Ksenia Rychtycka’s poetry chapbook A Sky Full Of Wings (Finishing Line Press, 2021) was selected as a finalist in the 2020 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Ksenia is also the author of the short story collection, Crossing The Border (Little Creek Books, 2012). Ksenia lived in Ukraine during the early years of the post-Soviet era and has backpacked through twelve countries in Europe. Receiving a private viewing of the Dafni Monastery mosaics and rescuing a wayward parakeet on a winter morning in Kyiv remain highlights from her years of traveling and living abroad.
All work
Mother comes to me as I’m making honey cake, /
measuring out sugar then whipping eggs. /
Never mind that Mother left this earth /
eighteen months earlier...
Love boards the train in Salzburg, /
stumbles along a dim corridor /
like the tumbling clowns you cowered from /
at the one-ring circus. …
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I have fallen in love with winter, /
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with the man striding along the path grasping /
a pink plastic bag that glows incandescent /
although it only contains dish soap /
and the cat food he carries home after work …
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I wanted to be gray-faced /
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Once he’d made the long, impetuous trip, /
once we were there, evening air billowing my skirt /
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I knew we’d marry.
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I lived by a river with tides unresolved /
Under the house a sewer under a wooden board it ran /
Sometimes a tapping sometimes a hum in the night like a motor
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and I dream of a young woman from Prague /
standing beside a red motorcycle as if so much /
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