Take immortality, God, but give me this cold apple cellar. Take the souls and other toys, but let us live: not-Adam and not-Eve not your son’s— my son’s life. Wet hole in a cellar with wooden floor—is a Promised Land. But no, we need cement floors and the smell of cats and mattresses and a bunch of soiled blankets. The city breathes though they poke us with missiles’ needlework. Watch: a mad tailor makes of a city a headless costume without hands. This is your human being, God, and not a retail display mannequin.

The future is a door of mud glass, the color of raw diamond.

This door opens inside my chest every moment. Each breath in is a breath out, sometimes faster sometimes not at all.

In a time of war the future jumps out like a frog, no, a grasshopper— one second— and there is nothing: no future—

just emptiness, pulsating.

In peacetime: the epoch licks us off in measured strokes but now— now the mad teeth of a Kremlin gremlin chew on us.

And our land is decorated with bloodied fragments of cement walls. I see a soldier’s hat diving in snow after my neighbor Miss Valya. The murderers are lit from inside by the saliva of their sick ideas.

I see them twelve miles off.

As the thoughts jump like pebbles on thick ice, the breath turns into a white seaweed.

We are holding hands while night hungry like an animal sniffs at balconies, eyes whiten: is anyone here alive? The walls of this town are tossed out of the ground with their roots,

the staircases are torn up like unfinished poems.

The body on the asphalt is a black-red sleeping bag— is that a person? I don’t know. Is that a person? The evening jumps.

We have no place on this earth, you and I, God, but you can’t drown in the sea of blood, sea free of people. Watch: these centipedes of tanks crawling on their mechanical knees

won’t swallow this street, that street, this street.

Translated by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky