Five Poems
*
a rolled terrain cigarette burning
stamping bolls of despair
seeded in mid air
as fireworks’ tentacles
tightened for landing
on a graph ocean
half-sunk ships teeter
like see saws
cut through bottoms of relief
[onions in quartz tunics
ripen in rustled beds]
*
swallows nest in the mud-tonsils
peak hoarse carried along by a wind
eroding mountains
into chess pieces
being plied
simultaneously
to inhabit margins of possible moves
hatching as tuataras
scanning the spectrum with parietal eyes
that flash within infinite mirrored rooms
of a sequin coat
dragging thistles and thorns
scratched by silken surfaces
having engineered goggles
for examining swallows in midbreath
*
a run blurs into a black butterfly
derived by a meadow’s square root
in velvet halos of pollen
sifting through a cloud emerged
from a handshake’s collapse of a building
the potter’s wheel throws
a tornado of imprinted passers-by
on a storefront glass
as rub-on stickers of horror
{another story: tattoos
on jammed wrists of film rolls
measuring pulse rate by flashes
plowing through the skin’s surface}
a breath encircled by
migration trajectories outlining
an onion bulb with cubical parabolas
*
a dragon blows fire-breath chambers
into basalt layers of fig
juggling wasp sparks
fused by lightning injections
the fig tree’s poi jangle
on strung washing lines
dividing highway streams
into blurred red-white strokes
of prehistoric dawn yolk
whisked into tempera
a polyptych of elements
oxidized by hearths
whispering
in fluorescent cracks’ dialects
*
a flame framed in a double glazed window
as an onion bulb of fire
to burn vase scales with a roar
tilted trees of the horizon
printed in a quiver of artefacts
shimmering on canvases
like sharp feline glares
[fencers with green foils
drafting quick sketches of abrasion]
a fire peeling sparkling shells off
incrusting the topology of diamond
with shards of furrows
generated by light crumbs
∩
Ekaterina Derysheva is an interdisciplinary poet, born in 1994 in Melitopol, Ukraine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Poem-a-Day, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Four Way Review, Zerkalo, Tlen Literacki, Literaturportal Bayern, Volga, and Homo Legens, among others. She is the author of Starting Point (2018) and There Will Be No Installation (2023), and co-author of Earth Time (Romania, 2020). She is currently an Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residence at the University of Pennsylvania (2024–2025).