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This piece is about 3 printed pages long. It is copyright © Dmitry Lazutkin and Vitaly Chernetsky and Jacket magazine 2008. See our [»»] Copyright notice. The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/36/rus-lazutkin-trb-chernetsky.shtml
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* * *
I am a matchbox
you are a match —
just grazed against me
and — lit up
although you went out rather quickly too
while to this day
I have a trace remaining on my left side
I’m an empty matchbox
* * *
love is a coincidence
the first grass almost a stubble
(I mean not rigidity but stubbornness)
you call
call back cannot get through
a series of lists like a stone curb
under the summer sun
a girl walks along it
a boy stumbled hurt his leg
and a lizard for example could sit there warming
* * *
mean daddy
kiss the taxi driver —
he’s so old
he has
deep wrinkles
and probably
no brakes
at all
* * *
let’s begin with the weather
although no
let’s not
war rages
on all fronts
I write freely
I’m fucking tired of rhyming
* * *
some words
are more interesting than poems
for example —
dandelion
* * *
young
handsome
I’ll fuck everyone
Sveta says
let’s play house
we’ve had enough of playing love
a bologna sandwich
and a couple of dreams
let’s say from the previous life
* * *
you and I
are entirely different creatures
like for example
a giraffe and an elephant
you’re far-sighted
and I
have a trunk
Dmitry Lazutkin(b. 1978) lives in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and writes poetry in both Ukrainian and Russian, characterized by fragmentariness and emotional intensity. To date, he has published four poetry collections in Ukrainian, and, in 2006, one collection in Russian, in the prestigious poetry series of the Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie publishing house, entitled Paprika grez (The Sweet Red Pepper of Dreams). A selection of his Ukrainian-language poems in English translation is available at http://ukraine.poetryinternationalweb.org/