Paul Ukrainets

now

there are sirens at the end

of a window with the curtain

billowing with spirit, the orb

of light is a signal falling to end

the day, the air of ears is peopled

and you can't always choose

by whom, even when you close

the house's surfaces. you can walk

though, toward one or another person.

you can adjust the temperature

with the tools of a room. now now

is answering, you can bring your

little textures to it, now it's drawing

away, now i'm catching it, no, maybe now.

frases

to see things as they never are: centered

in the mind of who's looking. you played

an instrument I didn't know as I touched

oranges, you wanted the line to go faster

and you were slowing it down by talking,

two of you wondering whom you'd overcharged,

if you'd be angry, your hands in the forest

of radishes. you are in an hour that requires

different phrases of the same feeling. small

& wrinkled in a bowl tasting better than

when you’re smooth, whatever aged you made

you brighter and stringier like a secret.

in your last minutes of being furniture, you hang

off the city’s ceiling. calling you blurs you. look

for the holes in where i am speaking. to the crosswalk,

to the fridge, to an image of the store, to a memory

of your life, to everyone’s memory of your life,

breathing a snowstorm through sheets of glass,

a series of loose ends, long notes.

Paul S Ukrainets is a poet/sometimes-translator living in Oakland. They're an incoming writer-in-residence at Good Hart and were a finalist for the Patricia Cleary Miller prize. Their work appears in Nightboat Books' Permanent Record anthology, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. They received their MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers.