Origami Microchap

There's Nothing Black  

Click title to download PDF microchap

Cover collage: A Loaf of Bread, Lilacs & Thee

by Jan Keough

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There’s Nothing Black

You and I are out in the sunny, snow-covered park.
Our steps crackle like freshly-baked bread.
The silver sturgeon spawns everywhere:
the caviar of ice rings on the black glazed branches,
and we, in no hurry, walk on and on...
Our hands sleep in the pockets of our coats like field voles.
The fog of our breath is dense and sluggish;
it drags behind like a three-toed sloth.
It freezes in the prickly air,
and on the foggy glass of our steaming breath,
I draw two graceless hearts with my finger
and sign our moments like photos, on the back
(the date, the name, the smile).
And the soul flies out like a genie released from an amphora, or from a flask.
But there’s nobody around,
and my soul is its own master, its own Marcel Proust.
Our shadows play snowballs, snort like Labrador retrievers.
There’s still hope, and the street lamps come on childishly early,
with the shaggy magic of overgrown dandelions.
The snow – blue-green, marbled, granular –
comes to life, like everything touched by the quill of a creator does.
And I dip my quill, made from an arrow,
into the inkwell of my heart,
where there’s nothing black any longer.

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Origami of Childhood

Hot radiators of iron amphibians
greedily suck tasty air out of the street
like juice out of an infected tooth.
Benches in the hot sun
turn into an instrument of torture,
assume the dignified bearing of the Middle Ages.
In the generous shadow of horse-chestnuts,
tireless kids
rustle,
drawing castles on the asphalt
with pieces of crimson chalk.
Carefully, I walk amid the fragile flowers, amid origami of childhood:
here are picked tree leaves and a small stone
and a medical box full of toys in the dusty grass.
Everything changes, and everything remains still;
Heraclitus hangs like a computer;
the one-way street of life
stretches like rubber,
and you have time to notice weird lanes on both sides,
caves in the sidewalks,
simmering milk of lilac in the pots of little yards.
Here you are, the life is over;
the life begins anew.
You start the first grade again tomorrow,
and your mother is ironing your shirt,
puckering her lips.

This longing for the past comes from your childhood:
the interest towards ruins and huts,
to invalids of time, not entirely digested lumps.
It’s like hacking open the belly of the shark of the epoch
and fiddling with the assorted junk:
a bent license plate, broken bottles, slimy postcards,
a legless doll, maimed octopus...
Sometimes your life gives you a candy
like a kid in the street, a kid you don’t know —
gives you an impression, an image, a mystery,
hits your fingers with a hammer,
but you don’t feel pain,
don’t smell the aroma of flowers from the garden –
unearthly religion only bees know.

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Dmitry Blizniuk © 2019

Previously published: Buddy. A Lit Zine., issue 2

You are a cat,

and all your nine lives are wasted on trifles,
on washing and cooking and tidying up,
on war painting your face and body,
on taking cat naps beside the cradle.
I have so little of you left to hold –
shall I pour you some moon milk?
I’m reading you like teenage adventures of Sherlock,
like crib notes written on a girl’s knees.
All that is left of you is La Peau de chagrin
that gets smaller and thinner with years,
but I never give up wishing, longing.
A small feather sticks out of the pillow
like a skiing track on a mountain slope;
the caramel moon shines through the window,
and I’m looking at you through the years
as if through a heavy snowfall:
you’re smiling, and your lips
look yogurt-stained
in the flurry of the falling snowflakes.

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Previously Published: Sheila-Na-Gig Online,

Vol 2-2, Winter 2017