translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

The captain’s widow housed white mice
in the corners of her holey kitchen,
and she kept a canary called Michelle
and lots of those tricornered hankies.

But, where did she spend her nights,
in which catacombs make sacrifice?
Sometimes Schlomo Fisher gave her a banana,
sometimes a vegetable, sometimes the fig sign.
(And the oldest of the Andrukhovychs
even gave her bread along with vegetables.)

The queen of backstreets dressed in tatters,
her head a cabbage covered with scarves.
And that captain: what was up with him,
probably died young, full of emptiness.

And so the immaculate widow knelt
before the altar of the cold city well
so that the abyssal sacred flowing waters
washed away both holidays and weekdays.

Inappropriate as a relic, she untangled
her clot of veils, spread them over
the fence’s vegetal ribs, and those emblems
of solitude dried where everyone could see them.

And when she was gone, the Market Square wilted
and Arabian sands swept over her tracks.
She flew away, they say, on white handkerchiefs.
But sometimes they say the orderlies buried her.

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