Lisa Ni Bhraonain

Helium is Red
Hydrogen is Blue

My first and last use of light on Sveta is when the
well-known and beloved
element ______ disappears from the periodic table: I
observe, frenetically
and stunned, its annihilation –plink, plank, plunk – nihilism
makes noise and it stinks – burnt hair, citrus, tar–

A vacuum is breached, a klaxon goes off;
there is surficial confusion, some fission, some fusion
where the element
never was – parched cindered patches on laboratory walls,
linoleum bubbling,
water coolers, coffee pots, all beakers imploding,
the poster of
Mendeleev’s face shot through like a paper target.

Sveta sinks down on her beautiful knees proclaiming
the advent of a fourth
color, and always the first to see things in a
different light, and as the
world is now anew, I let myself fall for her.

We are standing together at a disintegrating window; the
sky is saffron,
a sulfuric yellow, and birds are different, some dropping
from the sky,
we see a griffin, the starling elongated, the black crows,
flying dodos,
the metallic sheen of their enlarged wingspan infused with
the tint of Sveta’s
new spectrum as a wider prism unfurls and infested with
the enhanced weight of
the ever-present louse the size of quarters and spilling from feathers.

Timetables shatter, a mottled and early dusk falling,
satellites recalibrating,
all clocks moot, and with the never-having-been of her
husband, I ask Sveta out
over the romance of electromagnetic waves on the
spectrum of altered
and antique light, my invitation received via her Russian
radio coming through
big-bang static behind Shostakovich’s No 7, all clarinets,
all harps missing.

Sveta loves the radio’s marbled green case and imagines
its big happy
dial was once tuned on a Black Sea beach. She pries open
its plastic back
to check up on its innards: the cauterized and soldered
wires, capacitors,
transistors, all but the coils intact, and in Russian informs
me: All components
glorious and Soviet and – then dream-like and in Ukrainian,
she says, sad.

By a flat-faced pus-colored moon, no luna maria, Sveta,
opaline under the
changed metals in stars, the altered constellations and no
Big Bear, follows my
footpath of pea stone through a wind-spill of pine needles
up three brick steps
to the twin carriage porch lamps, the glass panes molten,
filaments gone, no
longer ferrous, into the open twin flames of two corpse candles
and the pandemonium of tetrachrome moths.

We slurp up the last puddle of vodka through paper straws;
we spit out the dull shards
of glass; we tune the big dial, now wobbly and
gummy; we get a last update
on the Zoopark in Kiev: Kamchatka bear gone, elephant
gone, zebra, swans, Przewalski’s horse, and old caretaker
too – and after the long-distance
phone call with old-fashioned shouting, the tombak brass in
Babushka’s samovar
now melted on a kitchen table in what is left of the concrete
slabs and re-bars
in the five-story apartment building on what was once
Frunze Street.

Lisa Ni Bhraonain, originally from the East Coast, lives in Oregon. She has a deep affinity with Russians and Ukrainians and has traveled extensively to both countries. She writes both short fiction and poetry.