yuriy tarnawsky
To dirty finger nails instead of stars, to a mouth instead of the sky, to poems consisting of numbers and mathematical rules, to Fridays which follow Sundays and Tuesdays and which are equal to their value, to my corresponding on Fridays with an address about when I am to die, to an ocean of my blood beyond which they want to send me, to a distance consisting of my wife’s name, to jungles made out of my innards, to my damp fever, to lips in the form of river deltas, and silt, and mountains, to a hostile whispering of my name by almost two hundred million mouths, to a leader with a brain from which there protrude six dead elephant trunks, to the trembling of my lips as if to twinkling of dark stars, to my hiding behind my eyelids, huge like cupboards, in other people’s chests, behind the curves inside fire, behind the warmth of animals full of distance like landscapes, behind red fishes with tails made from feathers and spilled blood. To a heart in the shape of automobile tires, and bridges, and Saturdays.
Numerous, like snowflakes, I fly through landscapes vomited up by a drunk or sick god, snow falls through the surface of my lips as if through space, I grow frightened from the wounds it leaves behind, during this day when heaven and the earth come tumbling down and the whole world pretends it’s celebrating Christmas.
from the volume without spain
