adelina sarkisyan
after Louise Gluck’s A Dedication to Hunger
One winter night,
two mouths like graceless
blooms. I slip,
irreversible, into
a lesser paradise. He asks
why I cover my body.
He means to uncover
a personal machination,
but all I see are permissions.
Is it spring somewhere?
Was this feeling once sweet
in its entanglement?
Its brutality? I remember,
since girlhood, thinking
of womanhood as a kind of betrayal.
Year after year,
meaning to snuff her out,
breasts and all,
but hunger can’t subvert
the inevitable. Somehow
the body finds its way. Even now
in this room with this man,
I am doomed.
He is telling me something
important but I can’t hear him.
I am no longer here.
I see my body as he sees it,
from above, and I am
unafraid. I dream
I am tame. I scream
because I misremember. Desire,
how merciless our reunion.
How we’d call it intimacy.
I come back to this:
a woman’s body is a grave;
it will accept anything.
Of this violence,
I am still learning how to say no.
***
Adelina Sarkisyan is an Armenian-American writer based in Los Angeles. Her writing has been nominated for Best of Net and appeared in various publications, online and in print. She is the Poetry Editor for Longleaf Review. Find her on Instagram @adelinasarkisyan and Twitter @etherealina.