Snowy Mermaids

Abstract

Snowy Mermaids Dmitry Blizniuk (bio) Evening.We walk through snowfall.I either smile or make faces; a dense silenceshows through the blue air like white veins,the glassy skin is covered with tiny goose pimples.The soft crunch of your boots in the snow.You say somethingabout sprouting onions, about cod-liver oil,but your words crush into the snowy haze diagonally, toneless,like logs drifting down a night river.I give you a chopped off part of my head with the ear,like the handle of a broken cup—while the rest of me listens to the snowfall,to the commandments of snowflakes: don't love, swirl,keep away from anything warm, and then,when spring comes, you'll go to icy heavens…Ugh… There are so many worlds that we will never understand,that will never understand us. We hold hands,we are a worn brass buckle called being-in-love,we try to use words to flatten the precipice between us, and the snowfall,with the mallet of poplars, hammers in the lights, the electric nails,the golden hedgehogs into the thick darknesstrimmed with saturated blue,while the snow moves in leeward of the trees:snowy mermaids wave their flippersfrom the black branchy trunks,and they are happy. Oh dear!There are so many snowflakes outside and inside,and we—demigods—walk on through the lacerated nets of winter,and a madman scatters poststampswith St. Bernards like confetti. [End Page 117] Dmitry Blizniuk Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Pinch, Press53, Salamander, Grub Street, The Nassau Review, Havik, Naugatuck River, and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Forest (Fowlpox Press, 2018), and winner of the 2022 RHINO Translation Prize. He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. Learn more at http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press