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.