from Kульминации не Будет, the forthcoming collection There Won’t Be a Culmination coming from Lavender Ink / Dialogos (2026)
Translated from the Russian by olga mikolaivna
you carry inside a bounded blizzard’s
radiating gear, motors
if abrupt movements impoverish cold
it’s possible to feel kind of calm
to entrust such — woven by a huntsman’s thunder — models
a signboard and a colander?
a sleeve with an alphabet
so long ago scattered by wind?
intonation permits the girl on rollerblades
to roll for a while, no stops —
go catch her. a turtle steps over
the game dice
Achilles studies a sonata
objects’ friction against surface
assigning numbers to them: the most stable
must master four steps
toska over the simplest things
over all that can be eaten or drunk
a midday deprived of its memory
I can tally
the postal hairs in your pockets
windows, dry stems
(blind
like wind instruments) —
we will behave ourselves as
though magnets still magnetting
and power appears
as black stains on pleated skirts
a life after life
catalogs a list of the dead
like a rusted bathtub.
an interruption machine methodically
burning its name
then the name’s ash / but the name of the ashes
participates in conception using a pseudonym
like some deaf brother-in-arms
of steel handles torn away from safe-islands /
a preface to the fake glow
of a home along a small road
the result of a montage becomes its own model
by resonance absorbing its own register
dissecting the authenticity of a contour / soft
apex of a symmetrical tree / a phrase spilled
upon a winter sun’s multiple floors
completely cold rooms
face the thermal baths
the wind buzzes with a carnage equation
a deflated
function
masquerades a structural weakness
a
a somber beast repairs the overslept sun
HIMARS clear out courtiers’ brains
weapons make the world better
July is covered by a netting of minuscule cracks
touch with a finger — collapses
even though it looks solid
a cobbler promises to arrange the extraordinary
but so far the second air raid of the morning
the siren is barely audible in our part of the city
b
a search for an unreachable measurement —
as though a pencil nicks at the paper
ripping it with delight
a reamer of names
imitates the movement of counter-battery radar
the meek brothers covered such eros
with a band of a watch
in between Scylla and Scylla
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. His poems have been translated into Italian, Polish, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Czech, and 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.
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, “our monuments to Southern California,” she calls them is forthcoming from Ursus Americanus Press, and her translation of Stanislav Belsky’s first full length collection in English is forthcoming from Dialogos / Lavender Ink. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.
World Poetry Review 