Anatoly Kudryavitsky



Watch How this Picture Paints another Picture


The Fifth International of honest people
is dressed in words. Shielded by timeproof
and breathable books, its members dwell
in the thicket of their breath.
They can’t tell their inside
from the outside.

What they use for maps the others unmap.
Hiding behind brimstone billows
of pragma, they watch clay doves fly
to the top of a fancy.
They can open doors
with their bare smiles.

At the table, they talk about dark-skinned
practice targets maimed by droppings
of a high-flying delusion. Their knowledge
is sand-coloured and grainy; it can be shaped
into their next steps across their
pasteboard boxes.



The Current Balance


The soul of a nation is a lemon,
the abode of sour moons
and statues’ marble veins.
Frontier guards stand imbued and yellow
against the backdrop of eerie lights.
The juices of acid farms corrode
the sea roads; the sky too
has been sliced and juiced.
Boneless cathedrals disgorge cycles
of gel-like silence and equinoctial outbursts.
Look around: insanity gambols
like an acrobat of agony,
and words point downward
to fear.
At this very moment imperial lion heads
exhale the existential question:
if we lemonise more than we’ve candied,
will we be able to hang on to the oily steel of time
for much longer?



De cavea


Living inside an edible mind cage
is spine-tingling:
every time it cracks
you have your crunchy moment.
The postulate: you eat
what you’ve thought up.
The counter-postulate: you
can be eaten.
At the bottom of your caginess
(oh those glorious drownings!)
there’s an innumerable formic army
seeping through the grey grass,
the telegraph of little hooves
ebbing and flowing.



Monday News


yet another election
won by the don’t knows
who defeated
the don’t cares
no one within fifty flies
cried stinking fish

from above
we’re shadows

magnification blooms
where growth withers

prenez un journal
prenez des ciseaux
colour in
the spare faces



Anatoly Kudryavitsky has published four collections, the latest being Horizon (Red Moon Press, 2016). His poems have also appeared in Oxford Poetry, The Literary Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Prague Revue, Hayden's Ferry Review, Plume, The American Journal of Poetry, The Wolf, etc. His latest novel titled DisUNITY has been brought out by Glagoslav Publications in 2013. He lives in Dublin, Ireland, where he is the editor of Shamrock Haiku Journal. He was the recipient of the Maria Edgeworth Poetry Prize (2003). In 2016, one of his poems has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize by The American Journal of Poetry.
 
 
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