• Forthcoming in Vestiges_07: Catachresis

    a long metaphor
    begins
    like
    a penumbral boulevard
    and ends
    a gaunt alley
    with an infinite odor of
    might



    Negligence triumphed.
    Departing at noon
    from a sketch of a station,
    you’ve stopped contemplating
    when you will return to the sky.
    Poetry — it’s a railroad roar,
    a jig of semantic pistons,
    condensed nonsense
    of chance conversations —
    an insidiously expanding
    conspiracy against the eternal.



    do not compose a poem

    he said and goes out on tiptoe
    from a gigantic dead house
    but this isn’t all: a music-murderer daybreaks
    in Christ’s pocket

    conversation like a flattened square
    with wooden wings
    but essentially: thunder
    hoary darkness Japanese grain spikes
    slipping into fractals, proportion

    unprinted word — lightning
    with warm vodka in place of a lymph node



    a nighttime model.
    a square floodplain of sense

    i will tell but later
    signals pass through stone
    forming into an unstable key
    available to stoplights

    undress: deferentially and
    turnlessly
    like a vanishing light
    in a fly-eaten phrase

    through lazy fingers through
    excess inventions through
    accounting swept over by snow
    repeating: Clytemnestra is innocent



    speak
    of a total disappearance
    of an internal snow
    giving a passing mark
    to straying
    pianists
    and also
    of silk batches
    of parliamentary factions
    of chestnut hair
    and the samurai precision
    of cigarette ash

     

    Stanislav Belsky (Станислав Бельский) is a Russian-language Ukrainian poet born in 1976 in Dnipropetrovsk. He has published thirteen books of poetry in Russian, most recently Quarantine Times (2023), On Sunny Concrete (2023), and Friendly Conversations with Robots (2024). His poems have been translated into Italian, Polish, Hebrew, and Czech and published widely in journals nationally and internationally. He is also a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poetry to Russian, a curator of the poetry book series Тонкие линии [Thin lines], a co-organizer of a Dnipro and Kyiv poetry festival Чернил и плакать [Get ink and weep], and a programmer by profession.

    olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. Her debut chapbook cities as fathers is out with Tilted House, and “our monuments to Southern California,” she calls them is forthcoming with Ursus Americanus Press. Other works can be found in mercury firs, Literary Hub, Cleveland Review of Books, Metatron Press’s Digital Publications Space, and elsewhere.

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