free verse copper wires gnawed bare
as thick as a little finger ready for scrap
that’s the best of what’s in my poems and in addition
breath
over the coal cathedral
of a half-ruined mine
daytime moments airy and white like bones
sucked empty of marrow
midway through the journey of my life
I can now choose where to go
but my legs like those of a whale are a fused lump
I need an ocean and not these streets and weedy lots
marauder in your own life
how easy it is to burn the manuscripts
written by your own hand a decade ago
otherworldly Gogol
step away from the fire
be honest with fate
step into the mocked forest red leaves burn brightly
frozen in time
a torn artery sways standing
like a snake on its tail
with its head chopped off
splashing about colors scarlet crimson
granulated blood
(translated by Yana Kane from Russian)
Dmitry Blizniuk is a bilingual poet from Kharkiv, Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Five Points, The Los Angeles Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine and hundred others. 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 2024 and the 2025 Gabo Prize finalist.
Yana Kane came to the United States as a refugee from the Soviet Union. She holds a BSE from Princeton University, a PhD in Statistics from Cornell University, and an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Literary Translation from Fairleigh Dickinson University. She won the 2024 RHINO Poetry Translation Prize, was a finalist for the 2025 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation, received an honorable mention in the 2024 Stephen Mitchell Prize competition, was included in the 2025 Deep Vellum Best Literary Translations anthology, and was longlisted for the 2026 edition. She is grateful to Bruce Esrig for editing her English-language texts.