SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Seven
ALEXANDER KOROTKO
What's Happening?
This garrison sky
quarantined since the last summer
looks like a discarded card.
No rain whatsoever
from something up there
perforated
by flying shrapnel;
no homestead rain-clouds.
We are about to start
whipping each other
with oak brooms
in the bath of glow-hot air.
Oak brooms of the wind –
how are we supposed to get them?
Stravinsky
A silent door, neither an exit nor an entry.
I read from right to left.
A paragraph holding a crust of bread.
A plebeian life, don't I know you?
What are you wearing on your head?
A corridor ready to faint.
You'll see, they will come for you.
Yearning rises in the west.
Having nowhere to go is not a tragedy.
It is not a thought of a sound but the sound itself
that sways, hanging from every lantern.
The winter's one-story schizophrenia
grows unconsciously
into some hustle at bus-stops.
The tram tracks read by heart
the axiom about two parallel straight lines.
When these lines intersect
at the zenith of their fates,
the dream, exhausted and doomed,
will reach its apogee.
And the words in my mind will sprout
into your silence.
Translated from Russian by Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Alexander Korotko is a Russian-language Ukrainian poet from Kyiv. Born in Korosten, Ukraine, he studied economics at Odessa University. His first collection, Window, was published in 1989. Since then he has published more than twenty books of his poetry. In 2019, SurVision Books brought out a chapbook of his poetry in English translation, Irrazionalismo.
