my wife hangs winter clothing in the closet
I ask myself if I am ever going to put them on again
or should I say goodbye to the seasons of the year,
to the parka,
to the woolen sweater forever?
those clothes remember the war, they’ve absorbed its horror
like hair absorbs the smell of cigarettes.
they’ll never forget.
the destroyed world is irreversible.

(translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian)

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades 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. А runner-up in the Gregory O’Donoghue Competition. He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine.

Sergey Gerasimov is a writer, poet, and translator of poetry. 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. The poetry he translated has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. 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.