Ariella Kissin
Poem
Today the Caspian Sea pulses with oil and sun.
Everyone is a storyteller, everyone consumes
pomegranate poetry. Outside, I keep queerness
an absurd secret. In the porcelain mountains
men sell jars and colors. The shepherd sits like a child,
his toy sheep scattered in the green.
I meet three Zoroastrians at a rave.
They tell me how, before the land
borders closed, they’d drive to Tbilisi
every weekend just for the party, not in Escape
but in Pursuit, and how I could have gone
with them had we met years ago.
We agree that August is for growing pains,
for limbs longing to breathe,
for the Caspian to swell,
for vowels to strain under burdens of speech.
Today I am everyone’s granddaughter and ex-best friend.
An old man kisses another and I find rose juice
in the grocery store. I don’t know which god
to thank for it all.
On Sunday a helicopter struck two birds
and they plunged, humble and easy, like human rain.
I cried at the Collapse.