Dmitry Blizniuk

translated by Sergey Gerasimov

Burying the Dead

scars of fresh graves
uncovered in clay, without crosses
or with them.
the wooden crosses, uncomfortable,
like cranes on crutches.
you avoid making noise as if in a stranger's house.
the huge blue sky presses down.
it's so quiet you can hear ants
climbing on cellophane.
burying the dead is a common thing now.
freshly dug graves
courteously
open their arms.
the blind brown hairy bride is awaiting,
smacking her mole lips.
don't ask for whom the earth, wide open like a square bell, rings.
you know the answer.

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, Five Points, The Los Angeles Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades and many others.  Forthcoming publications include    POETRY Magazine  and Beloit Poetry Journal. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine.

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. His last book is Oasis, published by Gypsy Shadow. The poetry he translated has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. His book about the war in Ukraine, Feuerpanorama, in German, can be found on Amazon. NZZ, in Zurich, has published as many as 540 of his antiwar nonfiction pieces since February 24, 2022. A couple of them can be read in English in Another Chicago Magazine.