We slept with you in the crack of a cut hand
We floated alone in the hole of a bloated memory

The wind was silently growing stronger
The wound reached the flood waters

You sneaked up on me like it was the first time
You took out the buckshot from your exhalation and shot at my heart

The mirror of silence cracked
The crunch became mirror-like

The river splits into two
The river finds its banks

Heart splits in half
You disappear like a ghost

Flowers without graves
Graves without flowers

Nothing
Nowhere

You leave without saying a word
(Words are incapable of conveying meaning)

You’re leaving taking my heart with you
(The doctors took my liver out of my body a long time ago)

I remain like a long-term drowned man in the water
I remain without the right to oblivion, doomed to memory

Trees wrap their branches around my sour body
The saucer of the moon breaks into fragments in the cast-iron milk of the night

The spittle of time spreads across the walls of air
And the burning abyss of silence erupts more than ever

They didn’t even sell me beer at the river store.
No one was born from the caviar belly

No one is resurrected
No one was crucified

I lovingly remember your angelic name as before
I’m miserable trying to forget names dates of birth phone numbers

And time doesn’t exist anymore
And there is no more time

We swam with you in the crack of a cut hand
Now I’m drowning alone in a blown well

…

Mykyta Ryzhykh has been nominated for Pushcart Prize. Published many times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, TheNewVerse News.