do not compose a poemhe said and goes out on tiptoefrom a gigantic dead housebut this isn’t all: a music-murderer daybreaksin Christ’s pocketconversation like a flattened squarewith wooden wingsbut essentially: thunderhoary darkness Japanese grain spikesslipping into fractals, proportionunprinted word — lightningwith warm vodka in place of a lymph node
[do not compose a poem]
Stanislav Belsky
Translated from the Russian by olga mikolaivna
Feature Date
- June 10, 2025
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- Translation
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English Translation Copyright © 2025 by olga mikolaivna.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Stanislav Belsky (Станислав Бельский) is a Russian-language Ukrainian poet and prose writer born in 1976 in Dnipropetrovsk. He has published eighteen books of poetry in Russian, most recently Missile Launches Detected, Shelter-In-Place (2025), Friendly Conversations with Robots (2024), On Sunny Concrete (2023), and the novel Polyhedron (2025). His poems have been translated into Italian, Polish, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Czech, as well as other languages, and are published widely in journals nationally and internationally. He is a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poetry to Russian, a curator of the poetry book series Тонкие линии [Thin lines] and a programmer by profession.
Photo:
Brent Galen Adkins
Brent Galen Adkins
olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. Her debut chapbook cities as fathers is out with Tilted House, and “our monuments to Southern California,” she calls them is forthcoming with Ursus Americanus Press, and her translation of Stanislav Belsky’s first full length collection in English will be out with Dialogos / Lavender Ink. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.
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