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Kerry Shawn Keys Blue Sky Blue sky in the Vilnius ghetto, the balcony facing the Northern light. . . crows caw outside the window as the stars start to stagnate into a septic clarity of polluted light. Could one grab a beak to dig the dark out of the graves, a feather to row across the. . . a blueprint to match the eyes. O may your lips never read the blood they’ve tread on mine, and so turning to the disquieting book so annoying but framing every vision on this urban perch in this chosen land— poor Pessoa, one reads as one might read the works of a disconsolate waterbug confined by timidity to the corner of a kitchen spending a lifetime telling us how not to live, and yet that distant birdnest in the leafless, Winter lilac, days so short now, I should be bathing in sugarcane in Brazil and not here with so many wingless dreams battered by a cold, faceless wind, bread and salt useless tokens, the song as all songs an illusion as the ripples disappear into silence. Not a waterbug nor a transcribed cockroach, these days I’m just a customs-clerk, and this frightens me waking up almost inhuman with the window strangely open, and I drink my glass of water, calculate the level of mercury and listen to the crying giving life to my poem as they drag them on a beautiful blue day like today down the alleys, into the forests and into the trains.