My childhood home had a single window. It sat along
a skyline of onion domes and steeples that punctured
the sky as if to force their way into heaven.
There, priests in black robes swung incense from chains,
erecting columns of song that delighted both God
and the devil.
I was raised to forgive those who build grand structures
designed to make you feel small. I lived off the fat
of my mother’s hurt—an inheritance I lit like an oil lamp
in lean times. Hurt was the stone in my pocket that kept
me from floating away.
My mother says heaven is a house with no floor that only
those with no unfinished business get to call home.
The rest of us are cursed to clutch our sins to remain
tethered to the Earth.
Each morning I pass a cemetery, a forest of stone where the dead
carved their regrets, left monuments to their former selves.
When my father left this Earth, we didn’t plant his trunk
in the humble dirt. We fed him to the sky until the crematorium
blazed like a concert hall, its audience all ghosts. As if to spite
death, he never disclosed his final wish.
Now, his ashes haunt my mother’s dreams—rooms once spacious,
gilded on the inside and full of song echo with the words:
how could you let them burn me?
Each morning, sunlight breaking through my cathedral
window reveals new dust on my nightstand—after all this time,
the ashes are still finding their way back down.
Svetlana Litvinchuk is anticipating the release of her debut poetry collection, Navigating the Hallways by Starlight (Fernwood Press, spring 2026) and is the author of a poetry chapbook, Only a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024). Nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, and a finalist for the Slippery Elm Poetry Prize, her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, swamp pink, Flyway, About Place, Moon City Review, ANMLY, Lake Effect, Arkana, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor of ONLY POEMS and an Editor for Rockvale Review in 2025. Originally from Ukraine, she now tends her garden in Missouri. Find her on Instagram @s.litvinchuk and www.svetlanalitvinchuk.com
