Past the central mushroom glades you find blight and infection, the frozen tendrils of anthrax sinking its talons in the pale-strawberry-colored Russian skin, terminal and crestfallen flowers in the hair, inflammation, membranes on fire, the spinal cord detached and a brain-hemorrhage among the infants and elderly, medical boot tracks in the icy snow that crunch when you walk, a single shard of sun-light on a sun-sick lake full of half-thawed tea cup orchids and the black moth sucking on the marrow of a drowned lark, girls in the sun sending videos to their friends back home.
Sky blue and a chalk-white inky tree wavers in abstract hypothermia, a frost morgue befitting for the old Soviet architecture, the cancerous system that dies like a yelping actor hit by a car, arms and legs torn asunder and strewn like weird branches, a tattered flap of a hammer and sickle banner sickly convulsing in a corrupt and undemocratic, totalitarian wind, a defaced poster of the Czar, the potent rage of humbleness, the harsh gust of blustery, frigid enslaved prison-fangs await the bitter, pock-marked faces, the overt radio static and silence, rusty faucets dripping gold in mud, every window broken from some unseen bomb, a parakeet on a twig, the rattle of a fatal cough, the warm palms of God pressing on your face.