it’s great to be insane in russia
free to beg for bread and vodka
doesn’t mean you’ll get it
you pacifist faggot

for you’re no airborne paratrooper
and your civilian unpatriotic ass
won’t march with any portraits (party pooper)
nor killed even a kitten in donbass

Translated from the Russian by Philip Nikolayev

*

Igor Bozhko is a painter, screenwriter, musician, poet, and actor. He is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and the National Union of Journalists and of the creative association “Mamai.” Bozhko’s paintings are on display at the National Art Museum of Ukraine and other museums, as well as in private collections. In 1988 he published his first book of stories, Memory Paints. The feature film Grafitti was based on his story “Faces on the Clouds”; Bozhko also wrote the script for Kira Muratova’s “Boiler No.6” in her film Three Stories and acted in various motion pictures by Muratova and other directors. He is published in the magazines Smena, Oktyabr, Khreshchatyk, Novyi Mir and several Odessa issues of the Deribasovskaya–Rishel’evskaya almanac. Bozhko’s poetry collections are Dry Grass, Queue, Year of the Sparrow, After the Year of the Sparrow, and Lyrics.