five poems
by Mykyta Ryzhykh
Water
What does a running river choose? To running away forever dissolve. How to kill the blood inside the meat mechanism? No one knows except the screaming stone. Empty birds fly in like paper and bring on their wings the air of the coming minutes; this is life. I walk and breathe like a fish or a flower. And the garden around me continues to move too. And the uprooted garden also continues to move. Glass reflects glass. The pigeon eats the pigeon. The first corpses grow from under the snow. Houses are falling apart like adverbs. However, the river inside me continues to dissolve death because the flow of liquid is the real alchemical time. The hands are like scarabs of the minutes on the clock, strained. My river crumbles like a desert.
*Originally published by Trampset.
Any building I would start to build here turns into a prison
Maybe the problem is in the place itself,
in the cement and materials? Or maybe
it’s that I cannot distinguish between
the words house and building? Is the sky
really cruelly sharpened by birds?
Or is the problem that the planet and all
the roads are cruelly rounded and you are
forever forced to return back? In the end,
maybe the problem is that between two rivers
of loneliness a cemetery covers with moss
and silence continues to grow. Or that I remember
too many names and have no right to forget.
Maybe it’s true I do not remember the last
time I was happy and the clock is like water
in one of two bitter rivers? Or maybe the problem
is me. And where all the postal birds have gone
from my eyelashes?
*Originally published in The Inflectionist Review
The suicide alphabet
The suicide alphabet letters break off from the tip of the speech into a maple cry. And the tongue weaves a mess of sounds that are born every time to die. Silence is crossed with talking and the smoked air hurts like meat. Everything around is burning. Everything around goes out. A lethal dose of unspoken words exists only to disappear into the dust of memory. Centuries-old layers of emptiness accumulate and the alcohol gets stronger. Everything has been swallowed and drunk and washed down. Suicide letters. Suicide letters.
*Originally published in the Packingtown Review
About how time ran out
I said goodbye to death like fire
I won't warm anyone anymore and I won't burn anymore
Some sea bones washed up on the orange shore
The worn-out animals came out of their bodies
A cloud floated up and my eyes became clouds
I don't un...
*Originally published in Sortes
Once in night
mirrors talk to silent
immobilized shadows
the corpse wrapped
in a blanket does
not move either
*Originally published in Sortes
Photo of Mykyta Ryzhykh
BIO: Mykyta Ryzhykh, an author from Ukraine, now lives in Tromsø, Norway. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023 and 2024. He’s published in many literary magazines іn Ukrainian and English: Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal, Shot Glass Journal, QLRS, The Crank, Chronogram, The Antonym, Monterey Poetry Review, Five Fleas Itchy Poetry and many others.