by Dmitry Blizniuk
The darkness thickens diagonally
as if someone plays Paganini’s caprice on the violin
without strings, without lacquered cartilages,
without hands or a bow,
on the pure vibrating clot of shadows.
I want to come to the open window
and take a big lump of the blue sky,
dazzling bright, cooling down,
with my bare hands.
Anti-evening.
An anti-moth flies into the light of an anti-candle.
Everything is inside-out in the rooms,
and all the mirrors are the entrails of a mirror carp.
The curtains, like horses,
drink the luminous dust at the drowsy horse-pond.
It’s so quiet that the whimpering sound of the TV
from the floor below seeps out through the silence
like sonic blood through the steamed concrete bandages.
– translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian
Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, The London Magazine, Guernica, Plume, and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize. He lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Poets & Writers:
http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk