Art by Cyril Larvor
All Lovers Do That
It hurts when an illusion is broken,
It hurts way worse than an arm broken in several places.
You are in a kind of dreamlike trance,
a detailed dotage turned inside out.
Your inner self rolls its eyes in pain,
wiggles, thrashes its tail like a sturgeon
on a hot galvanized deck.
When an illusion is broken,
you still try to crawl away
like a lizard cut in two by a shovel,
and reflected light dances
on the shards of your broken dream.
I’ve thrown you out of my life
and I nearly lost my mind.
I bit my tongue and tasted blood.
Why does this happen to me?
I used to think you were just a background to my life,
a female ghost
made of curtains, of laughter through the phone.
A college girl dancing in the shop window
in a blue gauze dress,
a carnivorous aquarium beauty
with gills of earrings
and fins under the suntanned bust.
I used to knock on the thick glass,
and the mermaid smiled, pushing her jaw forward,
showing her sharp triangle teeth.
Every loved one or close one
blinds us to
the machine-gun nest
of reality.
To a cold minty light in the tunnel
and the gorge of a black hole.
Only if we are together,
only if we are bound tight with the squid roots of the crowd
we can dodge the blackness
wreathing behind our backs.
It’s like a battle of blind warriors
when we kiss or kill with a sword first,
and only then touch the face: who are you?
You can only get rescued while rescuing someone.
Spartans fought back to back
And all lovers do that.
I’ve thrown you, haughty woman, out of my life,
thrown you out without a parachute
while flying over a field of lies,
over a meadow of poppies with sleeping lions on it,
and felt a hole in myself.
As if a tank had fired at a giant
or a fist had punched a hole in a painting.
This juvenile pain
doesn’t know yet
what it wants to become.
But I understood the meaning of the word “forever.”
We just think we are pulling out a weed
or picking a flower to smell it.
An innocent gesture, an innocent step.
But a small thing drags
entire underground forests behind it.
We never know where games stop,
and where the hell begins. We can never
beat our destiny in chess
or clear our hearts of mines.
(translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian)
About the author:
Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Nation, The London Magazine, Pleiades, Another Chicago Magazine and many others.. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize. He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine.
Dmitry Blizniuk in the Poets & Writers Directory.
In the artist’s words:
Cyril Larvor. My Black Bird artist name is a wink to the crow who is an animal who is often hated by his appearance as the black cat, but who is also revered by a tremendous amount of culture and seen as one of the smarter animals capable of counting and speaking. Speaking … and I have already seen it. I have always drawn, painted and photographed. I wanted to be a cartoonist in advertising or photography, but I went to study in business and computer science. For 15 years I worked in the directions of information and computer security. 3 years ago I stopped to return in my first love the art and the human. My influences are vast; I was born in the 80s in the northern suburbs of Paris where social and cultural diversity is enormous. The 80s were a huge source of artistic inspiration. In addition to contemporary art and all other movements, there was the appearance in France of graffiti, manga, hip hop, computer science and the evolution of photography and television. All this has to influence. Since my return in the art, I exhibit in the galleries. The Lavomatik, also proposes music, the book …. ART21, a gallery in Montmartre, a district which likes and others a little everywhere.
My other activity is in the human and the association. I collaborate with many associations that have been used as a means of communication and income. I collaborated with associations to help orphaned children, children in difficulty, migrants and give them the means to express themselves through Mixart art. An association for the protection of the oceans Bloom. An association against skin cancer Associations against poverty and exclusion: Emmaus, restaurant of the heart… J organizes painting workshops with children or disabled people and also grafiti classes. My inspirations are unlimited, including painting or in pictures, and I like mixing the two. My philosophical tendencies are in sharing, cohesion and construction or reconstruction away from destruction. My tips are simple. Create with your heart and share your art positively. For my art, I use all media and types of paints, but I have a preference for acrylic and aerosol: street art tools, and for digital photography and desktop publishing.
Long live art.