we swallowed an air like earth
the kind of black
neighbors garden together
and in that black
as in a fleshy cherry
sweet and bitter
and in that sweet and that bitter
salt and flesh
we stored in our lungs many years beforehand
not the cherry plum
another tree
some of us exhaled cherry pits
some bullets
stones bulged from their sockets
and became eyes
everything else became memory
air, fire
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oksana Lutsyshyna and Kevin Vaughn