Knar Gavin:APPTUS INTERRUPTUS

Up early

flirting, knucks

jambed

into

the reel.

Some hungering

line unfolding

along a

plastic

wire

haggard as a hedge

ha-ha’ing

at the edge

of the

lawn.

But the way we are rapt

now is nothing

like you

in the sun.

I was free with the nectarine

blossoms, a

tree in the world

that was

our life.

At least

it’s summer

forever

now.

Tiny fuzz-less

heads rolling

into mash.

Knar Gavin: After Meriye B. Ouzounian

O, captains of infamy, again 

you’ve battered and eaten the world. 

Borges had it almost right. Every cata

clysm happens for the first time, 

and in a wash that is infernal.

                         With fighting

fossil capitalism 

               there’ve been attempts — over the sink

               and under the moon, some white-lit

               trying, as if 

               to cleanse 

               buttered hands  

               with cold water.

Our bodies are shitting credit cards

               by the week, so plastiform is this life. 

Some things work themselves into you, 

               and that is the only getting them gone.

Where we might’ve broken bread

               or even 

broken it off with the land-swallowers

instead capital’s tyrant uncles drove

their straws beneath beautiful surfaces

to guzzle past and future all at once. 

When we think of tenure

we ought to think 

of the land, & 

of those who 

would hold

nothing 

back 

to get 

to a settled future. 

Catastrophe fills the scope, but my Armenian blood knows

brutality is as old as the fossil record. 

I remember my great, great

               grandfather, Krikor. Buried alive, but first

                         he put mud on our faces

                         so we wouldn’t look pretty. 

               I realize, now, that I am in the situation of communication 

where Krikor could not be.

 

The truth is 

in the pudding, 

& its still blood. Or, 

               the medium is

               the massage that

                              structure will have been.

Krikor, 

               he had pigeons

                                             he left all.

This full world is in flight for the stationed few. 

               O, Sinemas and, likewise, Pelosis and Kochs,

               O, Manchins — hot wives in cold houses

                              amidst this inferno 

                         of a near-future 4-degrees. 

I vow this: to cut the arms off every lifeboat. (1)

               To let them, all lovers of pigeons, survive the road out,

               to tear the fossil-hankering factory down, glitch

               the bone machine

                         with the incandescent power of those 

                                             neither wealthy nor insatiable 

               to wretch and howl the brute money men down.

Petes Buttigieg, Brians Deese: we’re coming.

               We’ve got mud on our faces 

and pigeon eyes in the millions.

We will not look pretty. 

               We will not back down.  

Wimmer of the 2022 William Carlos Williams Prize, University of Pennsylvania 

KNAR GAVIN: Strindberg Gray

He was trying to teach me to economize with my language. Strindberg gray

he said, instead of

                         and I thought, sad stuff; plays. Okay: born, rented room,

to Dad & Mom business & bar, how could you not? Or thought,

I cannot be your Lithuania nor her other Armenia,

emptied into river if not skein-tangled senseless. He won’t say her name

and not a word of the thitherings. Only that she was lost. Don’t speak

the heavy hinges, the crushed-bud breaking of taste

from language. That sort of excess has no place in the new economy.

Strindberg gray, say, when one thinks only January, January, January.

Of the Occurrence as recurrent. A single gunshot

in Dempster’s cistern, the echo chambers of sleep. The gray lot

of days in low-light hospitals, Strindberg.

I’ll call him gray, his sitting heavy. And her so Strindberg with veil and rose,

her poised in shadow at the door. Funereal nails sunk

into knees would be dripping were they not so goddamn gray.

Excess was for days when my mother sat turning grape leaves

with three sets of pockets: Turkish, English, & Armenian, plus lemon to dry it all out.

By ten, they’d sewn up two; said one is more than enough.

“English, only, Sanossian.

You will speak what we speak.”

I don’t know what it’s like to lose

a language. Instead,

Strindberg gray, I say, when I want to bring his lost girl back. Strindberg gray,

though I cannot take from him January, July, or the months of coping between.

When my mother leafs through me in her memory banks, bits of face are missing;

sometimes I’m limbless or smear. Gray even scentless, and still all Strindberg.

I tell him, I raise her: be darlings and come scream with me

from all the pockets sown over. Maybe by late summer we’ll be humming:

Tennessee yellow; Tennessee, Tennessee.

Source: Poetry (December 2014).