shot glass
title
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, and in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, The Prague Revue, Plume, BlazeVox, The Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, Stride, etc. His most recent poetry collections are The Two-Headed Man and the Paper Life (MadHat Press, USA, 2019) and Scultura Involontaria (Multimedia Edizione, Italy, 2020; a bilingual English/Italian edition of his selected poems). His new collection, Sky Sailing, is due from Salmon Poetry in 2022. His latest novel, The Flying Dutchman, has been brought out by Glagoslav Publications, England, in 2018. In 2020, he won an English PEN Translate Award for his anthology of Russian dissident poetry 1960-1980 entitled Accursed Poets (Smokestack Books, 2020). He is the editor of SurVision poetry magazine.


Anatoly Kudryavitsky


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Mene, Tekel, Fares

These two dazzling dots in the sky,
the two suns of misfortune.
An equinoctial finger points at the Milky Way
across the streetlamp light,
across the air of diminishment.
The sea won't bottle you.
Your body will.

The void birds ponder the nature
of momentary happiness,
duration as powerful as an illusion.
Under the hazy dome of circumstances,
three words,
three burning words on a ruler's wall:
Never divide people.