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5 poems
1
It’s touching, but the grass has sprouted
My mom asked me to dig the ground
The hair on my head got longer
My mom still asks me to work in the vegetable garden
Potatoes are growing on my grandparents’ bones
The meat on her bones my mom wounds every day at the factory
It’s amazing how fast trees can be cut down
Yesterday the potato crop was picked up and taken away
This morning my mom was taken away
In the name of the Communist Party
The sandy ears of time have been plucked
The wheat eyelashes of my neighbor I’ll never forget
The hungry years began
The neighbor ate her firstborn
I can’t see anything
I don’t know anything
Touching but the red grass sprouted
A bloody mother came to me in a dream
She asked me to dig the ground
2
Dawn belly hunger
Remember the eyelid of this time
Bottle of storm in the glass of the era
Rabbits play in the flame
Snakes scratch their quiet feet
Quieter
Quieter than foliage
Louder
Louder than bone
Eat me
Drink me
Blood flesh bone
Emptiness silence nothing
Glass grass memory
Knowledge ignorance faith
Mistakenly pressed buttons obu gods assistant
The sun has not yet been invented
Someone searches in the dark for the name of the tree
The crossbar is nailed to the crossbar
The body is nailed to the cross
No one is guilty
3
The night is washed white
The carpet is pulled through the hands by autumn threads
I am leaving through the infinity of fingers
Everything is painted outward by the ridges of bushes
There are berries in the basket and the dead man is not hiding in the foliage this time
Nobody owes anything and not even the cemetery
The lake of sand sparkles and time is an illusion
Everything that is thought and felt is an illusion on the bark of a tree
In my hands there is only trampled air
This is the right farewell
4
The burlap of the uniform gets in the way
The physicality of thinking interferes
Where were we when your stork became an airplane?
Where were we? — we were apart
There was no bottom where we were
The crystal surface of the water was stained with blood
Fingers are not needed
The heart is not needed
All that is unnecessary was cut off
We swam in the crack of the hand
We were in the palm of God
We were not in the palm of God
No one sewed a button of an eye on a teddy bear
No one came to the branch of my shadow
No one will come: and the future never existed before
The stones fell silent like idols
The stones fell silent, idols
The stones jumped into the water against their will
Like drowned men who overcame their fear of swimming
Form gets in the way
Body gets in the way
Consciousness gets in the way
The commodity-money system gets in the way a lot
(Am I getting in your way?)
You will swim out, stork-swan, and God will wash us
You will swim out, stork-swan, and God will dry us us
Nobody will dry us: nobody will come:
Nobody is needed by anybody...
The fire sacrifices the silence of the house for you
But you are still silent
The swan sea of the future drinks the water of its own absence
The fire went out like a pegasus
The centaurs trampled the ridges of the grass
The cries of the grass. Underfoot. The cries inside
But I hear nothing more
I waited for you for an eternity: but I couldn’t wait
5
Tonight it’s all the same: get coal or die
The fishing rod is hidden in water where there are no fish
I take the letters of your name from my pocket
Nothing is assembled from particles into a word:
God —
You say nothing and I don't know Your name
Apple cider has gone up in price and all I have left to remember the past year are empty
aluminum cider cans
Word —
It's written with a capital trembling letter
But the Babylonian dream has stuck to the pants of an American homeless person
The word is a nuclear bomb in the pants of an American homeless person
Money can’t be earned
Money can only be stolen
I steal from my talent
I steal from my time
I get nothing in return
The fish is drowning
God is drowning
The cider is out
I have nothing left but dreams of leaves crunching under my feet
The crunch of leaves in a withered chest
But I take the sound out of my ears and the water is silent
For the first time and again I take the heart out of my chest and time is silent
Time knows that nothing is happening and that everything has drowned
For the first time and again
God writes his name with a capital letter where there is nothing
This is how another morning full of the dew of the dead is born
The word God is written with a capital letter because I feel like a god:
The generals are afraid that I will stop crunching under their boots and everything will
collapse
The word Shit is written with a capital letter:
In my passport it is written: Shit
Use it as intended as humus
And above my head is the collapsed ceiling of the house and the collapsed world history
Buried apples rot and stink
Use them as intended as humus
Babylonian generals afraid that I will stop rotting
A daughter fish swims out to meet me
(She is also called a mother fish)
My vodka is running out
I am going to go out to the store for vodka
I will not go back
The fish God will come
He will give us a drink
He will not come
He will not wash us
The hydroelectric dam has collapsed
We are forever underground
A fish eye looks into the darkness
Soldiers shoot phallic: blood or sperm?
Mykyta Ryzhykh, an author from Ukraine, now lives in Tromsø, Norway. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023 and 2024. He’s published in many literary magazines іn Ukrainian and English: Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal, Shot Glass Journal, QLRS, The Crank, Chronogram, The Antonym, Monterey Poetry Review, Five Fleas Itchy Poetry and many others.
Copyright © 2025 by Mykyta Ryzhykh, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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