Karen Kevorkian: What Had Once Been My City

A funerary tower halfway climbed,
the Bedouin on a little motorbike always ahead
at the next site, necklaces swinging from his arm


the teenaged executioners parading in front of bound prisoners
before two-thousand-year-old temple columns,
which at that moment still rose


instructed to accept the cruelty that is wartime, its ochre horizon


some believing the border wall slows down large groups,
others having little faith in it


in earliest life forms the human body took shape,
predator fishes with long spines and thick boney arms,
protostarfish like meadow grasses in a breeze accepting
what came along in the current


a land where people did everything
with little flint knives set in wooden handles,
who sharpened blades rapidly against their own teeth
like monkeys who put everything in their mouths


in low tones a man chides the large dog he holds on his lap,
the dog moving closer until its body is one with the master’s


I take all jurisdiction, civil as well as criminal, high as well as low,
from the edge of the mountains to the stones and the sand in the rivers
and the leaves on the trees


on snow beside a mountain lake a woman’s skin spasmed
from the cold she called pure,
naked body gray in the water’s dusk


years solder solid black scrolled linoleum or paper
like something saved from flames of Alexandria’s library


remember Ahkmatova’s I can, lightning strike on
the desert describes a glass web in sand

From The Enchanting Verses Literary Review 

Karen Kevorkian: EVERYTHING STRANGELY FAMILIAR AND ALIEN

All day, people washed the body, 
stuck it, told it to open wide
to ease the pill down the dry throat

sometimes it was necessary
to turn from the eyes

sometimes dust settling
on the shoulders of ornamental glass

not the tall brown important bottles
with white plastic caps, each day
tilting toward late afternoon’s
foil fissures on the wall

and the mirror’s long silver shafts
slanted like rain, the body almost no more

it was drifting,
blood journeying on an opiate sea,
it left the shore

what good was disappointment
or relief, pale
as longstalked lilies, their sickest
sweetness

or the eyelet edging the pillowy quilt
bunched so like a watchful dog
ready for come here, now

from Literary Pool, 2014

Karen Kevorkian: IT WAS SHE THINKS IN BLACK AND WHITE

September cooling, arguably
an understated beginning, leaves 
crisped in flight, this must be 
the house, how the sun 
rampages through the trees,
the little yard a meadow 
where unquietly once 
a snake, shapeshifting

confusion, a door incised 
with the past, swagger 
of voices then the move to other
small rooms, another small house

of dubious quiet, filaments 
of tree shadow 
that craze makeshift 
walls, penscripted light


from Literary Pool, 2014

Karen Kevorkian:THIS IS WHY YOU MUST NOT LEAVE NOW

Vulnerably thin palm trees at the pool’s edge
spew down dead fronds, gunshot birds
brown falling at dusk

a little rain coming and going,
fine pepper spray on the face  

below the pool’s surface spotlights restating
what could not be more ordinary,
a kirlian woman discharging coronas of light

the water mottles, silver rings her body,
skimming fingertips explode parabolas

midnight on azure, endsheets of a handmade
Florentine book where peacock, cerulean,
and sapphirine profusely question

in the almost-dark sky clouds 
of steel, pyrite, hyacinth, azurine

a strange planet, everything in motion
in the mostly empty expanse
of ash and water, ember and ice

an infinite meadow of heaven
of white fire laden and literal blue cold 

from Literary Pool, 2014

Karen Kevorkian : Morning News

Spread the pages. Who is
crying today? Mother

lost a son. Father lost
three daughters. Child lost
both arms. City lost
fifty
"from the poorest part, the market."

"These scenes are graphic and may contain content offensive to some." The bodies

drawn from their trays in the cabinets
of the morgue. A child who seems to be dressed

in red. Helplessly
weeping, a big nosed mustached man
covers his eyes with one hand. A voice says quietly

"Mohammed, Mohammed." Then the hospital

where from a boy's body wrapped in white gauze

a plastic tube trails.
You see it all.
The man raising

the boy's shirt to show us. The boy's hands
as he tries to

push the shirt down

Karen Kevorkian: Soon

The wind's harder breathing

stuttering the window frame. A limited

war. Its limited

deaths.

           Soon 

a few months the leaves again 

budding. All that 

murderous flourishing.


Karen Kevorkian lives in Los Angeles where she teaches poetry and fiction writing workshops at UCLA. 

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.


From Agni, Published July 2008

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