Poems: Keshishian: A Silent War

By Stepan Keshishian

AyA

I am sanding down the jagged contour of my ankle
Which the architect neglected or could not reach.

No one could possibly underestimate the steadfast;
The irrepressibility of nature in the act. carved out

As She shines her finger down, each morning
From the top of the Mountain where, gaining speed

All particles of life stumble among and upon one another,
Crumble from her will and, collect in the fertile valley.

With a sheared foot in a westward pose, detached
I shift to the other, contemplating in Lost tongues;

Perhaps, I say, it is the inevitability of conditioning.

I hear the steady stream of the morning highway
beneath the current.

***

Contortionary

I go there, also. searching through framed seashores bent,
digging through rubble under bare heels and dust

I can’t recall an instance, displaced six thousand miles-
where the sun shines more content bent, at right angles.

Words leak and falter, alter
like borders. hoards of tight corners.

I felt a woman – made of earth, sword and skirt,
dead and mapped, giving birth.

We carved out a piece of the sun
to carry a long forever

***

Feast of Sweat

speak, now, on the fundamentals of civil policy
as the withered forest gasps of plastic.

the retractable awning of reform,
as in a penal code abolishing the mouth with

which to read- worn, of wind and rain,
the sky-blue muslin crawling across

the shifting desert, retracing–as children,
or the Euphrates in aimless perpetuity.

The beating sun,
bleaching, what
remaining essence.

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Guest Contributor

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