Ordering information for White Stucco Black Wing: www.redhen.org
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The following poems first appeared in these journals:“Imagine Your Body,” Rio Grande Review;“This Is the World,” Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review;“What Kind of Life” and “Soon” (under a different title), Runes:A Review of Poetry;“Tinged with Red Neon Clouds Drift in from the Coast,” Third Coast;“Escuela and Rengstorff,” Los Angeles Review.
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Email [email protected]
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Karen Kevorkian
Wheeze of Steadily Burning
Wheeze of steadily burning fire or a cat swishing through tissue
or a woman in a basement apartment straining from a window
to reach bras and underpants hanging from a line
slack between two buildings to cover them with plastic
this space of no particular use a conjunction
two three-storied E-shaped buildings
rain turning over to itself
the idea of repetition
gusts scraping dangling silver pipes
a charm of sound. Cantonese vowels swaying
down the cul de sac. Toilet flushing. Yesterday
a chicken dying window to the right
awk awk awk this unmistakable dying
El Camino Real
As in
Maxfield Parrish, though he wasn’t
Californian. Still,
that’s what it feels like
after dawn, or when the sun
declines, when a shadow’s black wing
cuts white stucco, the street for a minute
quiet, then
a child cries, or a
radio speaks
the inky fluttering tip of a crow’s wing
disappears over the white edge of a roof. Between buildings
palm trees effloresce, wide spray of
green fronds, something processionally
to bear. Ah, Aida.
Maybe. Less
grandly
new trees ringed with metal
staked, what’s
to come
Where Filbert Met Kearny
White apartment buildings surged down the hill
then they climbed so bone pale. Did my heart
beat hot or was I
a string of tape unreeling the taught? Heart
in my hat. That fine hat
of gold shaking feathers their whisper
too lately come.
Locked in my three rooms the key rasped safe.
Or was it soft?
Imagine Your Body
Imagine your body inlaid with mirrors recording
what passes and passes
away. Move quickly
to a sound like the shimmer of
a thin sheet of metal like the tinny rumble of
stage thunder.
Or think of
cement lawn furniture in the south where broken
ceramics and mirrors are pressed into mineral
a tabletop patchy and fantastic
all that passes
part of this surface yet nothing lingers
like cloud shadows
on the ground or an airplane passing. Or a rough
plaster figure into whose chest someone
cuts
a small round window.
Her Clothes Weren’t Quite Right for the New Town
- The afternoon is pleasant. Why shouldn’t it be?
It is wearing grace and pain; it is dressed like a woman.
—César Vallejo
Rain went to her closet and tried to find
something to wear. Something brilliant, unequivocal,
liquid thunder.
Too much black,
Rain said. At least
give me
sequins.
What
followed:
red clay buoying water
water slithering
exuberant
gutters
little Versailles.
Oh wind me
you bedsheet sky.
Cocoon? The task of opening
all the boxes on the floor. All the sleeves inside
flowing out onto
This Is the World
The white sky the black
embroidery of leaves. Song
raucous. Coarse
hue. All the small birds
safe in the trees. Liquidity
of skin. Burnish
it. This is not
pastoral. These days the
bright lights swiftly followed
by dark. Don’t forget
pain. Why should she crack
the bowl of her bones? Why
should the dying be hard?
This Membrane Hour
This Liminal
Through the hour of dog bark
lace curtain shadow
watery imprisoning
the businesslike cars surge
hour of persistent
water threading pipes
a closet in another room
a ticking along
a metal bar
Every morning bones insistently tell another day
(Oh she was
ready and I wasn’t
the only one she)
Dawn creaks
Mozart
on the radio twitter of
keys the occasional
tree frog stipple
not evening’s blunt
cicada drone the swell the
hum the subside
Hokum
will continue to fight the myth. . . of the global
Islamic revolutionary in the vanguard of
holy war against the West . . . what deadly
hokum. . . .
Sirens climb
the scale seamlessly glissand
then a languid decline. She is
looking down now. Heaven. A choppy sea
of car surge toward noon. American flags
clip-on wands. Cold noodle freeway
sprawl. El Jalisco. Acrylic Nails. Mi Tierra.
Churches big enough for two or three 757s.
Lots carved from johnson grass, sunflower,
mesquite. Train’s velvet call. Her body
transparent now
flying up. She must be up
if she looks down. The straightened
body. No more kinks. Chiffon dress
smoothed blue. Lipstick
slash. Sleep nested in the quilted
polyester. Cymbidium
just so
in clasped hands. Don’t she
look beautiful? Oh
there. There.
It’s Muggy Here
The green sheen of rain wore down her mineral
her flint sluiced
she’d come so far for this
one thing and it was just
another thing
a daily swim through the blank
sun of afternoon
the terrible green
The Red Dream
Incessant tapping
a woodpecker and overhead
big machinery of fire
Essentially a boys’ club where women have no place
oh the military does what it wants
Turkey buzzard in the tree top
sick glistening of its gray wings
red hood
soft whistle
She dreamed a red cross marking ground
so the plane could
find her (had she shown him
too much affection?)
Buzzard in the tree top
gunmetal cloak wisping
gnarled rigid red hood
this was not
Disney
all around gray limbs and brick houses
red as tomato soup in a child’s white
bowl
the child leaning into its breath
What Kind of Life
What kind of life is this
this ripe this
smooth this unhurrying
ascent and descent
quiet soles slapping shining wood floors
first to go up then
to come down. The faint
dog bark. The faint hammer’s
lift and strike.
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.
Tinged with Red Neon Clouds Drift in from the Coast
Here is a story: a teacher invites students to his house where his wife liesin bed in the front room, paralyzed. He never mentions her, and neither do the students as they step quietly near the body following a dusty yellow path
downhill past a water tank and its obsidian surface, a rat-rattling barn, and all the high pale grass with its dry rasp that may be lizard or wind yetall walk faster
to the creek where small trees are moss-grimed. Where lichen scabs bark. Where brown water flows cold over gold stones, where the horsetail, green anachronism, clouds the opposite bank, where they cross on fat white rocks,come to the fallen redwood, the base as tall as three, its spindly, mudcaked, erotic roots. Here is a story: A dancer watching her performance on film – My enemy is time. Here the rain penetrates
and earth gives up hardness, lets go of roots and the tree in its entire being accedes to the inevitability of dirt, yields to the shudder and fall. So memory saturates and who survives her own story? Though in the end it doesn’t matter whether you are the body celebrated or forgotten, the creek flows with a sandy accumulation of big trees
casual dust. And all night rain with its hurried thrum and spit. You’re wine-soused, dinner offering some illusion of others except the night knows better and you wake with a heart full of dread. This isn’t poetry
that hustle and sigh. Listening is hard work, the rain with its morse codeantique communicator
the something being told, lying beyond seeming-to-know, some whisper,promise,
release. Ss-ss the rain’s admonitory, fingertip tapping. The wet leaves fluttering with importance. Heave and turn these messages of night, anothercoast, and your irrefutable body.
Escuela and Rengstorff
Escuela and Rengstorff run into California Street then through to
El Camino Real where Lieutenant Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza
and party crossed this area in March 1776 en route to
select sites for the presidio and mission of San Francisco
and where, Fray Pedro Font wrote that same month
they came upon an Indian carrying grass. Seeing them, he
manifested the greatest possible fright,
holding out his bunch of grass
as if by this present he hoped to save his life.
The air swarming with ospreys, eagles, condors. And on the ground
antelopes, grizzlies, elk, and wolves roaming. Rabbits you could
catch with your hand. Great runs
of salmon and steelhead. Numberless
seals and whales. Ten thousand
Ohlone.
To cross the road you press a button on a pole
stop cars. The way people will
stop, turn,
help a blind woman or man, flash of dark
hands held out, feeling, something to
shrug away from.
Karen Kevorkian is the author of White Stucco Black Wing, a book of poems to be published in 2004 by Red Hen Press, Los Angeles. Her poetry and fiction appear in or are forthcoming in the Antioch Review, Fiction International, Third Coast, Rio Grande Review, Borderlands, 88, Runes, Los Angeles Review, VOLT, Hambone, 5 Fingers Review,River City Review (the Elvis issue), and Mississippi Review, where she twice won fiction awards. She has held artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Ucross Foundation.
Recently she moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where she teaches poetry and fiction writing at the University of Virginia. Before that she lived in San Francisco, where she edited and managed production and distribution of art books for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. In Charlottesville she is unlearning that experience in the letterpress studio at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center.
