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.
