Poem by 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

Karen Kevorkian has published two poetry collections, Lizard Dream and White Stucco Black Wing. A native of Texas, she lives in Los Angeles, teaching poetry writing at University of California Los Angeles. Her poetry and fiction appear in many journals, recently in Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Pool, Poetry International, and Volt. She has been a fellowship resident at many artist foundations, recently including the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. She is fiction editor of Able Muse journal.  

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