Dmitry Blizniuk: 1 Poem

Baby Dragons

translated from the Russian by Sergey Gerasimov

The autumn was like a column of brown fire.

We roamed the wine-colored afternoons—

the gauze of trolleybus wires, fruit flies of birds—

working up blind happiness, for later,

squirreling away velvet lyrical fat.

Unsteady phantoms of future snowmen

were so funny growing out of the clouds,

snowy bubbles ready to burst.

The smell of the cold weather and smoked leaves teased us.

October had dropped mittens of fox fur

into freshly scraped fish scales.

The dull, tailless days were caught in the glue traps

of thin liquid-crystal puddles.

The puddles reflected scraps of faces, overcoats, phrases.

October was cutting living photos with a pair of charred scissors,

making silhouettes, shortening parasols.

And the black with maple spots monkeys of the lawn

wanted to be picked up.

Poplars stood still like giants

but birch trunks—piano keys with awful incisions on them—

jerked silently:

someone was cutting ropes

deep underground.

Life routine hadn’t touched us yet, letting us fool about.

A velvety family of tiger cubs swirled in the park like a stain-glass miracle,

Bright red, leafy, lazy, and rough.

They bit our boots, chased the crows.

I believed we would get through the meshes

in the ripped net of destiny.

Yellow, webbed trees

looked like baby dragons

suffering from hepatitis.

You took my last name;

You did it so competently

like only women can do.

You took it like the crown from a sleepy king’s head.

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Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Kharkov, Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in The Pinch Journal, River Poets , Dream Catcher, Magma, Press53, Sheila Na Gig, Palm Beach Poetry Festival and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, Canada 2018).