five poems

by Mykyta Ryzhykh

I'm afraid

I'm afraid of water because

I don't know where

The current is taking me

I'm afraid of you because

There's no room left

On my body for scars

I'm shrinking to a mosquito

Your blood is on my lips

I'm shrinking to emptiness

Your loneliness is on my lips

I turn off the lamp and put out the candle

I leave the house and meet the night

I don't know who you are anymore

*reprint by Macticadores Canada

Silence

buried alive ground up with history stained with oils dead on all sides wrapped in red and brown flags and banners shackled by laws and murders pecked by birds like wooden days and endless cast iron nights we drink mother's bloody milk and this drink kills us eternity is like poison for children who have not learned to count in the dark the shadows of officers who will come to you and put you in shackles we will all die as unknown soldiers and unidentified corpses of prisoners because we are all prisoners so many years of chancelleries so many years of freedom and garbage what and who can change in a country where black crows bring corpses of fathers killed in Afghanistan in their beaks to babies' cradles and what does it mean to lose a war and what does it mean to live forever in war these hands can no longer be washed these candles can no longer be extinguished this body in the water can no longer be drowned kill me kill yourself change this country change this eternity smelling of ropes and necks tomorrow the blood will again become blood that no one will know about during this endless wedding night with death from every tree in this garden the original silence falls you gather this silence in the stump of your palm with fingers frozen to the bone and you collect this silence of the words with fingers frozen to the bone and you collect this silence in the stub and stump of a palm with frozen fingers shot through and through

Finding

grasshopper

seeks the dawn

Time

oranges like the sun

at the end of winter

Once

Once, I died without waiting for myself to come home from school. No one can state anything with certainty, because the living cannot know what death is, but now I know for sure that I died. I disappeared like snow. One morning. From top to bottom, like snow. And back again, evaporating from bottom to top, like snow. I disappeared. They continued to give me grades at school. My parents continued to make me breakfast and dinner. I was even invited to the Christmas table a couple of times. But I was already dead. Like Schrodinger's kitten: beautiful as if it would never die, though mortal. Like a kitten: unable to withstand the overload of the world, it died on a piece of cardboard in winter. I spoiled, like sour cream. I disappeared like electricity. I exploded like a bomb. I died like Judas. I created death like God. I rotted like leaves. I burned like a forest. I ate bread and drank wine, and I don't want to be Jesus: there is too much humanity and too much death in me. I died. I live. No one knows anything. No one states anything.

Photo of Mykyta Ryzhykh

BIO: Mykyta Ryzhykh (He him) is an author from Ukraine, now lives in Tromsø, Norway. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 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.