By DANIEL MOYSAENKO

I do not like what you’ve done to yourself— 

predictable theatre of struggle 
I’m in the wings
of 
           world 

Instead take this  
translucent  
pisces-glyph bug: 

           Its antennae flitting to test  
           the space just in front of its face 
           It struts right into a recluse web 

A lesson in what distracts from pain: 

           Say pinching my wrist  
           while a fish hook’s mined from my foot 

           leaving an open-pit bull’s-eye  
           that never heals closed  

What distracts from another’s: 

           A brick wall collapses  
           and takes down another in pixels 

           Names next to “laborer” and “child” replaced 
           by 2S4 Tyulpan heavy mortar  

Now the poplared river  
that Tatars were bussed over 
is redrawn by kamikaze drones  

And below  
a wine cave in Crimea has its bottles 
scooped out  

           Melon-ball divots 
           and cobwebs left— 

           this basilica of dust I watch the vintner pray in

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and Chicago Review. Recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and Emory University Rose Library Fellowship, he lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.