Housewife’s Prayer in the Kitchen
Love me Lord, love me at least a bit, don’t let me burn those vegetables, and the house along with them.
Love your neighbour, like a cook, who is wavering over whether to add salt or pepper.
The fire of this kitchen inferno, it does not dwindle,
So love me, like a gourmet his meals, because we won’t last long
Fighting on knives. Listen, forgive me the smoke
That floats around the home, for I too have loved you
When I started frying those veggies. You know, Father,
When the fire gets cross and oil shoots in my eyes,
When there remains nothing in my head, aside from fat and detergent,
I become someone else, scorching like chicken skin. Look at these heaps of dirty dishes and thick oil inside
And at us, committed in your likeness and image.
Look, the fire above the oil is reaching the ceiling:
You have thrown us out of heaven, from under the apple trees and into an infernal kitchen,
Yet I still crave an apple, like a drug,
Yet I still desire Adam’s lips,
So love me, God, don’t let me miss
The moment when it’s time to turn the burning knob.
So love me, God, do not let me, by God, hurt bowels like a heart.
Tenderness (elephants)
We have never seen elephants between us.
Maybe, tenderness is a myth, or maybe it is a nimbus.
Who knows. Perhaps it really is visible.
The world above the covers went by,
As I learned the number of days
During which I whispered the new name.
Did the pleadings crash against us, as if made of glass,
Did the balloons burst in the skies above,
Having risen too high, perhaps?
There are no halos without electricity, no?
Perhaps our roles are not leads after all.
But who flirts with those eyes, if not us?
But who will finish a walk in an autumn park?
Or in the winter forest, when everything is white and bald?
Try to outdo me in crying in the spring!
Perhaps tenderness is a plural pronoun.
Or is it elephants? Blushing aside,
The word is so big that it barely fits your mouth.
Hospitalization
I get better slowly, swallowing swords of soreness,
Falling and blossoming like a pill in gastric juice,
Sleeping during the day, even though the nights worked just fine,
Squeezing out all changes like acne. Because permanence
is as warm and sweet as that which drains me every day,
Forced to bury the moisture under a blanket.
Senile warts tremble and hide the crumbs.
Flooding in drops of sweat, while the tea-pot puffs
On a shelf with an enema and the cotton tampons.
Temperature rises, wet cough subsides.
Crushing all that is common and bowing deferentially,
I open the front door, breathing rapidly in public.
I throw a teabag into a cup, without anticipating an exit
Outside the soul or the body. Laying in the dark, like carrion,
I suffer as someone whose body is growing cold.
Recovering slowly into the dreams of ritual burnings,
Dropping and spilling around in sad incidents,
Pressing the pulsing vessel until the finger grows numb,
Breaking the silence when someone lights up by the window,
I break down and lock up poisons and harmful drinks.
Skittle Babies
Only the skittle babies, only those glazed with flavored sugar.
Only the virgins, who have lost all of their innocent virtues.
You will jump off the Mirabo bridge and will end up in the Missouri river,
Or you may, like a craven slave, end up at the bottom.
Children run along the margins, escaping an orphanage,
While the virgins read in the greeting cards the words of love.
You go out on a hunt and grab hold of your childhood.
Into a warm receiver you utter a sweet “Hello!”
A hello so cold, it may only be rendered in sign language.
Only the virgins are reading through their blood, still unshed.
And the bodies have nowhere to go from this absurdist play.
As you make the bed, you find a stork feather on a pillow.
In a sugary, bloodless, distant stork pillow.
Will your destiny lines cure this break?
Did the baby souls nurture their clothing in all this flesh?
Does the lollipop grow small in your mouth?
Or under the wing of a plane, or a bird, or a butterfly?
Will the trumpet wail, will the nine months pass?
But the skittle babies, these solemn irritable judges
Say to the virgins “Now”. You enter the world through the window.
Drafts of our children
Drafts of our touches. Drafts of our children.
I like your unshaven cheeks.
It’s up to you to propose a theme,
But the conversation will dry up sooner or later,
Like ink. No one will answer us.
Children will dip their brushes into the dirty inkwells
And drip into albums. I will be overcome by lust,
Fall to the ground, like a ripped piece of paper.
I will certainly smash into a chair.
Every touch was a trace
Of a child’s fingertip, a notch, a spot.
Our touches have been around the block,
They’ve been thrown into trash, they’ve been placed in a briefcase,
They’ve been crying, and soaking handkerchiefs.
They have rarely been successful, but sometimes they happened to work
When, like buttons pulled out of the buttonholes, we became free.
And when you start a new verse at night
A boy with a brush cries in the underground of a womb,
A boy with a draft of a poem is whimpering: for how long?
Children, who never happened, take their place in line.
Tenderness (boy angels)
Boy angels, sick with flowers and aprils,
The prenatal doors close behind you
In the hallways full of drowsy words.
Tenderness is but a dirty mess on the floor.
Slutty boys are slowly growing in boy virgins,
Baby boys are kissing you joyfully
At the cross-section of peace and quiet moaning.
Tenderness is something fake. Seems flaky.
Boy gears are pulling you to the rustle.
Think you can do it like that once again?
Angels are circling above the carrion, like crows.
Don’t grow dark. I don’t want to stand in your way!
Drowsy boys, soiled with tenderness,
Someone will take you away from me soon enough.
Someone will take you and throw you up high.
You are now old enough to be touched and to run the risk.
Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Maksym Popelysh-Rosochynsky
Short link: http://thatis.me/~iJCe2$E