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DEAR GHOST,

Here I am, at the festival, reading
poems about you. No, that’s not true.

I’m reading poems about those last days
when you were on the cusp of ghosthood

and I did not believe it, could not yet
perceive it. I tell the tales of how

you grew into my phantom companion,
and the audience delivers me

sagging bouquets of pity. They assume
you are a metaphor, a portal

through which I release my grief. They cannot
see how even now, you’re perusing

the book fair behind them, trying to leaf
through pages and failing. They cannot

know how you hardly ever leave my side
even when I am wicked and cry

for you to go or else to stop hiding
from passersby who look away, shake




their heads when I speak to you. You let them
pass their unfamiliar limbs right through

your once-skin. I am jealous of such touch,
your intimacy with each person

who sits beside me on the bus, who leans
close in the grocery aisle, reaching

into your skull for salt or cereal.
When I tell my therapist of this

envy, he asks, do you think you’re lonely?
What he means is, I think you’re lonely.

I remember lonely: nights when you still
had a body, began folding it

into the opposite end of the couch
from me, resting it there when I went

to our bed. I remember desolate:
the ruins of your mouth when you said,

poetry just isn’t my thing, despite
years when you’d sing my name when you came

across it in a table of contents,
declaim each verse to our throng of dogs.




Now, journals slouch in heaps, like the dishes
rank in the sink, like your possessions

I have placed on a chair with the intent
of donation. I sometimes find you

perched there, as if you do not care to part
with your threadbare quilt, your shirt I wore

and did not wash until it lost your scent.
My therapist asks, when will you let

yourself really feel this death? I feel less
sure of what you are thinking these days,

as I read lines about you to full rooms
in which you’re the only soul I know.

It’s been a year, and I haven’t outgrown
these incantations. If I can’t stop

these summonings, all I ask is for you
to behave for once like a proper

poltergeist, to flicker the lights, to fling
some blunt cutlery or slam a door

with the force of your presence. All I ask
is that you make some mischief, menace

me just enough so that I recall you
were not always this kind, as placid

as you appear now, slant of light falling
through your sheer shoulder. All I ask is

that you find the chain that binds me to you
and if you cannot break it, rattle

that shackle, smack it against the windows
until they shatter, let your rumble

and clatter loose, let your spirit smolder
with effort until the whole living

world witnesses these marks you leave, until
I am not your only beholder.

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SPELL TO LEAVE BEHIND A LIFE

Nothing was basic in that place, the fence
triple concertina, the dirt I carved
into trenches, burrowed with my bare arms,
each mark I made a stay against the fire,
bombardment in the dark.
                                                  What I return
to is home. What I call Spartan is so
because I had to prepare, make ready
for war, fitted with nothing but a bed,
a sheath for my sword.
                                           What I once called peace
dissolved easy, fat on my tongue, dusted
fine powder over the sleep where my teeth
would bury themselves in each other. Home
became a story best told at dusk, thread
sharpened with spit, needle meant to suture
but first to pierce.
                                  I left as carrion
leaves the animal who once believed flesh
necessary for life. I sliced my pelt,
slit it wide enough for home to slip through
that opening made by my hand, my knife.

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ISOLATION

Editors’ Note: Given the formatting of this poem, it is best viewed as below in an uploaded PDF format.

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I FOUND THE BULLETS, BUT I DID NOT FIND YOUR GUN

And so I was left to inspect the house, each crack
where doubt crept in: the sash of the bathroom window
shattered beneath a burden of ice, collapsed sacks

of flour that released a dusty eclipse of moths
when I lifted them. Each inch of our home became
the vault in which you might have kept your weapon safe:

behind stacked cans of sage green paint, beneath secret
panels in the pantry where we once hid gifts from
each other, up the chimney, under the mattress

on which I revolved in the hushed chambers of sleep.
The gun was all hypothesis, experiment
I could test like that cat in the box: now alive,

now dead. It was better to be unsure whether
the gun did or didn’t exist, whether it had
or hadn’t been fired, whether you aimed it at self-

healing targets at the range or in the forest.
The gun was conditional logic, a question
of reason: If he keeps the bullets tucked in with

the bottles, where does he keep the gun? I hunted
through your nightstand, through the box that held your folded
flag. I squeezed into the crawl space, unzipped the bag

you carried back from a distant desert. I dug
up the garden beds you’d tended, searching for what
you might have planted among the mole holes and mulch.

Even now, in a new house, with a new garden,
new body beside me in bed, I scour each nook,
each recess of our old address. I trace my steps

through that memory palace, trying to retrieve
some clue, some overlooked hint of what you concealed
in the camouflage of your face—always at ease—

some evidence of what you were about to do.

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ASHES

I keep my mother on the shelf. The urn fits my fingers, though I never pull it down. When I
received it, how weightless it felt, no different in size or heft from my bottle of pills, thirty
white discs settled to its bottom, so much volume unoccupied. In her vessel, does she reside
only in the tiniest line of dust, the rest just emptiness stretched over her? I refuse to let my
curiosity be piqued. I’ve never peered inside, not once through the sixteen months it’s posed

on that ledge, brazen, coaxing me to lift the lid, to find her reduced to grit. I’ve got only
a token bit of her in that jar. The balance remained with her boyfriend, who tipped it over
the bow of a borrowed boat. I don’t know where my mother would have wanted to go to while
away her afterlife, if floating then fading into the ocean would have been her choice. What
could I know? We avoided each other for a decade, then two, then three. We never quarreled,

or spat cruel names, or sat at a table in civil silence. We simply existed on our distant, separate
coasts. Now we’re so close. Fragments I could cradle, could carry around all day, instead stay
encased in black lacquer, cloaked in a baroque display of swirling gold vines. If I were bolder,
I’d keep some powder exposed in clear glass, as I would keep azaleas in a vase, a final trace of
perfume in a vial, jasmine tea forgotten in its pot, left to molder. I would inspect its contents

for chips, for shards, for a hint of what’s had its hooks in my throat. But I don’t want to hold
this handful of char, don’t want to follow my shrink’s instructions to conduct a ritual, to mix it
with dirt to nourish a sapling, or sow it across my yard for foraging juncos to find. I don’t
want to touch it to my lips, to sniff for a whiff of what’s past. I want a vigil: watchful nights
of brushing hair back to cloak a zigzag of scars, of tracking a somniloquy of dark moans to its

origin in her cluttered heart. I want to hunt down that juncture where we grew apart, her life
branching from mine. I’d pull free the axe that cleaved the tough bark of our bond, grind
that blade keen enough to hack at my ache, pulverize it to a fine particulate. I want to quit,
even for a minute, imagining we embraced at the end, unhurried, my face buried in her only
body. I want to forget how every day took her farther from me. How, even now, they take.

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MY FATHER WITH A SOLDIER IN FRONT
OF HIS HOUSE IN JERUSALEM, 1947

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READING A BOOK OF ARMENIAN BABY NAMES
THE NIGHT BEFORE MY WATER BREAKS

Editor's Note: Given the formatting of this poem, they are best viewed as below in an uploaded PDF format.

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WALKING INTO ST. JAMES CATHEDRAL
AS IF WE WERE ALREADY GHOSTS

Armenian Quarter, Jerusalem

inside  mosaics chant // lanterns half-tip  from
silver  chains  // incense  lifts  tin // a crowned
Jesus  blackened  from  smoke //  gold reflects
gold  // a  bearded  priest tells  my  father // to
uncross  his  legs  // we  leave  before the  final
prayer  // snake  along  walls of  peeled gray //
a  square  of  olive  trees  // the  cemetery  door
rusted  and  locked  // a  half-asleep  priest sits
nearby, his  legs  spread  to a  V //  he  says  the
cemetery  guard  is  away  //  my  father  points
to me  and  pleads // a  tarnished  key unveiled
// a  white  dog  follows  us //  his nose  tasting
sky // we can’t find my grandparents’ graves //
too  many  gravestones layered  with  shattered
platters // rows of black crosses // vines heavy
with  rotten grapes  and  chips  of  porcelain //
weeds  splinter  stone  //  everything  has been
moved // even  the  dead

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THE LOUDEST SOUND IS THE ABSENCE OF A WORD

Editor's Note: Given the formatting of this poem, they are best viewed as below in an uploaded PDF format.

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TO THE PURPLE DYE INSERTED INTO MY UTERUS

Oh loveliness, tell me what you see—
which horizon hues open to you. What

I didn’t know I didn’t need to know
until now. Are my fallopian tubes

roller-coaster looped or sidewalk-slick?
Do you detect dangers there? I only

know what I’ve been told. Here
on my crackling paper bed, I am soothed

by our meeting through a screen. Like you,
I looked for home somewhere. Let’s see

each other eye to dye. Find the caves,
the linings. Seek that uncharted I never

explored in person. How lucky are you
to have a place to go. Send forth, tinsel-light

the highways, the potential paths. Announce,
This way, this way. We are all so blind.

The hollows swallow you. You thread through
like cracks in wood grain. Spiraling my lining alive.

I envy your mobility. Bloom my insides.
What doesn’t yet grow needs rich soil.

Uncloak what has yet to seed.

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