yuriy tarnawsky
from the volume without spain
I vanish in the mouth made out of a huge white ship and a continent with its architecture demolished by food and a holiday; the air shakes from the color of the eyes of a girl who is watching me, as if from a huge motor; her eyes and cheeks for an instant are indistinguishable from her skirt; long corridors start in my cheeks, full of speed, like express trains; furniture all around me sways like water in a swimming pool; a black man appears pronouncing chairs, tables, and long rows of numbers; the greatest crime of all takes the place of the distance between my legs; it is the cause of death of all my fathers, and mothers, and brothers, and sisters; I am being ground up by a machine made from the concrete and wood brought from Spain; in my death, people pass through my mind and come out of my mouth growing and temporary, like numbers; we are moving away from the capital of the local architecture down an avenue of garbage; we cry together with the help of a special machine; we find our house partly hidden behind our minds and humidity; we enter it and find ourselves in our common chest; our tears take on the shape and dimension of empty rooms, so that we don’t know what surrounds us and where we are; out of our spare chest that in the form of a small gray box lies on the floor, comes a scream which had been hidden there about six mouths; it makes Spain come closer, with its time, its concrete triangle, its space in the shape of a fountain, and me, in an air-tight transparent cage with someone else’s tears in my eyes and moaning in my chest.
The bay I left behind takes on the dimensions of an ocean, and my face with it, and I take on the speed of the ship, and become at the same time very high above and far below myself, and tears, huge, like ocean liners, flow down my cheeks, illuminated with stars and the lights of a city mixed with the sky.
