Poetry by Dmitry Blizniuk, translated from Ukranian by Sergey Gerasimov
Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Five Points, Rattle, Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize and his folio had been selected as a runner-up in the Gregory O’Donoghue Competition and the 2025 Gabo Prize finalist.
Directory: http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk
A POET IN EXILE
The sky above the highway is low
like a cunning dog's muzzle above a steaming saucepan.
A one-winged angel of advertising
stands by the roadside:
Aquafresh, perfect water of gods.
And I'm an imperfect verb, just someone in a windbreaker,
with pieces of canvas on my head that flap like a pterodactyl.
Here's my garden,
set back some distance from history,
a prehistoric place for ancient bugs,
and one of them stands on its hind legs
in depression,
while the gloomy autumn stares from above.
We've run away from the simmering house
like milk that is boiling over. Now I'm single again.
The sun hangs behind a ruffled up shed,
like a bloody yolk on a cold frying pan
until the nightfall dumps it in the garbage,
while I'm looking for clean socks, sniffing noisily
like a dog with a mallard in its jaws.
I've had to leave the city and women behind,
make friends with the blissful world of sticks,
Like Lorca, I managed to avoid a firing squad.
He's grown old, he looks like a grey parrot with an earring,
keeps a rapier in his summer kitchen,
grows grapes and cucumbers, and something sparkles in his eyes
when blood pressure squeezes him
like a tube of Aquafresh.
If not for the Internet, I wouldn't exist.
A cat called Nostalgia
licks his balls on the windowsill.
The lampshade is a temple of flies, priestesses of summer schizophrenia.
I'm still destined to return,
I feel the power of a boomerang within me.
It's going to bend my way and carry me back to my youth,
otherwise, I don't care where.
An eyelid with long lashes has fallen away from the face of a garden doll.
The blue eye is unprotected now,
and the rubber body under the rain feels so at home in the garden.
For how many years will I decompose in the humus
in the garden of gods,
lie in the ground and see the black earth,
black caviar in the eyes of dawn,
then stretch up to the sky as a green needle of grass?
The smell of the rain that has just stopped is like spilled glue.
It's so fresh that I want to run up to the sky, but I can't.
A poet in exile is more than just a poet.
And a man? -- There is no man anymore.
Sergey Gerasimov is a Ukraine-based writer, poet, and translator of poetry. Among other things, he has studied psychology. He is the author of several academic articles on cognitive activity. His stories and poems written in English have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, J Journal, The Bitter Oleander, and Acumen, among many others. The poetry he translated has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. His books include Feuerpanorama: Ein ukrainisches Kriegstagebuch (dtv Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2022) and Oasis (Gypsy Shadow, 2018).
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