Natalie Bryant Rizzieri: Graveside Voyeurism

        

              - Kapan, Armenia
 

City of our last two years valleys wide
and this, the longest I’ve lived anywhere

with you.  Otherwise, it is not home. 

Concise rows of gravestones stitch
the hill’s skirt in uniform grey.  Sketched
faces assign dead eyes to follow us

with their last memories of a war we know only

by name.   Fake flowers, wind-whipped and

toppled, deplete the stones.  The sky widens

blue and deserted, among unflinching eyes,
we stand.  There is nothing holding us here
or holding us back.  This pain is not ours. 

Copyright Crab Orchard Review. Reprinted here by kind permission of the author

Natalie Bryant Rizzieri: From the Same Fruit

Summer of stone fruit. It’s late July. 

Grandmother cans Armenian plums

for winter jam to sweeten tea,

russet-tinted.  I eat apricot kernels,

the final center.  Yes, the wood pit

encloses a bitter almond. 

We threw them out too quickly,

lost this fact a few generations back. 

And this, the apricot almond

will save a life or lose it. 

She traipses behind me, cracks open

seed to ground, take and eat,

but not so many, pull gold skin back

under sun leaves to suck clean

the wood pit, what opens

to cyanide and latent salves.


Copyright Crab Orchard Review. Reprinted here by kind permission of the author