March 2016
I recently relocated to San Antonio and am adjusting to life as a Texan. Some of my poems have appeared recently in such journals as The Broken Plate, The Comstock Review, Exit 7, Main Street Rag, and The Meadow. Amsterdam Press published a chapbook of my poems entitled The Arboriculturist in 2010. Check out my author's page on Facebook or go to my blog at http://www.michaelminassian.com you-all!
Postcard from Russia
Above us the clouds stack up
like suitcases & steamer trunks
piled up in the murderer’s apartment
waiting for the delayed journey
to the cemetery or perhaps
a long ride on the train East;
time enough to write a short novel
or to crack the case
before the unnamed protagonist,
speaking faster than a lighted match,
swallows whole sentences,
paragraphs disappearing like smoke,
words spilling onto the front of his shirt
then dropping like ash onto the floor:
Along the tree-lined avenue
the widows stand still, mute statues
among the upturned branches,
burdened by the guilt of lost sons & husbands;
then march like blackbirds
brushing their wings against the trees
as rain falls and the sky bends
revealing teeth & the space between words.
-Originally published in The Meadow. (2013): 121
The Postcard on Reverse
I am writing to you
from somewhere in history,
illogical though that may seem.
Time, you see, is not just a river;
it’s a group of islands
& the wooden skeleton
of a wrecked steamboat;
while this place itself took a builder’s pen
& one hundred years to complete,
plus twelve dead workers, happy
in their sacrifice, eating out
of lunch pails & sarcophagi.
The cathedral pictured on the reverse
is a drawing made too late
even for photography;
notice the stained glass windows
when lit by the sun
like a row of teeth, sharpened.
-Originally published in The Meadow. (2014): 85.
On The Maryland Coast
In an old notebook, I found a few lines
I had written down the night we met,
just that one time, when I stayed
in your house on the Maryland coast,
each of us with someone else;
the night you & I talked about writing,
reading our latest poems aloud
before finishing the last bottle of wine:
you had a funny way of saying my name,
tilting your head every time you looked my way;
you were so intense, your face a map
not too different from my own story.
Later, while the moon danced
on the ocean’s secret waves,
I lay awake long into the night,
thinking of you in the upstairs bedroom
hunkered over your journal,
writing this poem or perhaps
holding the other half of a branch
whose leaves scattered long ago.
©2016 Michael Minassian