I Forgot Her Blue Ice

by Yuriy Tarnawsky

The Sunday was like a hot bus engine. People were leaving                               themselves as if for a day out in the country. My face slipped                              back past the window like a tree. Nobody knew its name. The                             future was closed like a museum. There wasn’t enough room                                 on the ground for the sunlight. Even the soft drink bottles                             sweated. The man was telling me about the cool of the Andes.                        Underneath, his life was torn like underwear. The green water                             swam around playfully with a white flower in its teeth and the                             cocoa-skinned boys were in vain trying to catch it.

Suddenly, there was the sound of an airplane. I turned as if                            somebody had called my name. The sky slid down and stuck at                               an angle, like a bayonet, in the flat Yucatan landscape.

 

Yuriy Tarnawsky was born in Ukraine and has lived in the U.S. since 1952. He is a founding member of the New York Group, an avant-garde Ukrainian emgrè writers’ group, and a member of Fiction Collective. He has published eleven volumes of poetry and two novels. (1992)