i forgot her blue ice

yuriy tarnawsky

The Sunday was like a hot bus engine. People were leaving themselves as if for a day out in the country. My face slipped back past the window like a tree. Nobody knew its name. The future was closed like a museum. There wasn’t enough room on the ground for the sunlight. Even the soft drink bottles sweated. The man was telling me of about the cool of the Andes. Underneath, his life was torn like underwear. The green water swam around playfully with a white flower in its teeth and the cocoa-brown boys were in vain trying to catch it.

Suddenly there was the sound of an airplane. I turned around as if someone had called my name. The sky slid down and stuck at an angle like a bayonet in the flat Yucatan landscape.

from the volume photographs are like flowers

two crucifixions (2)

yuriy tarnawsky



2. high

The cross went way up into the sky. It bent to one side like a tall blade of grass. It was made from metal tubing neither light nor dark, neither shiny nor dull. The figure of Christ was tiny like a stamped solid rubber doll. You could see he was naked. The cross swayed rhythmically like a man breathing. It must have been windy high up. Christ must have been cold and lonely. It seemed his punishment was cold and loneliness.

“Hey you up there, take me with you as a child onto a beautiful prancing charger!”

Reason is a servant of feelings. Sometimes it runs away and goes wandering through the world until it gets homesick.

from the volume photographs are like flowers

five self portraits (4)

yuriy tarnawsky



To Jurij Solovij

4. shevchenko

The man stood with the blank side of the page turned to the world. There was something pathetic in the way his hand had tried to form the letters. The blue ink looked sad as a pair of eyes. Usually gentle, the soul can be vicious at times, using eyelashes as claws. The tears were the color of mauve flesh.

from the volume photographs are like flowers

five self portraits (1)

yuriy tarnawsky



To Jurij Solovij

1. sea

The paper waited until all the green had arrived. A triangular mound rose up in the spot on the surface where the wave had passed. The white foam had the pattern of female pubic hair. It formed a line down the middle, top to bottom. Fragments of faces floated on all levels: a nose frail as a white butterfly, a pair of lips wearing a long silk smile, a cool porcelain forehead, a fragment of a soul looking like a blue eye. Without a woman! I’ve been cursed with a talent to become reborn again and again.

from the volume photographs are like flowers