Three Poems by M. M. Adjarian

These three poems by M. M. Adjarian traverse the dark borderlands of human emotion where love, grief and rage intertwine in quietly explosive ways…

by: M. M. Adjarian

Apprentice 

They were the artists of my life, my parents. 
Bearers of secrets and old griefs,

they chiseled out my scars, each one a secret
heavier than marble. Suffering made 

them generous. First, they took the histories, 
the wars and Old World hearts that
 
broke them, crushing everything inside
the mortar of America and wet the dust

with tears. Daring hope, my parents 
painted me in flourishes. They never said what

art and exile cost. But I knew. Bruised
black and blue by dreams of progress, they became

the colors on my palette, the one I use
to paint them, my parents, the artists of my life.

Love Song for a Narcissist

You gaslight me with your lying breath
Then burn me with the match of skin you strike
Against my yielding. It’s criminal how I sizzle, 
Pop and strangle in silence you take for consent.  
Arsonist and executioner, you measure justice
By the spreading arms and legs of women you call
Whores and bitches, sacrificed to your needs.
In the name of Father, the Son and the love you 
Don’t know how feel, you hold throats between
Throttling hands like prayers for the damned. Eyes
Closed against your ecstasy, I dream of innocence
And the purity of oxygen while you grasp from  
Behind the bars of your own emptiness. You take,
I give, judge and jury in the court of my undoing.

Untitled Ghazal

Burning with nuclear fever, the white hot brain dream that drives death & surrender, 
You do it: you disarm the hatch, open your heart & let go the power 

Because it feels too good to stop, because you’re not lucid now & don’t 
Want to be because it’s so much easier to subtract your power,

Lose the heaviness of a singular identity, for the lightness that comes from 
Willed self-detonation for the joy of oblivion; fission to the nth power.

Your atoms split, you merge with the atoms of your desire & call it love
When it’s Oppenheimer meeting Hiroshima, the unleashed power

Of bombs falling, falling, falling, in the space where a shrouded God sees all 
And you, M, do not because your god is blindness, the darkest power.

M. M. Adjarian has published her creative work in such journals as the Baltimore Review, South 85, Grub Street, Crack the Spine, North Dakota Quarterly and Poetry Flash. Currently, she is revising a memoir and working on her first collection of poetry. She lives in Austin.