Photo by E. Diop / Unsplash

Autumn. The perfect place for a homeland —
dilapidated, thick, stocky.
The wasteland of a deserted construction site
overgrown with magnificent weeds,
decorated with fainted stair flights to the heaven,
unfinished, unaccomplished like teenage poetry.
Lumps of concrete with rusty gristle of reinforcement rods.
Patrols of big-eyes, nostalgic dogs,
which are stuck between their melting love to the man
and progressing faith in the wolf.
There’s neither politics nor culture here,
only solid primordial AWOL.
Here both angels and chimeras
lose their useless wings.
Here the scraggy baby dragons of yellow maples
are barely pinned to the goosebumped space
with black pins of rooks,
and the wind licks the stamps of sorrow —
empty, damp windows.

Dmitry Blizniuk
Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Nation, The London Magazine, Pleiades, Another Chicago Magazine, Eurolitkrant, Poet Lore, NDQ, The Pinch, New Mexico Review, The Ilanot Review, National Translation Month, EastWest Literary Forum, and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). His poems have been awarded the 2022 RHINO Translation Prize. He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine.

Sergey Gerasimov
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. When he is not writing, he leads a simple life of teaching, playing tennis, and kayaking down beautiful Ukrainian rivers. The largest book publishing companies in Russia, such as AST, Eksmo, and others have published his books. 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 latest book is “Oasis” published by Gypsy Shadow. Poetry he translated has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes.