by Dmitry Blizniuk
Translation: Sergey Gerasimov

It’s so easy to breathe after rain.
God has just fed his fish.

***

Early morning in the summer house.
She feels the coldness of the linoleum under her feet
as if someone had put small living fish
between her toes.

Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Five Points, Rattle, Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine and many others. His poems have been awarded RHINO 2022 Translation Prize and his folio had been selected as a runner-up in the Gregory O’Donoghue Competition and the 2025 Gabo Prize finalist.

Translator: Sergey Gerasimov is a Ukraine-based writer, poet, and translator of poetry. Among other things, he has studied psychology. He is the author of several academic articles on cognitive activity. His stories and poems written in English have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, J Journal, The Bitter Oleander, and Acumen, among many others. The poetry he translated has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes. His books include Feuerpanorama: Ein ukrainisches Kriegstagebuch (dtv Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2022) and Oasis (Gypsy Shadow, 2018).