Dean Kostos: THE LIVER IS THE COCK’S COMB

after a painting by Arshile Gorky

Sun-warmed apricots release their scent.

A boy from Khorkom

breathes deep & tastes their color

with his eyes.

War’s impasto of flame.

Charred carrion: limbs

& entrails. His famished mother

dies in his arms. The boy draws

a scorched landscape, vermilioned.

That artist is now

a man. He hangs his voice 

from a desiccated tear,

dusts his knees, unpeels

his face & name. 

Sails toward a new self

in New York City.

Night blooms inside a skyscraper.

Petals wither.

Flute-hollow skeletons exhale

a satin sky, a coffin lining.

The painter thumbs his mother’s

embroidered apron—threads

unraveling, an Armenian prayer.

With paint-stained hands, he bends

toward a deathbed, a flowerbed:

             every garden a cemetery.

Dean Kostos lives in New York City. This poem is from his latest collection This Is Not a Skyscraper.