April skies, covert layers in pale blue. She’s drawn. Weight of mass graves shackled by her tongue. She stretches, digs into cerulean Scratches past dressed skin, ninety eight springless blue. Brown blood fingernails, air with air spread tasteless on Deir-ez-zor sand shifting, burning heaps of bones Her eyes, deny their hands, stained with Armenian blood scrubbing a black sky never to pale blue…
Outside, desert air licks tents with an icy tongue, creeping under pegs unto the sand floor, where she waits morning, legs squeezed, trembling tight. Her mother’s warm breath with a hint of onion and lentil smell brushes on her face, calms tremor of awake nightmares, her sister’s knees dig into the small of her back. She tucks her cold feet under her aunt’s ample buttocks, finds comfort and safety in the call of unwashed bodies, familiar, earthy, sweat of family in deep disturbed sleep on worn beige mattresses pressed side by side....
MUSE By Silva Zanoyan Merjanian She’s in between poems you wrote in your sleep between madness and euphoria in your dreams she’s between lips brushed on her breath’s skin between fingerprints you kissed on your sheets she’s between moans of the night and sunrise between notes of Beethoven rolling down your tongue she’s between tuned strings of a cellist on canvas in between shades of sunflowers and iris she’s laughter, snagged between your metronome beats she’s in between an ocean and a sky on its knees...
On a doorstep sits a aging glance drummed with two stretched shopping bags Cat licked stringed morsels, forgotten regrets Her gaze barely ever rises above the knees of passers by never stretching, pretending, striving wading through decaying mud baths of laughter from hurried lives sometimes her eyes do meet their stares past innocent chirping children, leashed parents who bare venom doused contempt, no pocket change we should sit as one and make of it a day, you and I tell me of children you bore, perhaps were forced to gave away...