October 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!
Author's Note: "Last Night the Dead Returned" was inspired by an article I read in the New York Times a few years ago about pictures and other mementos placed on refrigerator doors. So I became fascinated about the way that refrigerator doors serve as photo albums, art galleries for children's drawings, memo boards, message centers, calendars, post offices, and souvenir centers (think refrigerator magnets acquired on travels). They can also serve as remembrances of the dead and a record of relationships made, broken, and sometimes made again.
Last Night the Dead Returned
Last night the dead came knocking
on my front door, friends and relatives
and even a few I had hoped
never to see again.
I didn’t want to let them in,
but they came right through
the closed door, pale and oblivious
like the shadow of the moon
in a bright summer sky.
Oh, and they were very polite;
one or two even removed
their shoes, then glided
into the kitchen and pointed
at the refrigerator door: keeper
of mementos and reminders
of those best loved and some
who would never be seen again.
All the magnets came unstuck —
some strange reversal
of polarity caused, no doubt,
by negative energy; the dead
crowded around my kitchen
with no atoms to keep them
stuck together; and so,
everything fell
from refrigerator to the floor.
The dead hovered another moment,
crying without tears or sound,
fading out through the walls
and windows and up through
the ceiling and attic, still dead,
and I can say, really, I was not
sorry to see them go.
previously published in Nebo: a Literary Journal (2016)
Naming the Olive Tree
Jack and I walk in the woods
scratching time like an old 45 record,
naming each section of the path
after our favorite poets:
Gibran, Rumi, Shakespeare, & Whitman
forming the boundary from the barn
to the blueberry patch.
Along the way back home
we watch the rain descend
& wonder which of these trees
will fall in the next storm
or burst apart from a lightning strike:
burnt paper on which to write a song.
Lighting his pipe, Jack told me the story,
of when he was a young boy in Tehran
& how he heard a dervish walking past the garden wall,
singing ghazals and crying out to his lost love;
in the morning they found him hanging
from the branches of an olive tree:
“When I first saw you, standing under the olive tree
How did the earth not stop spinning, under the olive tree
My lips yearning like a single drop of water in a desert
for your rose to bloom, the moon to blush, under the olive tree
I whisper your name on the walls of the wind
My tears to salt the earth, the mud, under the olive tree
like rain falling backwards from death to birth,
my sobs a song only I could hear, under the olive tree.”
Last Night the Dead Returned
Last night the dead came knocking
on my front door, friends and relatives
and even a few I had hoped
never to see again.
I didn’t want to let them in,
but they came right through
the closed door, pale and oblivious
like the shadow of the moon
in a bright summer sky.
Oh, and they were very polite;
one or two even removed
their shoes, then glided
into the kitchen and pointed
at the refrigerator door: keeper
of mementos and reminders
of those best loved and some
who would never be seen again.
All the magnets came unstuck —
some strange reversal
of polarity caused, no doubt,
by negative energy; the dead
crowded around my kitchen
with no atoms to keep them
stuck together; and so,
everything fell
from refrigerator to the floor.
The dead hovered another moment,
crying without tears or sound,
fading out through the walls
and windows and up through
the ceiling and attic, still dead,
and I can say, really, I was not
sorry to see them go.
previously published in Nebo: a Literary Journal (2016)
Naming the Olive Tree
Jack and I walk in the woods
scratching time like an old 45 record,
naming each section of the path
after our favorite poets:
Gibran, Rumi, Shakespeare, & Whitman
forming the boundary from the barn
to the blueberry patch.
Along the way back home
we watch the rain descend
& wonder which of these trees
will fall in the next storm
or burst apart from a lightning strike:
burnt paper on which to write a song.
Lighting his pipe, Jack told me the story,
of when he was a young boy in Tehran
& how he heard a dervish walking past the garden wall,
singing ghazals and crying out to his lost love;
in the morning they found him hanging
from the branches of an olive tree:
“When I first saw you, standing under the olive tree
How did the earth not stop spinning, under the olive tree
My lips yearning like a single drop of water in a desert
for your rose to bloom, the moon to blush, under the olive tree
I whisper your name on the walls of the wind
My tears to salt the earth, the mud, under the olive tree
like rain falling backwards from death to birth,
my sobs a song only I could hear, under the olive tree.”
©2016 Michael Minassian
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