Saturday, April 04, 2015

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.

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