On my genes are engraved drafts of ruined cities.
Their stone squares I walk easily
Without a sign of ancestral profundity.
Their flesh—
Cut by prehistoric rivers of misconception,
Formerly scarlet, now blind.
I keep their crinkles beneath my nails
When my humanity begins to cringe.
I long for them to wash my sins—
Past errata in the list with paradigms.
The wheel knows better
Which movement to do.
I am left too plain in the distance,
Too insignificant,
Ignoramuses to read the ink on the papyrus
That says
The seed-corn has already died away
Sabred
While sleeping in never-budding times.
Vyarka Kozareva lives in Bulgaria. Her work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Ariel Chart, Poetry Pacific, Basset Hound Press, Bosphorus Review of Books, Mad Swirl, Ann Arbor Review, and is forthcoming in Abstract: Contemporary Expressions, Juste Milieu Lit, Sampsonia Way Magazine, and Triggerfish.