Blame Manual
soft grill of days on high
boil
near then reached
my
mother’s tears on
my birth
certificate your soft
hands
the peach from a lost
tree soft
endings lost
strangers their
damaged
thoughts
*
a wingless airplane shadow
of what my flight has
become empty
hand filled by
the shadow your intricate
absence the shades
on the guard’s eyes the list of crimes
our
delicate spelling exquisite
grammar excellent
blame
*
i count blossoms on
the peach tree i
blink two blossoms
gone you
gone
*
every small thing sang its song lasted
the wrong way
the gift
of my final days a list of
things i’ve left undone
the guard
turned away or
pretended to
my
mother
wading through shallow grass your
soft hands beautiful
ending parachute
me off
this life
a wingless air-
plane
biography
A. MOLOTKOV’s poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows, Synonyms for Silence, and Future Symptoms (forthcoming from The Word Works). His memoir A Broken Russia Inside Me about growing up in the USSR and making a new life in America is due out in 2022 from Propertius. Molotkov’s collection of ten short stories, “Interventions in Blood“, is part of Hawaiʻi Review Issue 91. His prose is represented by Laura Strachan at Strachan Lit; he co-edits The Inflectionist Review. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com