Boiled plum jam,
and the wind took away my hat.
In the morning,
when I spread black plum jam on toast,
I remember the taste
of the sweetest love.
Just boil the plum
and sweeten it...

the color of cinnabar
bluish-red fluid spills,
reminding me of a pearl.
I loathe that one day,
somewhere on Perovskaya,
in some bar.
I hate every foul memory
that tastes like blood,
like rust.
A city
where hot wind blows,
dust clings to sweaty skin.
You sit on the stairwell, endlessly tired,
and tears won’t fall
the antidepressants have made you
forget how to cry.
You haven’t wept in so long
not even for the things
most worth crying for,
when once
you could cry for an hour.
Vile summer!

It rains, and children, in rubber boots,
walk into the deepest puddles.
It rains the grass grows wet,
and my feet burn, for they are bare.
Rain is most beautiful in the mist,
and the pains our bodies feel
as the rain approaches
vanish with the rain.

The car windows lie back into the rain,
yet the rain keeps soaking them again.
This process
and the squeaking of the windshield wipers
is my favorite.
In these moments,
I dream of heavier rain,
of a longer traffic jam
so I wouldn’t be able to go back home.

I remember those nights when my mother read me fairy tales,
I would fall asleep in clean white sheets,
dreaming dreams
outside, the wind swayed the branches.
Back then, nothing felt as fairy-tale-like
as the morning
that began with pearl-colored
milk.

One winter, I noticed a migrant black crow,
arrived from a distant foreign land,
from my balcony
it was sitting and watching the gray crows,
who were hungry, since it was morning.
The black crow looked strong and calm.
I wondered
was it hungry too?
But it sat apart,
its feathers shimmering
like black satin.

Trees nourish hearts,
and I dyed my hair with the paint of their bark.
Like in Chinese fairy tales,
I don’t eat bird nests
that’s how I learned about such dishes,
probably from Pippi Longstocking.
I heard about bird nests as food from her.
It’s cold now,
so I decided
to make a sauce with vegetables
just to warm up the chill.