The snow is falling but do you care after all you are the night. The fire is burning but the stars do not warm and are insanely distant. After all you are the night of death. No one is born in a cemetery with a candle in their hands and this death continues simultaneously with the night. The river is endless. After all you are water and you are one with time. And everything around is censorship or self-censorship. And the jumping recitative of fir trees drinks the smooth surface of autumn. The last sip. But the truth does not exist. Death teaches after all death is our only teacher. Death learns hands and hands learn to sleep. Teacher or student? After all no one knows anything and this night an infinite amount of water has flowed into the future and all around is white and white. A black cry descends on the black snow. The ice cracks and the depth is endless. Minutes pour out. The years float by themselves like water in water. Seagulls cry. There are no more seagulls. There have never been seagulls before. There will be no seagulls and only beaks. Sound. The sound cracks. The forest of death noisily falls asleep and only the snowy night that touches your lips like an ellipsis. The word is your name. Cut a strand of silence and share the silence with it. Your grandmother was shot with a machine gun during the German occupation more than 70 years ago. Your daughter today looks at the sky and sees military planes shooting at the stars in the continuous darkness. Nothing has changed in the world for decades. The forest is squatting and the night shoots at the cast-iron milky back of the head at the soldiers sleeping in the barracks. The river of night floats by every second. After all. The future has never been here before. There is no future.

Mykyta Ryzhykh has been nominated for Pushcart Prize. Published many times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, TheNewVerse News.

You can find more of Mykyta’s work here on Ink Pantry.