‘Never Say Goodbye’, ‘Up On Cemetery Hill Road’, ‘Verdant Cascades’, ‘The Woman In White’ & ‘Follow the Light’
Lindsay Liang
Never Say Goodbye
In the 1920’s the cure
for insanity was amputation,
tooth extraction,
or a lobotomy.
I wonder if a broken heart
is madness or cardiac arrest,
a matter of semantics
or a forensic figure of speech.
Inside I am boiling
like a pot of paper wasps.
No wonder we didn’t stay
together – the past and future
circling both of us
like a kamikaze.
I look around at old mistakes
and twisted chances,
watch you leave my house,
the short walk down the driveway
your back straight,
the argument unending,
although I knew
I would never see you again,
the anonymous architecture
of our unspoken farewell.
Up On Cemetery Hill Road
The Jehovah’s Witness
Kingdom Hall
is next door
to the Lutheran Church
the parking lots separated
by a stone wall
the congregants
play softball against each other
Sunday afternoons
waiting for the umpire
to call out their names
as they cross home plate
each base like a station
of the cross
understanding the metaphors
of summer afternoons
curve ball, hit or miss,
squeeze play, sacrifice fly.
Heaven a long way—
an even longer walk
than over the stone
wall next door.
Verdant Cascades
In this landscape, clouds appear
as mountains, white cap on white
tinged with yellow, pink, even a hint
of the same blue as the sky
which in the afternoon turns
grey then gray then grave.
Thunder heads boom & crackle
on schedule these summer days;
when rain falls,
ducks, turtles, lizards
head for the lake without
need for directions, GPS,
or even language:
a useless catalog of words –
vocabulary of verdant cascades.
The Woman In White
I wake up alone
in a strange apartment
and hear thunder.
Perhaps it is memory’s
hammer on the floor above –
nails protrude from the ceiling
dripping with time.
I miss the woman in white
and see her face
hovering above the earth
un-anchored to the ground,
floating like an icon
in a blood red sky.
I am pregnant with her—
this will be a hard delivery:
the cut swift and deep.
Boulders and ice,
stone and fire,
spill from my belly,
her face like thorns
behind my eyes.
Follow the Light
My cousin John
older by five years,
taught me to play basketball,
how to eat a taco.
When he died,
I kept waiting for him
to come back from the dead.
After all, his brother,
my other cousin, was a priest,
and Jesus raised Lazarus
from the grave after 3 days.
I remember other stories
of people clinically dead,
revived somehow,
who spoke of a light
they followed like traffic signs
in the Lincoln Tunnel,
coming out again, alive,
on the other side.
Instead of grief, I feel anger,
and wonder what my aunt
would say, her whole family
in Armenia killed in 1915,
ghosts haunting
her house on Long Island,
already crowded,
jostling for space with John.
MICHAEL MINASSIAN is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing as well as a chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, are all available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com
