by Svetlana Litvinchuk
Arranged across marble we prepare for sleep.
Like the first folds of origami we were laden
with possibility until the lifehollowing brutality
of war. We had come to these marbled halls to
worship love in the joining of our union, had
found ourselves instead attending our own
funeral. In this lifetime we had one shared heart
between us— a ruby under pressure. Lying lung
to lung our bodies dream of becoming cranes in
the next lifetime, of learning how to fly without
stabbing through soft clouds, of how to become
lamb’s wool instead of paper airplanes. We dream
of safety, of the togetherness of touching
that we don’t dare initiate in our paralysis. We
share a dreamworld mausoleum, in the collapse
of which we search inside ourselves to solve the
eternal itching question of what acts can come of
human hands to make a life humane. To learn of
their other uses besides configuring numbers into
bombs. There is no oceansong in the spent shells.
There is no heaven in the rubble. Where in what
remains is there something to be learned, finally,
in a senseless world where missiles soar in the same
skies as the cranes spreading their featherwings?
We can be folded again and again to dig a way out
of the separateness that makes our geometry logical.
Add up the infinitesimal cost of living to infinity, of
God fulfilling His promises to us, keep folding
a thousand pages of unfulfilled birth certificates,
lay those numbers to sleep and in the alchemy of
our slumber perhaps we can quantify how this life
can be better spent, impeccably lived, to satisfy
that undying desire to calculate its worth. There is
still time for other lifetimes to begin. To transmute
the hardness of our corners. To become some soft
thing, which can keep safe that precious oncebeating
heart between us. Perhaps our separate edges can
for some high purpose be of use. Our wings can be
folded into spades, we can use our beaktongues to dig
at the earth’s gardens turned graves. We can be cranes,
we can be stars, we can be a heart with wings. If our
birdsoul beaks dig through our shared foreversleep
somewhere there is a window letting fractured light
into our cracks. Perhaps it’s not too late to dream of
a shared humanity. To discover its source. To let sun
rush in. To make whole again the fragments of our
eggheart now shaped as a seed for tomorrow’s flowers.
Perhaps we can find it.
SVETLANA LITVINCHUK is a permaculture farmer with degrees from the University of New Mexico. Her debut chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024) is now available and her work has appeared in Sky Island Journal, Black Coffee Review, Eunoia Review, Big Windows Review, Longhouse Press, Littoral Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, she now lives with her husband and daughter on their farm in the Arkansas Ozarks.
Union Spring Literary Review 