red Forest by Virgil Kay

©2018, Dmitry Blizniuk Translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian Cover Design: Edward R. Layout: Paris Pâté Editor: Virgil Kay Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Blizniuk, Dmitry, 1979[Krasnyĭ les. English] The Red Forest / Dmitry Blizniuk. Poems. Translation of: Krasnyĭ les. Translated by Sergey Gerasimov. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-1-927593-74-5 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-927593-75-2 (HTML) I. Gerasimov, Sergey, 1964-, translator II. Title. III. Title: Krasnyĭ les. English. PG3491.46.L592K7313 2018

891.73'5

C2018-904190-0 C2018-904191-9

Preface The Red Forest is a poetry collection that introduces Dmitry Blizniuk to most English-speaking readers. His poetry is full of colors. Red, green, lilac. White. Yes, the predominant color here is white, even snowy white. It’s the color of tenderness: You are already asleep. I'm listening to your breathing. It's like watching the snow falling outside the window.

The color of memory: I’m looking at you through the years as if through a heavy snowfall: you’re smiling, and your lips look yogurt-stained in the flurry of the falling snowflakes.

The color of time: the seconds of life melt like sweet snow on the lips Snowy white is not always white: The bright street lights, advertisement signs, and traffic lights swallow hungrily the waltzing flakes of blindness with their mouths, leaving lipstick on the edges of snowflakes like on the edges of goblets.

This is what this collection of 60 plus poems is about: tenderness, memory, time, discovery, and lots of universal things like freedom, pain, beauty, and love in all its forms.

CONTENTS ONE-LEGGED ANGELS ◦ THE EPOCH OF MIRACLES ◦ YOU WILL NEVER RETURN ◦ THE LAST BUT ONE KISS ◦ DEATH IS A SIMPLE THING ◦ THE INEXHAUSTIBLE RHYME OF THE NATURE ◦ I’M NOT A FLEA ◦ THE BONES OF THE LANDSCAPE ◦ BECAUSE THE PARACHUTE HASN’T OPENED ◦ A PURPLE LIZARD ◦ AN EROTIC MESS ◦ THE RAINY MOOD ◦ YIN AND YANG ◦ THE TWO TRAINS ◦ A LAUGHING PARABELLUM ◦ KISSES BEFORE DAWN ◦ THE GRAY MORNING ◦ A KALEIDOSCOPE OF BUTTERFLIES ◦ DON’T BE SAD, CHRYSOTOM ◦ THE SENSE OF SNOW ◦ THE FALCON ◦ THE LION’S HEADS ◦ THE UNICORN ◦ THE PHANTOMS ◦ THE MISPRINT ◦ MICHELANGELO OF CLOUDS ◦ FROM ANOTHER WORLD ◦ THE RED FOREST ◦ THE FRACTURABLE BEINGS ◦ THE CHARM OF AUTUMN ◦ FETISHIST ◦ THE ISLAND OF HOPE ◦ ANOTHER CHANCE ◦ YOU ARE A CAT ◦ NOVOCAIN ◦ LIFE OF A RAINBOW ◦ FORGETS ABOUT THE SNAKES ◦ THE MUSICAL GHOSTS ◦ ORIGAMI OF CHILDHOOD ◦ IN 80 KISSES ◦ THE MARTIAN KISSES ◦ WHAT DID YOU DREAM ABOUT? ◦ WITHIN THE WORD AUTUMN ◦ THERE’S NOTHING BLACK ◦ THE AVALANCHE ◦ GAME OVER ◦ SUMMER THAT GIVES AT THE SEAMS ◦ THE NEST FULL OF BROKEN EGGSHELLS ◦ THE GREEN STREETLIGHT ◦ THE BEAST OF MOONLIGHT

One-legged Angels A girl works in the garden. She expertly wields a hoe and pruning shears, looking like a surgeon on a giant’s body. Asters and irises sedated by the garden hose drool and wear silly grins. A cat basks in the sun, self-conscious, like a diva from a Titian painting. I’m so happy I want to cry for joy: I am fired! The unexpected free time runs around in circles like a chicken with its head chopped off. The girl looks at me and waves her hand. Is it supposed to be symbolic? A poet sweeping leaves from the streets, a poet unloading trucks, a poet covering someone else’s yard with grass seed, a poet cutting reinforcing wire with an angle grinder, a poet selling women’s footwear. A life full of adventures in the style of Arthur Rimbaud. You’ll be suntanned, seasoned, subtle, snake-like. A bullet won’t find you, but radiculitis will. So many centuries have passed, but poets have never learned how to keep their feet on the ground. One-legged angels, herons not of this world.

The Epoch of Miracles The girl made of sparkling braces, golden braids, and plush reveries, do you remember our living caves constructed of blankets and a warm plasticine darkness that greedily breathed inside? Or our huts of branches under the moiré canopy of apricot trees? Do you remember the primeval infatuation of the cave dwellers? An apple, sandwiches, an absurd doll, a water pistol… Like a home task given by God, if stranded on another planet, we could’ve reproduced the whole mankind, waking up each morning under the light blue sky. A busty progenitress resembling a pompous vegetable-seller was hidden deep in your body. There was a hunter and a warrior in me – a hardened ape, covered with scars. The epoch of miracles blazed up like spilled gunpowder, but it didn’t bring about a supernova explosion. The scarlet flower has built up silly muscles. The time of miracles has annihilated itself, as if Bonnie and Clyde started shooting in Disneyland. Ripping off the floor boards in the old house, where decrepit ballet dancers of desolation stroll the uninhabited rooms, I see underneath a small cat’s skeleton. The cat’s name was Yasia. What was your name?

You Will Never Return I walk along a lake in early morning: the silence around is polished and heavy as if concave plates of lead hung down from the sky, swinging rhythmically on aerial hooks. Something hides in the pool of the reflected bushes, and the young birches stretch up to the sky, pulling the whiskers of the enormous blue cheetah. And I feel that the Creator is so near. I bend down and tousle the stiff wet grass, touching the thin, almost invisible surgical suture two or three thoughts wide. It seems to me I’m a newcomer to this planet, and the whole world around is a patient after a surgery. It trembles in the gray robe of clouds, entangled in the torn bandages of the bluish birches. It hobbles on the fiery legs of the horizon, grabs hold of an IV pole for support. I help it walk forward. Everything will be great, I say. We step and step again. I look into its autumn-empty eyes. Everything will be just wonderful, my friend. I smile. You can’t enter the same day twice. You can’t step into the same life twice. Look at this sky with the clear eyes of a child who’s just woken up. Look at the world leaning on your shoulder, in great despair. You will never in your life return here, never in your life see it again.

The Last But One Kiss Some kisses are like snails: they are okay to look at or to touch with your finger. Some kisses are dry and stingy, but necessary, like talcum powder for preventing diaper rush. Some kisses are like a dive from a roof into a fragrant haystack: your stomach drops; the sweet fear and delight take your breath away. There are everyday kisses, like wet wipes or chewing gum. Some kisses are like damp matches: They annoy and make you angry. Some beauties give a kiss that moves like a living thing, like it’s full of heavily lipsticked lice. Kisses of love run across the neck like quick-moving lizards and hide under the rocks of the eyes, in the shrubs of the ears. The firecracker of our farewell kiss exploded at a filling station in the middle of a country night. Hard pain, dissolved in a canister of gasoline. No, I’m not lying – it was gorgeous: a little Buddha in a red kimono holds a thin burning candle on his nose, and the power of tenderness makes the hot drops of wax run backward and up, to the finely ground stars, to the waxen face of the moon. And the whole universe collapses behind his thin back. The tsunami of stars draws near, slowly like in a dream. The time will come when our lips will rot like cherries, and our teeth will get yellow; they’ll stick like a picket fence. But our last but one kiss will remain forever in the child’s memory of the world as a symbol of something eternal and real, of pure, unpolished love.

Death Is a Simple Thing Here, in the countryside, death is simple and unpretentious. It goes without makeup, and a chipped log rattles under a dented axe. This low, big-boned tree stump (be careful, watch your step) is a guillotine for chickens. Feathers and down are stuck in the notches in the wood, like last unlit cigarettes before execution, or unsent letters to beloved onesâ&#x20AC;Ś And autumn birches pose nude around the house: armfuls of freckles are thrown up to the clouds and hang there, on the long, equine face of October.

The Inexhaustible Rhyme of the Nature The city is brown, and the streets with the neat houses look like chocolate bars with the raisins of faces or without them. Palm trees, shabby bottle brushes for cleaning the sky, sleep upside down, reflected in the burning hot asphalt. The evening comes with its viscous horde of shadows, whispers, and the currant aroma of yesterday’s gossips and news. The old fire-house rustles quietly, like a box with red polished beetles inside. The evening begins solidly and softly like all Tolstoy’s novels. You hug her on the porch, from behind. You are part of the epoch, almost. You two are two stamps on the envelope of the air cancelled by the crazy heat. Well, it’s just an invitation to the lyrical nowhere. A man and a woman smoothly merge together: the inexhaustible rhyme of the nature. The scolopendras of the sunset have crawled away, and the sky is so thin and clear that you want to take a scalpel and make an incision, from the horizon up. It’s good when there’s a woman near, just to hug her. And there’s a key to your apartment. And the cat you love, whose huge whiskers are like a rudimentary lyre.

I’m not a Flea It’s a city at night. Wilting stalks of electricity scratch my cheeks with thorns. I push the immense bell of the night. It’s black and has no clapper; it hangs from a heavy yoke fastened to the vault of heaven. The silence rings out deafeningly: the alarm of the universe has gone off, but the velvet display cloth is empty. The night city has already stolen the necklaces of constellations. The mycelium of satellite dishes brims over with hi-tech poison. It’s not a city anymore. It’s something quite different. It’s a giant half peeled pomegranate. Hundreds of its seeds glimmer with a deep ruby light. With the power of my mind, I fill myself with hundreds of lives. Handfuls of lives. Pulp of lives. Like King-Kong, I pull whole families out of the windows, pull people in bunches, in bundles. I make my mind do a full split; I rip the delicate membrane between me and God. The veins, capillaries, and nerve endings of hundreds of fates twinkle. My thought holds its breath and dives in the slowly boiling tar of humanity. I write a poem, I concentrate, I stretch myself up to touch with my words the invisible. God. Notice me, discern me I’m not a flea.

The Bones of the Landscape A birch with a naked top. A dotted beauty under a cloak of twigs. The yellow leaves on the right side are spread unevenly. They don’t fall but flow down from the birch in a single huge stained-glass drop filled with the jelly from the pig’s head of the wind. The drop hangs above a desperately red Mazda. A cat lies in the sphinx position on the still-warm hood. And higher, on a branch, there is a clear bag. Having swallowed a lot of raindrops, it dangles like a body of a hanged man with a swollen eye. A dead pigeon in front of the garage is pressed into the asphalt, embedded firmly in it, and only wind brushes the three feathers: the zombie ikebana flinches, trying to fly, for old time’s sake. The distant brood of building cranes against the pale pink sunset look like futuristic flamingos that feast on anchovy in oil – on people, walking home from the factory, They make their way over the bridge, in the undisturbed boredom of the slowly falling night. The gnawed-bare bones of the landscape.

Because the Parachute Hasn’t Opened We laugh and hug while I’m driving. We listen to music and ape other drivers. We are like a boy and a girl who take turns peeing into a river, and neither God nor Alpha Centauri sees us. We are joyful and happy: two uterine angels who sleep sweetly, head-to-toe, in the soap bubble of time. And I scribble with a red pencil on the spine of the moment: “a perfect moment of a perfect life.” I underscore it. So that years and years later, clearing off rubbish, I can find the torn ticket for paradise, marked with red pencil. I close my eyes. I incarnate into memory. I light a cigarette and watch her hair jump wildly in the current of the sun and wind. It occurs to me that our past is a little girl peeing into the river of oblivion, a little girl with a thousand braids, and an impossibly bright, distinct band is plaited into each one. But you can’t return to your past because the parachute hasn’t opened.

A Purple Lizard February is a purple lizard spread on the luxuriant snow, and the hard, aubergine-colored skin of the reptile is enveloped in somnambulistic smoke. The approach of winter makes you jittery, like the approach of a gigantic icy surge. It moves slowly like a sky-wide snail. You can come to it and watch it closely – it’s not death, but a deep, dreamless sleep, the liquid nitrogen of the oblivion, spilt over the surface of all mirrors. But it’s nice to shove some snow down your friend’s back, and to feel in return the snow-white snorting slap on your cheek. The bright street lights, advertisement signs, and traffic lights swallow hungrily the waltzing flakes of blindness with their mouths, leaving lipstick on the edges of snowflakes like on the edges of goblets. In the long puddles curved like longbows, newts living beyond the looking glass froze and became crusted over. The reality is temporarily under quarantine. The streets are strewn with magic disinfectant. The veiny cataracts grow in the eyes of all windows. The low sky is coated with Styrofoam, and a plane, like a cigarette, burns through it a straight poisonous line.

An Erotic Mess With nothing better to do, she languishes, lying on her back. Her body, like a grape vine, climbs around the tightly stretched wire of loneliness. She hears the microwave oven click: the chicken is unfrozen . Her parents will return late tonight. She longs for a prince with a snow-white smile, riding a white stallion a youthful playboy with a bunch of roses. She longs for the blue sea, or a smoky dance floor of a nightclub. She sees herself with someone else’s eyes – she is dancing, snake-like; her body is dainty, ephemeral. Bright, nasty glances pierce her like a living butterfly. She doesn’t care much, Actually, it’s really nice. Soft, fragrant twilight slowly creeps in. The sentient rose scratches the bed sheet with her fingernails. She stretches her body, and I hear a hundred thousand of Edgar Poe’s black cats lazily wail, bricked up in the wall of silence. She lies on the sofa, in the semidarkness, too lazy to cook the chicken. She is the first woman on the planet. Her dreams voluptuously flutter around her, like enormous , long-fanged butterflies and her indecent thoughts steam, like a horse’s mouth on a winter morning. An erotic mess.

The Rainy Mood The rainy mood came long before I went out. It came in the morning, in the bathroom, when I, like a toothbrush, was taking in the world around me: a crumpled floorcloth lay rigidly on the tiles like a dying ballerina on the stage, and beside it, there was a copper-green horse chestnut leaf, its edge wrinkled. God knows who had brought it here. It had ridden on someone’s foot like street children of a hundred years ago used to ride on the coccyges of streetcars. But maybe, it was her who’d brought the November in. And the cloth had absorbed the rainy contours of her body when the drops zigzagged, jumping over her moiré skin. Then, I already knew that the wet delusion and a drizzling miracle of the new puny day were awaiting me outside, and the buildings would float past me half-dissolved in the fog like soda crackers in gray milk…

Yin and Yang The night trees are like horsemen sleeping in the saddle, their backs are hunched, but they hold the reins in the sun-tanned hands. The sunset above the river looks like a girl in a red kimono who does her toes with the nippers of birds and the nail file of the wind, and the comb of the horizon in her hair glitters like a barrel of an antique musket. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d better not look in the river â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the clouds are reflected in its glassy surface. Orange, green, and bloody tints, and colors of unreal saturation. Animal innards. Dolphins, aliens, placenta. A transparent pregnant womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stomach. And I can see the two twins who share the whole world, Yin and Yang, the ancient sign, the two big-headed prawns.

The Two Trains You grow from the past and from the future at the same time. Two infinitely long trains run in opposite directions on parallel tracks. And you are a boy from the past who sees the face of himself, but from the future in the window of the train whooshing by. (The window with yellow curtains. The turbid edema of thick glass.) A single moment â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist here anymore. You are somewhere else, and you are someone else, and that moment shimmers forever -the tiny flickering light bulb of our self.

A Laughing Parabellum We two watch the sunrise together. The city is a toreador wounded just above the groin. It crawls in the gray dust of the roads, leaving behind stains of spilled coffee, wine, and urine. The streets recover their sight, arch their backs innocently like baby giants, wallow in their brick infant bodysuits, longitudinal and resonant. A bottle of fortified wine – and the world kicks the stool out from under his bare, jerking feet. It’s only our second week together. The secret of staying in love is to put as many as possible parallel needles and catheters in the soul. A viper in the terrarium doesn’t eat the favorite mouse, eats all the others, but not the favorite one. It’s the second week already… The fresh air is sudden like a hare; the first trolleybus on the reversing loop flexes its hip joints; our talk is simple and beautiful as if a cat lazily walked over piano keys in an impossible, but quite forgettable etude. We hear the sounds of our voices in the air. It’s like watching the bright towers of the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan. Thanks to this night, I met my destiny. The destiny looked into my eyes like a laughing Parabellum. And I realized: I can’t linger anymore. I threw from the chessboard all the pieces, but the queen. The time has come to draw on rice paper sketchy figures of future colds, kids, prayers, Sunday mornings decorated in soothing blue tones.

Kisses before Dawn Kisses before dawn, the taste of dried fish. The old piano, like a fat tarantula settles to sleep in the mirrored hole of the built-in wardrobe. The whole bedroom froze upside down, like an upturned beetle. Saliva and whitewash on the pillows. The volcano eruption happened at the weekend. Everything, from the plate with crumbs on the carpet to the bookshelves, is strewn with bitter ashes. The alkali of passion. And the palpable tenderness coils on the bedsheet like a remorseful dentist, his arms up to the elbows in the pulsing beads of pain. Our eyes get heavy, and we fall asleep. We are the hugging ruins of an ancient-something temple, and through the speckled gray inflow of the night dreams I already see the following day: a chicken is cleaned and washed in the kitchen sink, and there’s a semitransparent egg is inside. Nothing will come out of it. Neither a fried chicken nor fried eggs. Nothing will come out. An insatiable sleep, a hairy troglodyte in a wreath of bitter dandelions of a slight migraine, is going to eat all the time up. But she won’t be able to sleep. She’s going to slip out from the spring trap of my body, go to the kitchen, and drive into herself two black piles of strong coffee – an oil platform in the raging ocean of the day. Then she’ll be having a shower. Without a sound the ghost of me will burst into the shower stall and watch the waterfall of the girl: the serene face of a saint stares up at the heavens decorated with blue Italian tiles. And the cheerful streamlets run down her heavy hair and elegant body. A mermaid prays in a see-through open-air cage without closing the curtain decorated with funny mice. It’s time for her to get ready for work. It’s time for me to idle, write poems, and make up for the lost sleep.

The Gray Morning This gray morning is like the unwashed feet of a dancer, and between the trees, like between the toes, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dirt of the night feasts: empty bottles, packs of nuts and chips, cigarette butts. Garbage trucks dump waste containers in themselves, as if a caring nurse empties bedpans from under a palsied millionaireâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rear end, who watches cartoons and soap operas all day long, drooling on his neck and on his gold chain. The weather is disgusting like a cat squished by a truck. And the wail of police sirens is heard in the distance as if a purple rogue elephant races through the stone jungles.

A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies They dance in a half-lit room. A blindfolded desk-lamp is motionless like a hostage. A melody from the battered stereo is pasted all over them like a silky kaleidoscope of butterflies. He steps on her toes, And she laughs, tossing her hair. A minute passes, and her flesh is like melting ice-cream already, it oozes out through her underwear and jeans. His hands caress the bends and curves of her body. And suddenly they are inside the skin. They wrestle like grass snakes inside a blanket cover, trying to find a way out. Her moles fly off like rivets. The music lingers and lingers. Like a clumsy dirigible, it ousts everything, leaving only the lithe ikebana of their breath, tobacco leaves, bubblegum mint, and the red fat of her lipstick. The butterflies become heavier and sink into the pale dough of the flesh. An vortex of passion grows. It devours inch after inch part of the carpet, the crumpled bed sheet, a fragment of the bra, someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s little finger. The cannibalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lips carefully suck the meat from vertebrae; he tastes the barbequed neck of his love. The bone bells of the back chime. The music suddenly stops. And the silence, like an embarrassed dog that finds its master making love with a stranger, jumps onto his back, scratches him with its clumsy claws. Its warm saliva drips in his ear; a narrow stream of blood runs down his neck, mixed with sweat, but still, he keeps impaling, victoriously, the little origami boats on his sword again and again, one after another.

Don’t be sad, Chrysostom Rural silence is a thick sandwich with butter Generously sprinkled with the sugar of meadow dragonflies. Nothing’s going to happen here in this century. No one’s waiting for you in the Future Simple. When the reddish, high in hemoglobin, blueness of the evening sweeps over you, Carnivorous stars start moving their nippers. They are real and terrible here; They are not sick city animals muzzled with smog. You can gnaw on the candied nuts of constellations if you like. The moon is screwed up to the skies for centuries Like a basketball hoop, But an eagle-owl flies too high for a three-point shot. A couple eat each other under a dark window: The skin of the stumpy, thick-braided girl Is covered in moon dust, which tastes of unwashed soap. The kisses are rough and greedy sweet and sickly, like Turkish delight. Such an intoxicating stability reigns around That you can hardly tell day from night. And during the daytime, the whole landscape, no matter which way you look, Is a blue gauzy scarf with a sparrow that got caught in it. A goat rests on the roof of an old kennel. A proud rooster strolls around the yard, its comb sticking out like a naked brain. At nights a persistent moth Bangs its head against the illuminated glass Like a loony angel in a motorbike helmet. Revolutionaries hibernate like frogs here. Here there’s no sense in saving up for a vacation in Egypt. Here everything obeys the theorem of Rip Van Winkle. Everything is misty with drowsiness. In the evenings you are drunk with songs of crickets -They’re strong like pure alcohol -At dawn, the huts try on rains Like female goblins that try on necklaces. Your dreams haven’t come true. So what? Have angels on motorbikes sped away from you, Leaving you with a backpack on a dirt road? Don’t be sad, Chrysostom, You’re nothing more than a man sketched on a school blackboard. And you’re being wiped off from down up. Your trunk made of chalk is still seen, 24

But your elbowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dissolving in the wetness under the sponge. The highest heights are not conquered. The silence is as unassailable as ever. The bout of growing up is dragging on. The flat tires of your bike stir the warm dust. The life is passing by, pushing you to the roaring edge. God allowed you to dream, To sit for a while behind the wheel of the limo of the world. Then He threw you like a puppy onto the back seat, And jabbed the key of dawn into the ignitionâ&#x20AC;Ś

Sense of Snow The first snow has fallen today in the garden. The black brain of the dirt, mellowed by ants, and the curlicues of still green grass and piebald leaves are beautifully strewn with white feathers. Like angels had a pillow fight, their claws tearing the white cloth with a quiet crackle. The snow has come today as a stranger innocent, tender, a fluffy Trojan foal. It's leaping around, playing, pretending to bite my fingers spread wide apart. And my soul rejoices regardless of logic or common sense, even if it's all just elevating lie, waltzing me around, while camel colts of childhood are peeping through the eye of a needle. I'm taking the dwarfish garden in: a black, bony cherry tree has caught its second wind; it's blooming almost like in spring; it's caught a flock of hungry sparrows on the spinning rods of its branches. Here, in November, amid the cooled inferno, the first snow is gorgeous like a white whale surfacing from below the dirt. Ahab lingers, but still, points his harpoon away. I'm Atlas in a down padded coat, and I'm lifting the heavy sky with my eyes: the black and blue barbell fringed with white goes higher, higher, still higher. I'm alive, I'm immortal, I'm something elseâ&#x20AC;Ś

The Falcon Hair frosted with hairspray. A pleasant voice. A wart on the chin. Here she is â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a woman of a basaltic age. She gives off a sad smell of vanilla and Latin â&#x20AC;&#x201C; like parabellum, but preparing herself for another bout of overeating, not for war. She's gone through fire and water, and through the local plumber, just a little bit. It sounds incredible, but it happened that she's never been to the seaside and she's not sorry about that. She carries her body stoically, as if a short-winded dragon stole it but failed to capture the violoncello of her soul, and one day a prince charming will sort out the weed from the chaff. In the morning, when the dawn boils soap in the sky over the stadium, after killing all Hunting Dogs, and melting the constellations into apricot goo, she, in a nightgown, walks out onto the balcony. She's huge like a church bell, like a mega-ghost. She lights up a thin, strawberry-flavored cigarette, and the balcony strains its concrete bull's neck. But somewhere inside the immense princess lives a little girl, who spends hours at the piano, studies her granny's recipes goes to the movies with friends. Here's a photo from an outing: she stays in the background like a moraine, looking defiantly, with a cool fury. Like a freshly caught falcon staring through the bars of its cage.

The Lions' Heads like an aching tooth, deep in the night, an elevator jerks to a halt through the thin walls. the silence racks a gun, and here I am, swaying in front of the screen, like a cobra hypnotized by the flute. gradually, I'm coming to myself, ripping words off the green face like scraping mussels off a rock: the tide of inspiration has been up. my winged soul is still away, it's in the empyrean, strolling around the rooms of a neglected palace, the palace of constellations, like a baby deer lit by the blue moonlight, wandering around a picture gallery, where all the gray, shimmering walls are hung with moving lions' heads.

The Unicorn A cloudy autumn morning. Streetlights, like giraffes, quietly roam in the fog. Oblique clots of shadows quiver behind the trees â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the small fish of the last night got caught in the weeds while low tide. It smells of burnt felt and rotten plums. The light-boned autumn trembles like a rickety foal on the crooked legs of the branches. An old woman drags a hand cart of apples. Some leaves still glow, with the color of bile and blood. Suddenly it starts to drizzle. Hands of hundreds of ghosts rub the wet branches, making fog thicker. Two girls, students, hid from the rain in a pavilion. They smoke and gently feed each other with pieces of chocolate like birds feed their gaping chicks with worms, trying not to smudge the lipstick. A tipsy janitor stands at the front door. He's sad; he misses his father's apple orchard. Barely a month later, the thoroughbred winter will come, and you'll see the snowfall plodding along outside the window like a pure blooded unicorn, white horseflies stinging its sides, and it will fan them off with its tail of drift-snow.

The Phantoms A girl in a white dress, on the deck of the ship, puts peanuts in her mouth, staring into the distance, where the wide river and the sky touch like past and future, like revolver and holster. "I'm a nymph. I live here," the silence says in the language of snake-like hair, writhing while the mongoose of the breeze plays with it. We are on the ship, She's eating peanuts; I'm smoking. Thin orange dragons with pelican's beaks glide up from the east. We both see them, and the world gradually recovers from mankind, from the sentient AIDSâ&#x20AC;Ś No, I'm just imaging things, imagining phantoms at the edge of the sky and the river.

The Misprint Sun rays are beaming through rents in the clouds like someone’s aiming a searchlight through the silky ash-gray ribs of a skysaurus. The autumn leaves smell of raw peanuts, and the wind licks the puddles with its scratchy tongue, like a Cheshire tomcat, before dissolving into the majestic folds of the autumn day. The street with the Napoleon’s bicorn of a kiosk faces a side wall of a bleached bedlam. Partly dismantled, it looks like a Tetris game. Farther away, building cranes hang out together over the concrete letters of a building site. The cranes are ready to leap into fight like humongous mechanic spiders in a humongous three trillion liter mason jar. I feel like an insignificant seedworm in an Eden built for some absent giants, where each apple is as big as Luxembourg. The starry sky keeps me away at night; it raises the veil of slumber with the tip of the moon rapier… The Milky Way – God tried to wash the darkness out of the space, in the centrifuge of the Universe. This world wasn’t built for us; and where would we be now but for the sinister misprint of the consciousness?

Michelangelo of clouds Michelangelo of clouds has cloaked the whole sky since dawn, And in the marble block of the ripening rain, I can easily see the seeds of future Davids Or asbestos girls with vintage umbrellas made of birds. I walk home along Black Cat lane. The asphalt is littered with sand. It lies in patches, in big paw prints. A beast of sand glass has stalked the road. It looked like a big brown lynx On conic paws. My soul opens, Feeling the presence of a miracle. Three girls, one by one, Run out from behind the corner. They’re ordered by age from youngest to oldest. It’s Virgo sapiens evolution scheme in pictures – From a clumsy monkey with golden locks To a cheeky malicious thing with brackets on her teeth. The miracle lasts a split second, But something radiant and bright has enough time To squeeze its way from one world to another, To jump from one car to another on the run – A princess throws on a Puma jacket and hurries from A tedious royal ball to a pirate ship The Flying September.

From Another World A branch gently taps against my window. The steady clinking of knitting needles. The sounds merge into the deafening magic of silence. The silence emerges from the background of small noises Like a girl emerges from the sea. She deftly like a mermaid shakes the water from her hair, Squeezes it, and puts it on her shoulder. I take her hand. She’s trustful and tender. We walk through the park strewn with sounds. A crown strewn with jewels. A coin falls on the asphalt, A strike of a match scratches the air, A streetcar clicks its castanets far away, A blind man on the bench smacks his lips. The snails of his eyes are drawn deep into their shells. Beside him, patiently sits a woman, upright and flat Like the Virgin on an icon, and holds his hand. The pines are as motionless in the sky as rocks. It’s so quiet that one can hear The crunch of the tiny jaws of squirrels in the pines. Silence is a way from another world, A path of gods paved through the musical bedlam of humanity. In silence, one can see the eternal mess And the pageant of elephantine ideas, images, ghosts. Draw aside the fringed curtain of November And listen to the silence… It’s all That will be left of you.

The Red Forest You live in me. Every morning you come to my eyes From inside my head. They look like French windows – Their clear cast glass extends down to your feet. You stretch yourself on tiptoe and look out At the green, breathing waterfall of the new day, Staying yourself. You stare at the well-known but unfamiliar world At the city waking up in lilac pebbles… I’ve given you a bright drop of immortality, I’ve let you live in the red forest of my heart like a bird of prey, tawny owl… I used to kiss you, Inhaling the sweet smoke From the clay mouthpieces of your breasts. I absorbed the brackish essence Of your translucent clavicles and neck. My fingers rubbed the moire glow On your shoulder-blades. I held your consciousness In my hand like a fluffy dandelion. It was enough to blow tenderly in your eyes To puff away all your seeds And send them slowly waltz around the bedroom Like a thousand and one swan needles… After that, we used to sleep, hugging each other. Sometimes I started in my half-sleep like a fridge, And you gently stroked the nape of my neck. Our flat was ropy with wires. It needed a renovation Like a poor fakir needs A new basket for his dancing snakes. We didn’t have either a magic fish capable of granting wishes Or even the sea, Only a monumental view from the window, Looking like a (removed by the moderator.) I was a kid inside a ship, And you were my mysterious sea. I fought against the light of your candle; No one wanted to give in, To lose to the scalding darkness growing between us. I whispered “off”, 34

But your love glowed softly. Little by little you were becoming a part of me; You nestled inside my brain Like a blade nestles inside a pocket knife handle, Like the rib outgrowing Adam… My love, I’ve become a hostage of good habits I’m plagued by the universal hunger: Everyone I remember becomes me. We find the extension of our soul In a worthless stone found on the seaside, In a woman, in an idea, in a tree or a theorem, In a rural dullness, in the thickets of science, In the eternal, glimmering orchards of art, In the tiny warm palm of a baby, In any other straws we grasp…

The Fracturable Things It’s harder to lick wounds of your heart in wintertime. The whole city looks like a computer program Devoured by the weak-sighted virus of snow. Blue shadows freeze in paper cups. The waterline of twilight becomes fuzzy. The white, pink, orange darkness draws near. Sumo wrestlers shake their cold blubber On the pavements, awnings, benches. The snow rustles, the blizzard swishes, Snakes settle in old newspapers… And you’ve found three pairs of gloves While cleaning up the shelves. Now that you are alone again, Who could you give these nights to -The lilac triangles of love and warmth, Of light snoring and sleepy kisses? It’s only winter that hugs you, And loneliness puts its heavy paw on your breasts. It’s not January but a factory for sewing silvery covers. God’s moving house from this planet to no one knows where, Packing belongings into boxes, into Styrofoam of snows: Fracturable things, lives, orchards, ships. He puts them on foam rubber, wraps the dishes in paper, Careful not to break to smithereens The fragile Christmas bauble with people on it…

The Charon of Autumn November tastes like a gulp of cold coffee. Artificial light tickles the stone throat of the avenue. The golden ulcers of streetlights give a sinister, glimmering light. The Charon of Autumn has taken all the fallen leaves to the palaces of humus, to the floating castles, and now he's calmly smoking under a lean-to. A boy in a bright raincoat takes a soft and juicy walk around the puddles â&#x20AC;&#x201C; sort of a growing messiah in high rubber boots, messiah still small for the world. Everybody doesn't need somebody. The wind bends the trees to all sides; they are like a hungry fish that swallowed several hooks. A harsh puppeteer puppets the world, bending the showers, shaking their cold, nasty spines, emptying giant wells on the asphalt, turning inside out stone sacks of bad water. Juicy blackness oozes from all cracks; the blue, mixed with neon, blood of the evening burns like poisonous boiling broth. The empty square with a monument to the leader is a looped message to aliens: Hello, you have reached the Earth. No one is available now Please try to phone later.

Fetishist The birthmark on your neck is amusing. It looks like a tiny fly. I want to touch it, to play with it, to see if the spider comes running to the call of the skin. I want to bite your neck like a vampire, to infect you with my own world, to leave in the reeds of your subconsciousness a few tadpoles. You're holding my heart, and little by little, you pare it with scissors, waiting when it becomes as small as a scout badge, but anyway, I'll be the first to get at your spine. We are together, you and me. It's evening. It's raining outside. Someone plays Chopin's nocturnes with long oily fingers; the oily golden streetlights loom and shimmer, and I'm looking at your neck â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it's as refreshing as to look at a waterfall or at a young branch. You say that I'm a fetishist, That I look at you with a deranged greediness like a neighbor kid who swallowed spiders, on a bet. It's because, my love, that I have so much free time, that I've missed all the trains in the world, and I loaf about the railway station, writing down no man's poetry lines no one's searching for.

The Island of Hope Autumn: shocking, like ammonium chloride, beauty of the wretched, shaking world brings me to my senses like a gray monk that lashes his fat sides with a cattail whip with nails. And I discover an island of hope, a scrap of spring, where I can wait till the miseries are over. Where I can watch the city suffer from November, from the electric indigestion of the streets, from the delicate heartburn of lightning and the gloomy hangover of wet lanes.

Another chance the menacing jaws of dirty snow rotted on the sidewalk. a strange thing I saw: spring. uncanny, magical, damp transfiguration. a monster in a gas mask tore the ugly facepiece off and appeared as a long-haired damsel, emaciated like a starving louse, green pimples all over her forehead and cheeks. another girl, in jeans and a leather jacket pasted all over with silver lizards of zippers bounced down the subway steps like a seductive ball bye-bye! sliced in two by the fresh air I breathed on the vista of sobs and blisters, of pulsing impressionists. the drizzle sent wandering kisses. a puddle - the bedpan for a taxicab was fragrant with petrol; it planted in my brain the broken jigsaw puzzle from childhood: a blue car washed a day before is shredding the alley like a snub-nosed shark; the engine is started, and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re heading for the sea and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m hopelessly in love with a quick, sly girl with a squirrel tail. yes, my friend itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spring. again it regrows its feminine arms like crabs regrow their missing claws. wet blueses are hung on the balconies and branches, like drying baby jackets, and my head swims to the music of testosterone and the beetles of cars are speeding away on the revolving vinyl disks of the wet roads, escaping the insolent crows. this is a new life, and we, repeaters, are given another chance again

*** The late afternoon sky glowed like a freshly washed wound. Behind the open window of the first floor room (the frame was cracked like an ancient prosthetic limb,) a short-haired kitten of a girl was plinking out a ridiculous tango on a terribly out of tune piano. The melody was sagging, coming apart at the seams. The sounds scurried backwards, then walked sideways, crab-like, and I, like a number on a snooker ball, felt the earth beneath my feet slide.

You are a cat You are a cat, and all your nine lives are wasted on trifles, on washing and cooking and tidying up, on war painting your face and body, on taking cat naps beside the cradle. I have so little of you left to hold shall I pour you some moon milk? I’m reading you like teenage adventures of Sherlock, like crib notes written on a girl’s knees. All that is left of you is La Peau de chagrin that gets smaller and thinner with years, but I never give up wishing, longing. A small feather sticks out of the pillow like a skiing track on a mountain slope; the caramel moon shines through the window, and I’m looking at you through the years as if through a heavy snowfall: you’re smiling, and your lips look yogurt-stained in the flurry of the falling snowflakes.

Novocain Hundreds of canaries and goldfinches languish in her glance like in a cramped cage at the pet market. They fight, sing, click, hop between the perches, peck the water, groom their bright feathers. It’s such a compressed birdness and melodiousness that you want to bend the thin bars of the eyelashes away and set the little chimeras free. But in the back of your mind you know it’s just ingenious cheating, a butterfly on a cobra’s hood. And no matter how much you pinch yourself – ouch! you don’t wake up because the root canals of your soul are numbed with novocaine.

Life of a rainbow You squeezed out lemon juice on your breasts and whispered, "I'm your oyster, eat me!" You accelerated my blood like kids accelerate shopping carts; your amazing nipples met my fingers like Doberman Pinschers – they cocked their pointed ears alertly if the master opened the gun safe. It was love, but love with a limited shelf life. Life of a rainbow. Life of kefir. Eternity lazily turned its back to us, and we, light and careless, scattered like young rats in a port after the cruise was over. But sometimes the bronze angle of the horizon reminds me – please don't laugh – your eyebrow when you looked at the sea above the sunglasses.

Forgets about the snakes Twilight conceals the defects of our souls; evening is simmering in the kitchen like a pot of cherry varnish to mend crippled violins. Turn down the light and simply watch: the world dilates like a pupil. A green lampshade, an eerily lit aquarium, the lilac semidarkness â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it's all we need to let the soul transcend the body, to make the words step with confidence, insolently, like Mowgli who saw an evening town for the first time in his life. Sometimes silence is a form of sound, sometimes darkness is a form of light, and our silence coils around the unsaid words, we are two twilight planets. Embracing you in the dusk, I wash my name off, throw off all the price tags, all the angular formulas. There are too many traps for an intelligent beast, too many glass kennels inside. When the night extinguishes the lights of consciousness in the greenish-bronze candelabra of bodies, for a few minutes, we become those who the God wanted us to be â&#x20AC;&#x201C; free islands without clear-cut shores hovering in the double twilight of the sky and the sea; as free as an invisible man in the rain. This feeling has been accumulated for centuries, when we were lying in caves on lice-ridden animal hides, and a toothed sheen of fire warmed us, replete, sleepy, ashes peppered our bodies, and silence bloomed on the stalks of breathing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; flowers of orange dark. this is the power of shadows and whisper, when you can hear music inside the veins and cartilages, inside the kisses and the face bones; 45

these are cherries on the meat cake of a predator, and our embrace is a sign of something bigger than just an instinct of reproduction, or pleasure. We're like a mongoose that listens to a flute melody leaking from a half-open window, and for a moment, forgets about the snakes.

The Musical Ghosts This house was built by Mozart and Gogol. The floor boards creak: musical ghosts walk behind you, taking step after step, octave after octave, and candlelight bends in the draught – an orange gymnast limbers up, touching her toes. So lovely and naively tick the kitchen clock like a boy's wiggling a baby tooth with his tongue. The carpets in the hall – the carpets of the gone epochs – smell of serenity. Warm, a bit dusty bliss of the unfolded sofa smells sweet. Like no one ever is going to die, Like no one is gone. Curtains, like girls, are looking at their sandals. All the things on the shelves –books, a case for glasses, bijouterie in the vase – everything in imbued with meaning. Everything is sleepy and has a wise air. Like aquarium piranhas already fed with fresh beef. And you lull yourself like you used to do as a child: everything's going to be fine, everything's going to be fine. And a narcotic magic oozes out of the moment like pus out of a wound. The picture bursts on the edges of consciousness, bursts like a ripe gooseberry on your teeth: this and this and this is eternal.

Origami of Childhood Hot radiators of iron amphibians greedily suck tasty air out of the street like juice out of an infected tooth. Benches in the hot sun turn into an instrument of torture, assume the dignified bearing of the Middle Ages. In the generous shadow of horse-chestnuts, tireless kids rustle, drawing castles on the asphalt with pieces of crimson chalk. Carefully, I walk amid the fragile flowers, amid origami of childhood: here are picked tree leaves and a small stone and a medical box full of toys in the dusty grass. Everything changes, and everything remains still; Heraclitus hangs like a computer; the one-way street of life stretches like rubber, and you have time to notice weird lanes on both sides, caves in the sidewalks, simmering milk of lilac in the pots of little yards. Here you are, the life is over; the life begins anew. You start the first grade again tomorrow, and your mother is ironing your shirt, puckering her lips. This longing for the past comes from your childhood: the interest towards ruins and huts, to invalids of time, not entirely digested lumps. It's like hacking open the belly of the shark of the epoch and fiddling with the assorted junk: a bent license plate, broken bottles, slimy postcards, a legless doll, maimed octopusâ&#x20AC;Ś Sometimes your life gives you a candy like a kid in the street, a kid you don't know -gives you an impression, an image, a mystery, hits your fingers with a hammer, but you don't feel pain, don't smell the aroma of flowers from the garden â&#x20AC;&#x201C; unearthly religion only bees know. 48

*** She examined her hands meticulously like a bark beetle examines maple branches. A stone-eating politeness permeated her voice. As she spoke, the yachts in the bay, their sails folded, glittered in the sunlight – splinters in the body of an enormous, blue, fat jellyfish. Seagulls stirred the emptiness with their heartrending cries, like a fork stirs milk and eggs to make an omelet. We stood on the very edge of the summer I stared through the contour of her face, through her spider-like moving hair. The rustle of the waves licked the collar of the sand giant. I felt like a mouse trapped in a glass-topped box. If the sky was the screen of a laptop, it was not a kind God who looked down at us, but a gamer's eyes -- rapacious, caffeine-shot, with unhealthy glitter of the pupils, of the seagulls. And even her handbag – a dark-green thing – defied the rules of still-life painting and looked like a dead lizard on a statue. The impending parting was the only salvation we had: a starving vampire had sucked dry the last scoundrel in the world and was throwing up in the bathroom to clear the stomach from the filth. The waves looked like the serrated blades of bread knives, and the remote town was composed of loaves. Cupid, pursing his full lips, lubricated a crossbow with gun oil as if he didn't care, as if he had nothing to do with us, and a faraway lighthouse looked angrily around: a rogue Cyclops suffering from a hangover. Now I am seeing her for the last time. Her high cheekbones look like cliffs, and fragile, noble boys of my glances – all of them made of glass – jump down and break against the rocks. The thin, thin skin is like a living prawn caught in a fist; the tracery of the sea foam is our shame. 49

And suddenly I understand that I'm collecting things, details, before leaving her world forever. It always happens when the movie is over, and love gives you a farewell slash with a wolf's glance, like with a razor because it doesn't believe in saying goodbye.

In 80 kisses Do you remember our walks in the park, without a dog? In the green corrugated cathedrals of spring, we received the communion of kisses, of fruit ice cream and Coke. Wandering along the maple lanes, we hugged at the fountain, and my lips caught the blue fish of your heartbeat on your tender neck… If you remember, then You still exist, somewhere else… All my memories are copper vessels for brewing fog. The golden ghosts are stuck in the foam of sunlight Purple succubi, pillars, twisted benches, the streets in the boxing gloves of horse chestnuts their prickly eyes are popping out. And you are looking down on me, like a girl on a beetle: don't be afraid, I'll carry you to the forest and set you free… But what for? What for? The golden diamond of the window is trembling in the night a glassy electric dress made of moths. So come to it, naked, try it on. Let your nipples touch the cold glass. Let the sparkling black lava of the night city reflect you. Your comb on the sill is a nostalgic hedgehog. It carries a lock of golden hair through the autumn … A journey around your body in 80 kisses is over. You linger in the balcony door that leads up to the sky over the slate roofs of the neighbors' homes. Naked, unsteady, as if the very air took your shape, adopting the religion of breeze, the rhythm of a moiré cradle. Your green eyes are skilled rock climbers; They are looking for a weak spot in me, for a crack in the rock to fasten your rope. You hold a cup of lukewarm coffee 51

smeared in red lipstick. I am a sleepy genie from a broken amphora, I'm vanishing from you, little by littleâ&#x20AC;Ś Dress yourself in something from Brodsky, give me an anti-crowd pill, and we'll go, go for a good walk tonight. For such a long time I've used your heart as an ink pot, but now you are free, my love. Choose for yourself any of the worlds without me. It's our last immortal night among the wet lights and granite pillars. Give me the reality, memory, and joy back. The joy to create new worlds and new follies. Let my disheveled muse lean with a cigarette over the pages, while the silly carcinogenic nimbus grows and grows under the ceilingâ&#x20AC;Ś

*** Your name is a splinter, an ice-breaker a loop of pearly fog. Your nineteen are kill notches scratched with an accurate slope on a buttstock, a perfect shooting range for Cupid. I'm slightly in love with you. A timid grace of a kitten playing in the grass. Small ears like two pieces of chewing gum. Your nose has a bump on the bridge, like Cleopatra's. Like an apricot pit got stuck in the spout of a kettle. My heart used to sink when you, in the morning, still ephemeral, not fully incarnated yet, pulled your thin skin on, starting from your ankles, adjusted the elastic belt of the pantyhose, like a meridian â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an inhabited girl-planet. I hugged you displaced, warped; I dived into a mirror of absurd, took a shower of refreshing nonsense, getting brighter. Pity, I don't know where you are now. You see, we only live once; by pure chance our hearts collide, and break like Christmas baubles. We won't ever see each other again in this Universe. I left you at the window, and winter light laid out a garden on your shoulders. Turning a random corner, I left the Euclidean street. I'm not there, I don't exist anymore. And you're still standing at the window like Madonna in a kitchen icon, adding the days you have lived to the spinal column of January. You place heavy silver coins 53

On the frozen eyelids of the dead wasteland. The columns of coins are already tall. They're going to collapse any moment on the puddles covered with thin papery iceâ&#x20AC;Ś

The Martian Kisses Let's build fire in the fireplace. Let's lure the red beast out with the bitter smell of smoke. Let's sit in silence like deaf-and-dumb king and queen in a medieval palace. Animal skins are scattered all around the floor, like clouds; terriers slumber, starting in their sleep, and a simple tune of happiness spins in our heads like a copper hoop. You drink coffee at the round table, holding the big warm cup with two hands a pensive Eve with the apple. The silence crackles cozily. It resembles a cat's whiskers. You can pull them or even cut or burn them. Can silence live without us, after us? Can it hunt mice? What will it do without people? Outside, the wind rips the sound off the snowy bones of the air. Its fangs strip off the dried meat from the darkened ribs of the branches. You've hung some fat on a wire, for chickadees in the garden, constructed a birdhouse for sparrows. And here in the palace, the time stopped for us; we ended up in the jellyfish of a moment, in the blue ice block of dusk, along with the dusty mammoth of the sofa. Bacteria of happiness drifting in a comet for eons. You've finished your coffee and embrace me. We can live forever in this moment until we get covered with boredom and mold. 54

The fire hums like a fan. We are hiding in a shard of the world. Here are hypertrophied matches from the fairy-tales about giants. A basket, a piggy-bank shaped as a transparent elephant. You smell of coffee and perfumes, of the female perspective while the winter outside – a cruel white ape – scratches the thick French window with its claws. Terriers slumber, starting in their sleep. It's happened so many times before. Our happiness is round like a table, like a vinyl record. You are fingering the lock that fell across your golden-green face – you are a Martian, aren’t you? The gramophone needle gets stuck in the first grove of the moment, of the moment, of the moment. Let's build fire in the fireplace… Do you feel the compressed centuries growing their thorns through us like stone flowers, windowless cathedrals, quantum ghosts? All our great-great-great-parents are vaguely reflected in the river of time like bronze candelabrums with blue candles. Look, the water in that river has thickened like tar, And a crucian stopped beating its tail, its red gills froze. Sometimes we go out of ourselves, pull off heavy spacesuits a butterfly and a lamb, a wolf and a pick hammer and notice that there's enough air around. So let's keep a bit of the ancient warmth on our fingers and lips. This is your hand made of modelling clay, the amber gleam, Martian kisses, and the black nostrils of terriers…

What did you dream about? A Sunday morning. She slowly opens her eyes: a submarine for two (one seat is still empty) comes up unhurriedly to the rough surface of the sea of blankets. A bacchanalia of blue and cream colors is spread around. I look into her eyes, waiting when the hatches of her pupils will get unlocked, and a girl in pajamas, who looks like a claymation flower will scramble out. And then I’ll growl, “Morning, my love! What did you dream about?”

Within the Word Autumn Someone walks within the word Autumn, walks on high red heels, one floor above, one understanding above. Someone stops at the window, pulls the curtains open, and secretly admires the suntanned horsemen of the falling leaves that prance, rearing up on their hind legs, golden and flared. The willow at the lamp post has lost its mind; it mourns with bowed head, dropping green saliva on the ants. Then, later, late at night, the moon will come up, it will be thin like an eyelid -a teacher with a birthmark on her face will take a crowd of stars-second-graders on a trip above the night city.

There’s Nothing Black You and I are out in the sunny, snow-covered park. Our steps crackle like freshly-baked bread. The silver sturgeon spawns everywhere: the caviar of ice rings on the black glazed branches, and we, in no hurry, walk on and on… Our hands sleep in the pockets of our coats like field voles. The fog of our breath is dense and sluggish; it drags behind like a three-toed sloth. It freezes in the prickly air, and on the foggy glass of our steaming breath, I draw two graceless hearts with my finger and sign our moments like photos, on the back (the date, the name, the smile). And the soul flies out like a genie released from an amphora, or from a flask. But there’s nobody around, and my soul is its own master, its own Marcel Proust. Our shadows play snowballs, snort like Labrador retrievers. There’s still hope, and the street lamps come on childishly early, with the shaggy magic of overgrown dandelions. The snow – blue-green, marbled, granular – comes to life, like everything touched by the quill of a creator does. And I dip my quill, made from an arrow, into the inkwell of my heart, where there’s nothing black any longer.

The Avalanche Your soul is a snowball of memory a child has thrown down from the Alpine mountain of life. The celestial being claps his hands for joy (the blue mittens dangle, tied to the cord so they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get lost). And the snowball of you rolls down, gets covered with layers, with tons of memories, winding on the lustrous, deafening spool of destiny trees, villages, snowmen, snow leopards crouching down. Your photogenic power knocks everyone over like a Shaolin monk. Over time, you turn into a tiny country, into a Luxemburg of ghosts. This is how a human avalanche growsâ&#x20AC;Ś But here, on a school playing field, is still summer, and a young mother, without suspecting a thing, walks her little son Cyril and two big wrinkle-necked tortoises. In the grass, the tortoises look like dinosaurs in the jungle. The mother puts the smaller tortoise onto the back of the bigger one, and the toddler claps his hands clumsily, and enjoying the miracle, sways on his feet.

Game Over Game Avenue. A girl stands at the crossroads. An ungainly albatross in a pale yellow dress, she stopped in the middle of the dead ocean, as dead as it could be. Either her haircut or her straight posture resembles a horse chestnut flower. Or young princess Diana. She dreamily bites the gold chain hanging on her neck. She hides in the pagoda of a half-smile. She thinks no one sees her. But an old martyred maple (one of the branches is exquisitely twisted as if someone twisted a nipple until the pain was unbearable) watches her. Tell me, girl, why are you smiling like this? No answer, only autumn insolently blazes around, a momentary flame of yellow leaves flickers here and there. And two bus stops, like petrified Mary Poppinses, jump with the umbrellas of roofs into the rudimentary abyss of puddles. You’ve probably escaped from the film Moulin Rouge. In one of the parallel worlds – there are more than I can count – I’ve known you. Loved you. Wanted you. Kept you away. Held onto you. Looked at you and saw your moonlit face. Breathed you like air. Ignored you. Hated you. Was totally addicted to you like cigarettes, then – could barely stand you, played with your mind, hurt you. And now, dislocating the thought of reincarnations, from under a sleeping truck jumps a lean cat, black like a galosh, with green impassive eyes, a long-legged devil. And immediately, the girl is blocked up by cheeky buses, bleating trams, snuffling cars, and haughty street ads. She’s lost among the fine print of passersby. And that’s it. The ocean wasn’t dead, wasn’t dead at all, and the moment for a miracle is lost. Game Over.

Summer that Gives at the Seams The steady hum of wasps gets louder, as if someone demonstrates the International Prototype of hum made of platinum and iridium, exhibited under the glass dome of the summer noon. The watch on your wrist was a tadpole in amber, showing the girlish time, toy time. Here’s the country house, ivy-clad, a green poodle rearing on its hunches, holding a balcony in its teeth. The puppy’s tongue of the curtain glows red in the dust. And further, a church spire is stuck like a fishbone in the darkening larynx of the mauve sky. Peachy dreams. A dragon bone in the throat of destiny. How can I find you, my girl? As a token, you gave me your farewell stare – you wanted to jump into my eyes, like into a slowly and heavily departing train, but all the doors were already closed. Welded shut from the inside. The gray-blue metal. Like the last dawn when we were together, where we are still intimately interwoven with the greenish-lilac bodies, velvet roots of scents, with the transparent snakes of our souls, of consciousnesses. An unsteady scar in the glowing summer that gives at the seams.

The Nest Full of Broken Eggshells Here it is, our former bus stop. It used to be a great place for crablike cuddles and long, icy kisses, really indecent ones. Now this looted sarcophagus is not inspiring. Now uninvited pharaohs drink beer here. Sitting on the bench, they wriggle with laughter, with ancient infantile obscenities, like innocent worms. Do you remember, my girl, how we slowly, self-forgetfully were getting soaked in the sunset -golden mackerel in the unbounded aquarium. The pitchers shaped like juvenile bodies were getting filled with the carrot juice. And a slight shiver was felt in the neck, as if God had deigned to give us a pat behind the ears. It tickled. Now Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m looking at the sunset with a long, theatrical gaze full of burning triremes, tasting the glorious, velvety color. Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mulled wine. I get over it and start my search again, with a scratched iPad and a birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nest full of broken eggshells.

*** You are already asleep. I'm listening to your breathing. It's like watching the snow falling outside the window. Night birds fly together to land on the windowsill, to listen to your heart that scratches quietly like a vole under the white earth of the blanket. You sometimes speak in your sleep. You've forgotten to lock the safe of your soul for the night. There's a velvety emptiness in it, enormous banknotes of constellations you can't buy anything with because the shelves of the sky are empty. I like speaking to you while you are sleeping. You answer me clearly, you complain, argue, insist. Who is speaking to whom? From the POV of the minds It a head to a tail, Or someone else, a third party, Who appears between us, taking the shape of a clown, of an agitated childâ&#x20AC;Ś I always stay up late to get reflected in the warm river of your body in the pink lake of the melted wax, to get closer to your heart, like a clot of blood or an artery clamp. You are a keyhole between the worlds, and I, playfully, stick a grass blade of I-love-you into some different spacesâ&#x20AC;Ś While you are sleeping.

The green streetlight The ineffable… I've walked into your trap. I went to a spring late at night and froze like a armless statue in the middle of an autumn garden. What should I do? Should I grab with my teeth the knotty pencils of the twigs? Throw myself in front of limousine-long words? Draw on the dirt? Scratch the asphalt?.. But a young maple embraced a female street light, a glass flower on a metal pole, and dressed the iron in yellow leaves: "You are alive; now you are one of us!" Three girls with their hair down gracefully click-clacked out onto the path, and the smells of expensive shampoos, fluffy like minks, sashayed behind them… I could hear each sound, felt the details: A cyclist flew past. The slender swish of the spokes. Two boys buried themselves in their gadgets – fat moths in the rings of lilac light, the soft snouts hit against the flickering screens, and oh miracle! – down the asphalt stream, a couple waltzed under the platinum shine of a streetlight. She, an angel in a white jacket, with a backpack, taught him. Hundreds of thoughts, details, images swarmed, Buzzed, demanded, nibbled – But how many of the impressions would survive? Or would they melt like bits of butter on the heated pan of existence… I found myself in the center of the slow hurricane of red and yellow butterflies of October, of ephemeron moments… Oh God, how can I express this? Phosphorescent salty water of meaning passes through the sieve of mind, and thoughts and thoughts and thoughts swirl in the brain like music by Liszt. Look how fast a maple leaf falls. It looks like a pianist with his leg in cast. 63

I darted out of the night shadows, changed by the ineffable – as if the slightest radiation had changed the lyrical code of my soul. On the verge of tears, I ran home, the stumps of my arms moving, and carried in my teeth the ghostly green ray…

*** Express trains fly through the night like golden tracer snakes through the woodlands. A night magician shoots a deck of cards from one hand to the other, and the rustling arch appears for a long second. The naked dial plate of the moon, the whole yellow ticking mechanism of it pulses, and your thoughts walk in single file, stepping in their own footprints left a whole year ago. Moon wolves trot across the clouds. You see their silky glowing paw prints, and you seep out through the kitchen curtain like a jellyfish through a wire mesh. You feel the edges of someone else’s worlds and lives. You walk on spider legs of hearing into the warm inky tide. Blue lions of a pride walk around the purple savannah proudly. They swear, laugh, drink beer near the pub. Night doesn’t allow us to forget that we’ve come out of darkness, and all of us are going to return into it: the words are already read, and someone covers them with the flat blackness, closing the workbook,. Electricity, light, rainbows, adds, flashes of inspirations – everything will go back to the velvet square one, the square that is black and empty like the eyes of a fox in a black burrow. But the marathon runner of humankind is still running under the raining meteors, and his torch still burns. Let embryos of worlds crumple in the wombs of hills, and consciousnesses dissolve like pink clots in dark acid, but we can still get rescued. You can chain your son with handcuffs of destiny to a departing train, 64

but your own passenger car was already detached from the locomotive when you left school. And the abyss between your and the future widens, and you peer into the night out of your kitchen window: oh I still can jump over it, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m still strong! But the moon wasteland of the present day with its unhurrying nomads of events bristles, and somewhere far beyond the pubs, beyond the woodlands, night granular roads hiss like dragonsâ&#x20AC;Ś

*** Little cracks of spare time are like pink gills clogged up with nonsense. You think your life is just about to start, and everything that has happened – your childhood, school, first love, university, the birth of your son, the wound, depression, war, dismissal from the job – was only a prelude to what is yet to come. A cannibal’s foreplay.

*** There’s something about destiny that resembles a dentist’s work: sterility, perseverance, carefulness, consistent cruelty, disposable whiteness. One day, you enter the kitchen and suddenly realize that you’ve lost forever this smiley summer, this milky cloudy planet, this slim nervous woman with green eyes. And you put on the final movement of the Moonlight Sonata, having no faith at all in art. You throw a lousy witch into a fire, expecting her to spit, swear, kick her legs. Hah! The angered melody will soar up, emitting smoke, the smell of sackcloth, and the fume of uncombed felty gold of the hair. And frightened, you close yourself off, but the music will seep in even through the shuttered windows. Its poisonous vapor will worm its way in. Your body will start sweating at once, getting covered with small drops of fright, like hot chicken meat in a clear bag. Oh, great music, you work wonders and nightmares.

The beast of moonlight My soul is gray like foam in a saucepan. I pick up scattered socks, tights, wish good night to my younger son, check if the door is locked to prevent the warty beast of moonlight from finding our souls, which remain unprotected till morning. Now nothing can stop us from romping on pink horses of dream in rainbow marshes, but I still linger like a Siberian tiger on an ice rink. I cling to a book before going to sleep. I put it down – the seconds of life melt like sweet snow on the lips, And I have already nearly melted. But a sudden thought yanks me out of the somnolent landscape. A wild recollection breaks into my mind like a burglar with a gun. A small town, a nasty autumn, a bus, fields of stubble – sutures are open, but the threads are still there – someone has removed the golden fetus of the sky. She cried silently, hiding her face in her wet hands, Medusa in a kerchief, ashamed of her own withering eyes, changing everything around not into stone, but into a pulsing ulcer, into a diamond of shame. The salty taste of tears. Suffering is like a woman inside a marble block. Knock-knock – she can’t sleep in there. Where are you from? Why did you come to me at this time of night? I’m not a sculptor, and I’m not a vandal. Another fragment of memory has attached itself to the first one: a boy is alone at home late at night. A chamber pot at the window. Heavy curtains. Dim, sifted light of street lamps – they look like black giraffes, and they are his best friends. The dulcimer of loneliness whines slowly. With such a sound, interns pull out teeth in a morgue… But the waltzing swamps of sleep approach, 67

and the Creator drops pencils from His hands. I hear a slight snoring, a rhythmic growl of the fridge. A deep sigh in the heating pipes quickly fades, and a green warty paw of the moon beast gets out softly from behind the curtainâ&#x20AC;Ś

*** The autumn was like a column of brown fire. We roamed the wine-colored afternoons – the gauze of trolleybus wires, fruit flies of birds – working up blind happiness, for later, squirreling away velvet lyrical fat. Unsteady phantoms of future snowmen were so funny growing out of the clouds, snowy bubbles ready to burst. The smell of the cold weather and smoked leaves teased us. October had dropped mittens of fox fur into freshly scraped fish scales. The dull, tailless days were caught in the glue traps of thin liquid-crystal puddles. The puddles reflected scraps of faces, overcoats, phrases. October was cutting living photos with a pair of charred scissors, making silhouettes, shortening parasols. And the black with maple spots monkeys of the lawn wanted to be picked up. Poplars stood still like giants but birch trunks -- piano keys with awful incisions on them – jerked silently: someone was cutting ropes deep underground. Life routine hadn’t touched us yet, letting us fool about. A velvety family of tiger cubs swirled in the park like a stain-glass miracle,– Bright red, leafy, lazy, and rough. They bit our boots, chased the crows. I believed we would get through the meshes in the ripped net of destiny. Yellow, webbed trees looked like baby dragons suffering from hepatitis. You took my last name; You did it o competently like only women can do. You took it like the crown from a sleepy king’s head.

*** A boy on a tricycle hurried to me. The sun smiled over the avenue. But I woke up in tears like a clear bag in dew amid heavy morning grass.

I breathed out, “God, forgive me…” Is there life after me? Homunculi, aborted fetuses stare at me from above with reproach. Waxen spiders with child faces don’t blink, just silently purse their thin lips\mandibles. What can I tell you? I was so lucky. I might as well have not been born. It was an improbable coincidence: I bit into the ovum -excuse me, mom -like into a sweet biscuit, and hung onto the silty edge of existence. What a fine ghostly thing is that line between to be and not to be, between Hamlet and the ghetto. Now I blindly thread the black needle of the universe with a luminous filament of poems, while the creator, like a drunk war hero, shoots a machine gun at random at the twelve zodiac signs, and the night sky is on fire from one end to the other. The nature alone is always happy to see us -the way a fridge is happy to see food. God sees you in his dream, but after he has woken up it’s unlikely he’ll remember what his dream was about. The jug eared boy with the eyes of a deer. Who are you? Who are you? The last hope of the world that has acquired a fantastic dimension. A small boy, standing atop a tower made of elephants. Standing on the shoulders of millions of lives reduced to dust. You reach out to the window in a star and knock timidly: Is God at home? 70

Will he come out today? Will he see me? Look, the whole world got on its tiptoes, rising from fire and darkness. It gives you its paw and a rose with a thorn Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s be friends Help meâ&#x20AC;Ś

*** In the rainy season, the fish deep down inside you comes to life. A pile of rubble and sand resemble a dead dirty lion, its mane made of nettles seething in the ditch. Street lights on thick stilts plod their way through the sparkling fogs – tall clowns hold lamps in their mouths like pirates held their swords. Dusk boards the city. The days are flooded. But I can’t swim up to your window, which glows with soft apple light. I can’t jump to the overhead wires. The trees dance like black squids. Goodbye, my phantom. A burnt child dreads the fire. It’s just rain. Just rain that hammers the tilted aluminum piles into the softened ground. Minutes, minutes, minutes. The air smells of ozone and mushrooms. Of fever, ammonium, and plagiarism. The spidery shower licks its lips; it bangs on the roof with its heavy silvery paws… Do you remember how cheerfully, how persistently time dripped through the roof in the hallway? We used buckets of clock faces to collect it, or seashells of kisses. And a huge moth in the kitchen sneezed under the chandelier… After the rain stopped, the acoustics in your head is like an empty dolphinarium: hollow, resonant, huge, and bright reflections slide across the ceiling. It smells of chlorine, and of washed marble. Our best days are just dew on the sagging grass of memory, on the pimply bodies of lizards: motionless, they drink the precious moisture with their skin. But someone has ordered to preserve us.

*** It hurts when an illusion is broken, It hurts way worse than an arm broken in several places. You are in a kind of dreamlike trance, a detailed dotage turned inside out. Your inner self rolls its eyes in pain, wiggles, thrashes its tail like a sturgeon on a hot galvanized deck. When an illusion is broken, you still try to crawl away like a lizard cut in two by a shovel, and reflected light dances on the shards of your broken dream. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve thrown you out of my life and I nearly lost my mind. I bit my tongue and tasted blood. Why does this happen to me? I used to think you were just a background to my life, a female ghost made of curtains, of laughter through the phone. A college girl dancing in the shop window in a blue gauze dress, a carnivorous aquarium beauty with gills of earrings and fins under the suntanned bust. I used to knock on the thick glass, and the mermaid smiled, pushing her jaw forward, showing her sharp triangle teeth. Every loved one or close one blinds us to the machine-gun nest of reality. To a cold minty light in the tunnel and the gorge of a black hole. Only if we are together, only if we are bound tight with the squid roots of the crowd we can dodge the blackness wreathing behind our backs. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like a battle of blind warriors when we kiss or kill with a sword first,

and only then touch the face: who are you? You can only get rescued while rescuing someone. Spartans fought back to back And all lovers do that. I’ve thrown you, haughty woman, out of my life, thrown you out without a parachute while flying over a field of lies, over a meadow of poppies with sleeping lions on it, and felt a hole in myself. As if a tank had fired at a giant or a fist had punched a hole in a painting. This juvenile pain doesn’t know yet what it wants to become. But I understood the meaning of the word “forever.” We just think we are pulling out a weed or picking a flower to smell it. An innocent gesture, an innocent step. But a small thing drags entire underground forests behind it. We never know where games stop, and where the hell begins. We can never beat our destiny in chess or clear our hearts of mines.

Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared The Courtship of Winds, River Poets , Dream Catcher, Magma, Bombay Gin, The Gutter, Press53, Reflections, The Ilanot Review, Prime Number Magazine, Tilde, In Layman's Terms, Underscore review, The Write Launch, Sheila Na Gig, Grey Wolfe "Passion Pages", Black Heart Magazine, Lighthouse, Smeuse winter, Dragon Poet Review Winter, The Scene & Heard Journal, Buddy. a lit zine, Canada Quarterly, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Garfield Lake Review, Furrow, Barzakh, Poetry Pacific, Twyckenham Notes. He is a finalist for 2016 Award 'Open Eurasia', 'The Best of Kindness 2017'(USA). He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. In addition to translating poetry, Sergey Gerasimov has written fantasy and surreal stories and novels. His stories have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, and many others. His last books are a wildly surrealistic novel, The Mask Game (https://www.amazon.com/Mask-Game-Sergey-Gerasimovebook/dp/B00H58G1NU) and a fantasy novelette Oasis (https://www.amazon.com/Oasis-Do-Schrodingers-Cats-Ageebook/dp/B079Y6BMND/ref=sr_1_2?s=digitaltext&ie=UTF8&qid=1531483906&sr=1-2)