Home is still possible there...

Kateryna Kalytko

Home is still possible there, where they hang laundry out to dry, and the bed sheets smell of wind and plum blossoms.

It is the season of the first intimacy

to be consummated, never to be repeated.

Every leaf emerges as a green blade

and the cries of life take over the night and find a rhythm.

Fragiletinfoil of the season when apricots first form along with wars and infants, in the same spoonful of air, in the stifling bedrooms or in the cold, from which the wandering beg to enter, like a bloom of jellyfish, or migratory blossoms. The April frost hunts white-eyed, sharp-clawed, but the babies have the same fuzzy skin for protection.

What makes them different is how they break

when the time comes for them to fall, or if they get totally crushed. Behind the wall a drunken one-armed neighbor

stumbles around his house, confusing all the epochs, his shoulder bumps into metal crutches from WWI,

a Soviet helmet made of cardboard,

and the portrait of a man with a glance like a machine gun firing and hangers for shirts, all of them with a single sleeve.

So they will fall and break into pieces and fates branches parted, fruit exposed to the winds.

The neck feels squeezed, in the narrow isthmus of the throat time just stands still and mustard gas creeps through the ditches. All of this is but a forgotten game we play in the family backyard, hiding amongst the laundry that hangs outside

the world becomes more fragile at each moment,

and when you suddenly embrace

through the cloth - you don't know who it is,

and whether you've lost or found.

And the swelling parted body of war intrudes into a blossoming heart because we didn't let it enter our home on a cold night to warm itself.

Translatedfrom the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and Oksana Lutsyshyna.

Originally published in Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky (eds.) Wordsfor War: New Poemsfrom Ukraine, with an introduction by Ilya Kaminsky and an after­word by Polina Barskova (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press; Cambridge, Mass.: Har­vard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2017). Reproduced with permission.