Karen Kevorkian: Care of the Body

Care of the body was sweet
besides there was nothing else.

I said are you hungry she seemed angry that she was.

If you saw what you had given years to

fish swimming on disposable placemats

you could do it
one hand tied
behind your back.

On good days we went to the Dollar Store

spill of toothbrushes, tiny porcelain dogs, red
plastic roses, bins and bins of books with blank pages

everything she now would never make good

no time to start thinking
too late for that.

Shiny bright knives of light on the sheet in the morning.

Would you like pie? It’s lemon.

Why shouldn’t I?

A crispness to kindness.

Karen Kevorkian: Soft Music

the empty, very empty, great empty, and all empty
Highest Yoga Tantra




Lowspread the live oak leaves rattle

money in a cup. Fat whitewing doves
teeter on the power line. Soft music

having severed any relationship with
the body, she does not think
“my body”
a fingernail ringing, four times,
a crystal rim,
a hesitation between
the first two calls and the last

a middle place
lasting seven days but these days
are very long
millions of years
what absurdity




Grapelike sparrows in the eaves
soft racheting wings. Sweet fuss.
Usually no one in the room.

The emaciated woman
hairless gaunt woman

lift of shoulderblades wings’ absence

and after death a hungry ghost exits
from the mouth. If it is to be born
a god of desire,
the navel


Bruised (needle scars) flesh puckers
breeze quivering over smooth water
rainpocked sand

She raises a skinny arm to feel fog-hovering new hair
pats her head carefully

a god of magic
the ear

Knees give way. One hand steadies on the wall.
the other feeling what must be hair. A white mist
like wet dark limbs around them green haze collects.

a human exits from the eye



Are the leaves solid black?
No the sky’s grimed gauze
tunnels into the room where TV bodies
lie oddly angled in blooming loud fire

deafness within deafness
only smoke

fireflies appearing
in the dark
she does not know
what to call them

she cannot understand
what is rough what is smooth



Silken reassurance this tangle
the final diving into deep water

very clear emptiness
mind of the clear light

black and silklike sweet
licorice mucky
earth savor


Karen Kevorkian was born in San Antonio, Texas. Her book of poems, White Stucco Black Wing was published by Red Hen Press (Los Angeles, 2004). Her poems and stories appear in many journals as well as The Drunken Boat and in a recent anthology of work by artists and writers, the land of wandering. She is a member of the poetry board of Virginia Quarterly Review and teaches at the University of Virginia.

Karen Kevorkian: The Dozen Crows Calling Blackly

White bodied woman at the window
of the brick house that rouges
                                  a white morning. Come back to bed
 
from the unwound sheets. Only what’s observed
                                the black crow caw
 
not a dog’s bark
                               black diagonal echo
                                                                  unwinding peel
knife paring
                              seeking pith every morning
 
                              gray squirrel shooting down a wet limb
every morning the slide down
 
                             an arm raised against
                             eyelids’ red scald

Karen Kevorkian

Karen Kevorkian: Willow and Pecan, Hackberry and Huisache

Not a language of grief
the well rehearsed green chorus
bends to one side. A sleek blackbird erupts.

Somewhere
a chainsaw. Somewhere
a leaf blower. Somewhere

a clock ticks in a room
where doves query one-two
and three hah hah over there
collect
a pear go comb
your hair go say
a prayer oh don’t
be scared opulent

pink flames at the window
western sky graying

shadow wants the streets

still body on the bed. Dove lusters
Go now. Go.

Oh oh oh from the trees.



Karen Kevorkian