Zhenya Piven, Kyiv

**

The space of our small town is wounded and hurts. You peek outside and peer into yet quiet surrounding, and it feels like baked. It is a very physical feeling, somewhere in the trachea, in the bronchus, in the abdomen. It seems that a new part appeared in the brain, that lights up from the explosions, or similar sounds. It’s becoming harder, like a callus, or compressed layers of soil, where you step over and over. And then all of you are a stone jammed into a fist that is hurting. Not by force but it seems with a force itself.

**

I am currently trying to grasp the hatred, with which our enemy came to our land, dark, naïve, dumb. Hatred, that is translated by rashist scumbags: bloodhungry church brutes that sputter, cheap proputin graphomaniacs: all sorts priliepins, bilchenks, dolgariovs, diemidovs. Their hatred is as primitive, made of the same shit and sticks as their art. All of it is simplistic and cheap, like tacky pop, like a blunt temporary blade that sinks in the waters of oblivion, and is replaced by another one, no less blunt.

Our hatred is powerful, vital, eternal, complicated. We have a right for it, and they don’t. They will choke on it like on their own spittle, like on the letters and lines that they are unable to use.