The beggar was standing in the underpass in front of the Ministry of Education. Noticing a rare passer-by, he unbuttoned his Commissar greatcoat with the suddenness of a magician’s gesture. The art of the future, which he heralded for quite some time, instantly came to light from the pockets full of poets, musicians, and actors. Having pulled out one of those figures, he began to inflate it with puffs of vain air.

No one was paying him any attention; they all were going on about their business. Deeper into the night, a couple of culturally concerned passers-by pitched the idea of inflating all the figures at once.

The clock finally struck midnight. The figures were staring at the concert and theatre playbills and bowing like puppets in the wind.

*

Anatoly Kudryavitsky is from Dublin, Ireland. He is the editor of  SurVision, a magazine for Surrealist poetry. His fifth collection of English-language poems titled The Two–Headed Man and a Paper Life is forthcoming from MadHat. His poems have appeared in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Prague Revue, The North, Plume, Stride, Otoliths, The American Journal of Poetry, Shot Glass Journal, and others. He has also published seven collections of his Russian-language poems. His latest novel titled The Flying Dutchman has been published by Glagoslav Publications (London, UK) in 2018. He won the Maria Edgeworth Poetry Prize in 2003 and the Mihai Eminescu Academy Poetry Award in 2017.