Showing posts with label Michael Akillian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Akillian. Show all posts

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Inside Out: Armenian Perspectives in Poetry and Prose

GARTAL 
the Armenian Poetry Project 


present 


Inside Out: Armenian Perspectives in Poetry and Prose 

Nancy Agabian

Michael Akillian 

and Lola Koundakjian 



Thursday, October 28, 2010 
6:00 PM 

Gallery Z 
259 Atwells Ave 
Providence, RI 02903 
401-454-8844 
www.galleryzprov.com

Friday, August 27, 2010

Michael Akillian: Her Kitchen

Such a meticulous child,
it wasn't always easy for me
to watch my grandmother cook.
She used her hands for measuring cups,
her fingers as tablespoons.
Close enough, she'd say
while she worked over the pots and cauldrons
that steamed with fasoolya, pohrov kufta,
dolma... She used garlic when she was happy,
and she was happy often.


She baked a lot, too.
Whenever I'd come over she'd stuff 
flour-fingered walnuts in my mouth
and talk while I couldn't.
Like so many old-country cooks
she cleaned her kitchen through use.
The corners and back cupboards lay kittied
and abandoned, while the working parts
were wiped at least daily.


I gauged her aging
by the slow encroachment upon her kitchen.
I watched her slow, stoop, and finally sit
in her green and stainless wheelchair.
The time I discovered her at the stove fenced
in an aluminum walker, I stole
down the long empty hall of her deafness,
and out.


When she died,
the only part of her kitchen that was clean
was the right-front burner on her gas stove.
While my uncles worked in other rooms, 
my father and I took the kitchen -- 
two pools of cleanliness spreading outward.
We stopped as the people began to arrive.
That'll have to do, my father said, sliding
the damp dish towel from his shoulder.
Close enough, I thought, and left
for the living and the mourners.




This poem is part of the volume entitled "The Eating of Names", published by Ashod Press, 1983. It is reprinted here by kind permission of the author. 

Monday, August 09, 2010

Michael Akillian: Self portrait

His entire body is a stenciled crate

in which he ships his heart
from freighter to port
through the world.
It is designed
to get through Customs;
secret compartments hold
a young girl’s embrace,
hailstones from Moosehead Lake,
gyroscopic love, discarded rules
and other compartments  of great capacity           
that echo with the thud of stamps
and labels and the cursing of workers
as the crate shudders off its pallet
towards whatever is scribbled on
the crumpled and illegible bill of la[n]ding.



This poem is part of the volume entitled "The Eating of Names", published by Ashod Press, 1983. It is reprinted here by kind permission of the author. 

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Michael Akillian: The Life course

Station I

Unfurl.
Open yourself to the world.
Press your lungs into daylight.

Station 2

Lift yourself to the branch.
Become fruit.

Station 3

Put your ear to the water
and listen to the hum.
Leave four secrets afloat.
Make a song of emptiness.

Station 4

Woman: massage your heart
             gently in both hands.

Man: stand on your head
        for a long time, no hands.

Station 5

Climb the pole high enough
that the wind holds you in place.
Try to come down.

Station 6

Give some part of yourself
to fire.
Wipe the ashes under your eyes
to reduce the glare.

Station 7

Lie down, outline
your body in the fine sand.
Mate.

Station 8

Touch the ground, touch the sky.
Do this until the pain
of reconcilation becomes unbearable.
Repeat ten times.

Station 9

Run in place
until you are alone.
Walk slowly to where the sun was.






This poem is part of the volume entitled "The Eating of Names", published by Ashod Press, 1983. It is reprinted here by kind permission of the author

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Michael Akillian: Ascent

A single note
murmured
from a small plane:
a note

depending on the chill patterns
above semi-white
pines and a thickening oak
a drone

from a small plane
persisting up
and down
a limited scale

a drone
gravel-throated
clinging
lazy as a dazed fly

at the window
that spills afternoon
sun across the sickbed
and silence

a note
from a small plane
playing out
over all the other places

beyond the silence
that tries
to resettle
upon itself

the sun
from the covers
scaling the 
dresser.






This poem is part of the volume entitled "The Eating of Names", published by Ashod Press, 1983. It is reprinted here by kind permission of the author. 

Friday, August 06, 2010

Michael Akillian: Another poem about colored leaves

falling from the morning skies of New England,
of frost like a small white bird climbing
the panes cut with isosceles light,
of pumpkins stealing from the star-dark porch
in search of vines,
but it isn't so.


This is about a woman who paints herself red
and goes out to inflict
upon herself the onus of our attention.


It's about standing here
while she, flustered but adamant,
circles the yard collecting
what she can manage of departure.


And it's about how much I love this loneliness,
heavy as the weight of fallen leaves
and slow as the slow of sap that huddles
towards the vague bus constant promise of the dark.








This poem is part of the volume entitled "The Eating of Names", published by Ashod Press, 1983. It is reprinted here by kind permission of the author. 

Thursday, August 05, 2010

New England poet Michael Akillian

Mike Akillian was born in Boston MA and grew up in Watertown MA--a rich melting pot of Armenians, Greeks, Italians and Irish--and was actively engaged in Armenian music, dance, poetry, and literature. He attended the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration Executive Program at Dartmouth College and holds an M.S. in Science Communication from Boston University and a B.S. in English from Northeastern University.

Mike has worked as a writer and editor, a marketing executive for high-tech and non-profit organizations, and consultant in marketing and strategic planning for institutions across many industries including higher education. Most recently he served as Vice President for Enrollment, Marketing and Communications at Wheelock College in Boston where he also led the College’s strategic planning using an approach he devised that is recommended by the Association of Governing Boards to its 1,200 member institutions.

In addition to being a published poet, Mike holds national and international awards in writing and communications. He lives with his wife, Carol, in Amherst NH and can be reached at mike.akillian@gmail.com.



Michael Akillian: The Painting

The canvas is a composite --
valley rising to meadow drying
into sleek desert;
a tree, broad and creviced, squats
beneath its shadow in the foreground
and counterbalances with a single distant mountain.
Except for the sky, everything is some shade
of earthworking and the texture of rich soil
that so enticed invaders. 


The people are of earthtones too. The man
by the tree standing in the shade
of his mustache is almost sepia, 
the young man in the meadow, the women
whose skin darkens to the tawny sand
of the desert where they walk.


It is the reds are missing.


I squeeze red onto the immediate starkness
of the white palette -- red
the shade all red things want to be.


In one place I mix tree sap, dark,
viscous, until I see bubbles trapped
and trying to rise like something
that wants to say itself.
I use a matchstick.


Clods of clay and dark earth I mash
into another for texture. I use
a horse hoof.


Onto a third I pour fine sand to break
the brightness. My tongue stirs in its saliva.


I finish this painting for you


Uncle Aram, patriarch, broad and strong,
lashed to the tree and burning with it
mingled in sizzles and smoke,


and for you cousin Carnig,
buried in your earth to the shoulders.
As the horses grew large you bit back
your eloquence and spoke with silence,


and for you Maral, small deer,
plunged early into womanhood
all along the wide, relentless arc
of beaten sand steps
that never did close the circle.






This poem is part of the volume entitled "The Eating of Names", published by Ashod Press, 1983. It has appeared in ARARAT and is reprinted here by kind permission of the author.