Life
by Gayane M. Haroutyunyan
Life is waiting for something
that may never come.
So I sit and wait.
People are painting the streets
with their funny hats
hanging off their funny faces.
I want to laugh
but my smile is in my pocket
screaming at me.
I complain about the weather,
but what does it owe me?
The papers in my pocket are green.
That should be
but isn’t beautiful.
I want silence
but New York
is the capital of noise.
Slim pair of legs,
smell of burned raisins
and a boxed violin just walked by
should be a collection
of poems with a title
but nobody can take them home.
It’s cold in my mind,
and I could just kill myself
with this guy’s hand
who is softly scratching my back
with kitchen utensils
and taking something away.
Only one thing
holds life right at this moment
– a warm buttered muffin and
my hand the size of a tennis ball
all over again and
that tall woman that was my mother
who never really was tall.
But somebody tore me out of my plush pea coat
and sat me at a cold desk
and told me I was to be picked up by seven
and that I should wait there.
I looked up and cried a mushroom soup
with one eye
silently
and died a little.
To my unborn son
I know you are waiting
in the back of my life,
braiding beauty of my intestines,
waiting for your name and face, stealing my eyes.
I do not know if I will ever be a mother.
Here’s a promise –
I will split the atoms into stars, searching for truth,
write stories to prove to you
on a mid-summer’s day break
something will make amends and deliver
your father
and my gifts will happily fade.
A Snowstorm the Day Before Valentine’s Day
in my triangular room,
in a house,
in what I hope is New York
it feels like a bad dream
but it is so cold in it
that I stay awake
and do my life.
There are no cigarettes
left in my pack
so I walk outside.
All I see are
dirty cars
breaking the traffic.
I want to be sitting in one
next to a stranger
with bad music
and a smell like a strange riddle
loving my tired hands together
feeding the afternoon night.
But nobody will stop,
offer a wet woman a ride.
So I keep walking,
it is what I know best.
It is much like life –
walking and hoping for God,
who in this case is warmth.
I keep stepping
on my beloved Black Sea,
frozen over an American town
with occasional spurts of life
in it.
Few people brave or stupid enough
to be out
look into my eyes as they pass.
They know everything about me
(my black spirit, my true language,
and the dolphin skin patches in my soul I hide)
and it can only be true
in this mother-in-law weather.
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.
The weather just will
not let up.
It must be suffering something
or is in love and weeping.
Any minute
my feet will give out
I will stop
and so will
my mitralvalveprolapsed heart.
That makes me think
about life,
about knowing that
in less than eternity
the sun will come out,
murder the snow,
slim the icicles
and shoot
red, blue, yellow, and green
over the pavement,
and it will not be so painful
to wake poor thing, the morning,
to a cold starve.
And it is sweet poison
that I have forty or fifty years
to live
of days unlike this one,
or terribly like it
and some curious strangers on a bus
are on their way to my life
and chopped nails, kisses, messes, and bad dresses
are also coming,
until one day
I will die
and wouldn’t it be perfect
if it is
snowing
that day?
Writing and Crying
after The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog by Robert Bly
I never intended to have this life, believe me—
It just happened.
A blue baby-giant needed a doll
for Christmas
with brunette curls
that doesn’t speak the world’s language
and does not really age.
Every day I ask for a miracle
but he likes
my fresh frenzied face,
my pretend agony
whispering gibberish
at his belly button,
that I think is God.
BIO
Gayane M. Haroutyunyan is an Armenian-American poet living in Los Angeles. Her work appeared in Chaparral, Zetetic, and Apple Valley Review, among others. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her hobbies include daydreaming in public places, cooking, and traveling places with her heart.