by Dmitriy Shandra

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The frost dulls sharp colors and leaves the breath hoarse. Trees crackle at night, as if ice wendigos were leaping over them. My body itself becomes another layer of clothing amid the others and I gaze outward from its depths with detached eyes. The void feels especially uncomfortable in the cold, but everything that can empty out indeed does. Every crack widens into a rift, wounds leak and shrivel, and the unstable succumbs. Every crack widens into a rift, wounds leak and shrivel, and the unstable succumbs. Frost weaves its lines, entangling even the most natural needs. Food transforms into sleep, and hands on the white snow turn black. Conversely, clarity emerges from the cold, revealing a succession of memory-images. Shards of memory can be seen in a strange, almost impossible perspective, akin to a Mondrian work painted by Beardsley. I never asked for such clarity and never desired it.

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I’ll be returning home on leave soon, and I anticipate an uneasiness among civilian men of conscription age when they’re around me. At some point, I long to purge my memory until all that remains are the glowing red windows, the diesel roar of the Dragon and the Elephant, and the monotonous anticipation of a mission. This city, a ruin among ruins. These men, weary unto death, bearing signs on their shoulders and death behind them. The intimate understanding of machinery’s screams and human cries. The sight of a cratered forest with fallen trees and the sun ascending over an electricity pylon that was torn asunder by monstrous force. As the radio hisses, a whirlwind of cluster munitions, mines, and fire takes off toward the sun and death.

I am sick of chewing on prose instead of poetry, and will try to keep clear of it. Our quarters are pleasant, however, —one fellow screams in his sleep, and another one laughs.

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Let words loose from their leash to speakwrite the essence of war. Not what it is, but how it appears, though visibility itself poses a challenge. Like the visual hallucinations of a blind man, reminiscent of Plato’s cave ceilings in Lascaux and Altamira, adorned with twilight bulls. It’s all about the labyrinth for the first humans, those at the frontier, the soldiers.

I find myself drifting aimlessly through the intricate webs of texts that dissect war—its essence, its absurdities—calling out pain, absurdity, suffering, and heroism. Heroism of the absurd—each word spills from the lips, trailing grey threads of abstraction, rendering them meaningless, weaving a labyrinth within a vast, bomb-ravaged carcass of a building. Only the two outermost walls endure, bearing witness to a door leading nowhere, a staircase ascending to emptiness, and a tangle of molten steel beams sprawled between them like a skeleton of a colossal beast.

These are the mazes of sheer power, extending from the ravaged building to this entire complex. The military windows cast a silent, crimson glow over the scene: a booby-trapped town nestled in the heart of damp forests. Here leaves blaze, mushrooms rust, and bones bear the marks of nibbling. The sky looms and festers overhead, presenting a tangible possibility of succumbing to madness and finding solace in the embrace of sleep.

Never attempt to escape like that little grey man who resembled a drab house. He sat there, awkwardly and somewhat squeamishly inspecting his foot, or more accurately, its tulpa. The top part lingered, with a tousled red fringe dangling beneath. He wouldn’t venture out again. In my memory, his blood gleams in a pattern on the emerald grass. I realize it wasn’t real, yet I also know that many active-duty soldiers regard amputees with a tinge of envy as seen through         

     Trakl’s eyes.

Why read about a primitive tribe when you live in one? Why delve into Scandinavian mythology when a rune smolders on your left shoulder?

(Translated by Denis Pinchuk & Bohdan Bondarchuk)