Silva Zanoyan Merjanian
(Lebanon-USA)
Brass Knuckles of Traditional Values
On domestic violence and the bill that finally passed to criminalize it in Armenia.
Opponents of bill didn’t want to lose ‘traditional values’
Winter’s on the side of the road
with a suitcase of shame.
Gravel hardened,
sign blinks Dead End
and I, holding on to the rain.
It’s patriarchal land
I slip and fall on every day.
I chase prayers to edge of my strength,
a flickering candlelight
in camouflaged rage,
compliance swallows me
to spit me back
into a white veil
hanging empty
to have and to hold
in embroider pretense.
Nightmares sleepwalk
between my legs,
I count stains our ceiling holds,
count saints who turned their backs,
bruises darken on measured breath
guarding the blush creased
in your untarnished hands.
We are man and wife.
My tribe retreats
wings pinned to ancient stones.
I have kissed the groom.
A deboned fish flapping in your mouth,
I can neither explain nor catch my fall
yet I insist I’m not that woman,
ice your fist, my pride, the face
I take to bed.
Remorse has shades
you’ve never seen
on skin that molts as the sun sets,
burnt musk rises like smoke from vows
shackled to humped mountains,
ancestral chains.
TRANSLATE A DREAM
on faith
I take my leave,
And hasten to the heights that I have longed for
Leaving my shadow still to be with you
Anna Akhmatova
God,
I came back in a dream for my shadow
I was a fish
you were the sand on a shore
the way this ocean ate the moon
nothing was left
of its light
nothing to fill porosity
of your pride
you, mercurial wind
nailing spring poppies
to blades of grass in a field
I, the bite on your breath
colored them red with your blood
I was the sediment in your glass
you, the night, almost drunk
I erased your death, forgave
your birth, but your nocturnal pain
remained as loud as thunder against
my mouth
all you had was a drop of deyo in metaphors
on a reed pen’s tip
you, the writer in this dream
and I, the reader you want to lure
to this poem but turn the page on a whim
Top of Form
Deyo- Hebrew word for ink used during Biblical times – powdered charcoal or sooth mixed with water and sometimes gum.
MULTILINGUAL
Reduced emotional resonance of language. Feeling less emotionally connected to your second language might make it easier to use highly emotional vocabulary.
Wilhelmiina Toivo
If language were a city
I’d be homeless in its alleys
in these parts of memory
you can’t find a reason
not to fear exhale
of your mother language
a mere buzz past a hunger
across rivers you’ve known
for force of their currents
through your veins
for the shadows
it casts on your heartache
doubts it digs
from your palate
like bruised worms
in the wet soil of spring
and you wonder
if you say it
in any other language
would heaviness
of this silence between lines
rise from pavements like steam
(Fifth Wednesday Journal, Fall Stellar Issue)
Writer’s Block
for a poet lost in translation
I thought I had you by frilled hem of a metaphor,
but street-light’s flood of yellow fog
hushes me again to a mere doubt in your hands.
We are diverging.
Your flare escapes fingertips,
turns corners and crosses streets,
collides with slippery notes of Blue Café
playing in a city that echoes back,
Take all you know, and say goodbye,
your innocence, inexperience
mean nothing now.
There’s a poem dying on the sidewalk,
we will bury it with the rest.
It starts to rain.
What’s a poem without rain?
I lose you in the downpour of words
slit and gutted to this city’s taste.
You say, write the streets
after they flatten you against a wall,
see the gutter fill with regret.
Write the river
until you drown in the rising water
You let go of the wind,
it’s taken you high and dropped you
when you least expect,
a poem like that is road- kill at best.
I’ve seen your white collarbone at 3 am
and you’ve seen my hysteria when alone,
our footsteps swept from the streets
appear again in verses, wander in alleys
picking shame with the trash.
A city does not forget shame.
Some poets never make it home.
Write, write the homeless till you are one yourself,
let an alley cradle your ribcage.
With the smell of an animal in my hair,
I write your lust till it’s dry semen
stuck to a sole after the train’s departed.
But a city never forgets heave of a moment
that cut like a butcher’s blade.
Write! Damn you, write the longing!
It burns, it burns where a scar runs on edge of a poem
to a heart and back,
to between-lines, only a night drunk on a full –moon’s light
grasps.
And when a poem takes you home,
puts you to bed alone,
you hear the city turn to its side,
face the wall where the street- light
doesn’t reach at all,
and crows flutter in your throat,
looking for a way out,
they die on a line clenched between molars.
A dream wakes up in a dream on your tongue,
and you swallow your raw words.
Call it writer’s block, when dawn
tells you of all this, while sober and free
of the night’s spell.
(Peacock Journal & Anthology)
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BIO
Silva Zanoyan Merjanian is a widely published poet who grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. She moved to Geneva for a few years during the Lebanese civil war and later settled in Southern California with her husband and two sons. Her poetry reflects a little of what she took with her from each city she lived in. The nostalgia for her roots, her Armenian heritage, her deep sense of humanity reduced and elevated at the same time in life’s events permeate through her poems. Her work is featured in anthologies and international poetry journals. Merjanian was the guest speaker at Celebration of Survival cultural event at Ohio State University on the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Merjanian has two volumes of poetry, Uncoil a Night (2013) and Rumor (Cold River Press, 2015.) Rumor won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award Fall 2015 for best poetry book by NABE, she has 3 poems from Rumor nominated for Pushcart Prize.
Merjanian donates proceeds from both books and speech compensations to charitable organizations.