The Needle

Dmitry Blizniuk

The city has crawled away, like a dog with a broken spine,
leaving behind the dark, mazut-like mass of factories.
Yesterday, they were pulling metal shavings out of my eye,
a delicate spiral, and the eye liquids around it
had already started getting rusty.
And I left a mental notch
on a tree in the vitreous forest of time: I will definitely write
about it one day… When I grew up into a real person.
Reality smiles like a hyena.
The bite force is 1100 pounds per square inch.
In the evening, I pull off my trunks,
but my body oozes engine oil like a tree that excretes tar.
My life has swallowed up so many splinters
like a drunken fakir who swallows kitchen knives.
Do you remember? When we were kids, we were afraid that
a needle could fall under your collar, then get into your vein,
then reach the heart
as fast as a boat floating downstream,
and you would die.
The foreman, wrinkled like a phallus, was scolding me listlessly,
"Wear safety glasses when you cut metal!"
But everything swims in front of your eyes when glasses are on,
and I see a myopic, cartoonish world.
I prefer to be face to face with life,
prefer to see clearly the needle that zeroes in
and swims down the red river like a water snake.
And a thought that got under your skin
will definitely reach your heart
and kill.
 
 
 (translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian)

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Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The London Magazine, Pleiades, Another Chicago Magazine, Eurolitkrant, Poet Lore, NDQ, The Pinch, New Mexico Review, The Ilanot Review, National Translation Month, East West 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 RHINO 2022 Translation Prize. He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. Dmitry Blizniuk in the Poets & Writers Directory.
http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk