The Killing Centipedes

Dmitry Blizniuk

O Lord, take away immortality,
but leave this cold apple cellar.
Take the souls and all your playthings, but spare our lives,
neither Adam’s, nor Eva’s, nor your son’s,
but my son’s life.
This wet cave in the cellar with a wooden floor
is the Promised Land,
but no, we need concrete instead.
The smell of cats, mattresses, a heap of soiled blankets.
The city is alive, but someone stuck shells in it
like needles. A crazy tailor is making
an ugly sleeveless, headless jacket.
But we are people down here,
Not mannequins.

The future is a door made of dim plexiglass
the color of unpolished diamonds.
It slides away from you, smoothly, every minute,
with every breath, in or out.
Sometimes faster, sometimes slower if it’s curious,
but only in times of peace. In wartime,
the future just jumps away, like a frog or grasshopper.
A moment—and there’s nothing ahead,
only a precipice. The void made of  
spiteful rectangular pixels
from the game of a maniac
is waltzing.

In times of peace, the epoch slowly, evenly
licks us off,
like ice cream. But now the Kremlin Vova,
the crazy monitor lizard,
gnaws at us, at our blood-soaked earth
strewn with crushed concrete and stone,
his fangs dripping toxic saliva.
The rocket ball of death.
Its hunt for people;
a silver fox breaks the crust of ice over the snow,
diving head first for a vole,
diving for my neighbor Valentina.
Russian murderers are lit with 
the shimmering slime of their sick ideas,
and I can see them for tens or hundreds of miles. 

Our thoughts bounce like rocks from thick ice.
Our breath turns into white seaweeds.
We hold hands.
The emptiness is black and blue, the night is hungry.
An enormous cougar smells the balconies,
the whites of its eyes shining. Is there anyone alive?
The walls have been uprooted,
the trees have been twisted into a corkscrew.
The broken off staircases lead nowhere like unfinished poems.
The body on the asphalt is not human;
it’s just a black and red sleeping bag.
The darkness jumps,
the beast of roar and dust.
There’s no place for you and me in this world
of total death.
But you can’t drown a sea in blood,
the sea of free people.
The killing centipedes crawling on their mechanical knees
will never grab this land.

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Five Points, Rattle, Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine, and many others. His poems have been awarded the RHINO 2022 Translation Prize and his folio has been selected as a runner-up in the Gregory O’Donoghue Competition and the 2025 Gabo Prize finalist. His entry in the Poets & Writers Directory can be found here: www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk

This piece was translated by Sergey Gerasimov.

Sergey Gerasimov is a writer, poet, and translator who lives in Ukraine. His writing has been published in Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Poetry magazine, The Threepenny Review, and dozens of other places. Since day one of the Russian attack on Ukraine, he has lived in Kharkiv, written about six hundred anti-war articles for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in Switzerland, and DTV, one of the biggest publishers in the German language, published his book, Feuerpanorama.