The Sun Has A Musky Smell

The gaze lacking an anchorage
I feast my eyes admiringly on thee.
Thin water yields smoke. From the home chimney, the wind’s familiar howl slips
insinuating through the white bricks.
Labels and prefixes need no glue to bind
in this skin at best you will find
that everything that is, is on the outside; look:
the tissue rhetorically flowers in a warm box of toys, fairy tales on broadsheets, pure fictions,
warm birds, Cyrillic inscriptions
«as soon as you hear it, it occurs.
The things you crave fade and blur
into snapdragon, into your very own match»
when the field ends in a moat, the sagebrush bursts into poppies like a maiden’s wide-open mouth

Kseniia Kononeko
Cycle of Poems for the Project «In the Salty Sand, the Sun Has a Musky Smell»
Translated, from the Russian, by Thomas H. Campbel