Armine Iknadossian
Oh God of Mercy where is my gold key
to unlock the sixteen year old boy inside of me.
No, not the marrying kind,
the kind who took me by the riverbank,
under a buttered moon like Poe’s pendulum,
that bored devil who looked on,
then slept snugly as he undressed me.
Yes, I was stolen. I was his abortion.
His fat penis, his dog bone,
a boil outgrown, a plundering prince.
No one ever knows the first time,
the twisted kiss, the abracadabra
open sesame of limbs, the carnivorous,
the pebble of the clitoris in a sling,
the indifferent hands, the armored cock,
the prying open, the spoils of war.
Oh body of Ms. Maybe, a king’s daughter.
A cockroach tongue in the ear,
a pinched anus and the boundary,
the hard skull of the earth.
The gelatinous blood, the cat howl,
the awful rowing towards seventeen.
The Virgin
Edna had it right
but she leaned to the left,
if you know what I mean.
She greeted guests
with a witty remark and
took a lover
after that dinner
of Biblical proportions.
(Or maybe
she married Ted Hughes
and went fishing for trout;
read about the sacred feminine
and considered joining
the Communist Party. )
At dinner
Edna mentioned her love
for Greek tragedies
as spirits came out of the sea
looking for a mortal wife.
Maybe a mythical seal
or a white horse
tricked her to ride him.
The Seduction was subtle
but came down like a large scythe
on a blue meadow.
Her husband
did not see it coming…
(… but then again, neither did Sylvia’s.
If she was there with Edna,
she might have said,
“Seeing young men make tea
is still a source of silent mirth to me!”)
And they slept,
Edna and Sylvia,
after a dinner of forced smiles,
after standing naked on the shore,
slept like the sirens of the Aegean Sea
dreaming of immortality.
The Last Supper
Armine Iknadossian is a poet and teacher who lives in Pasadena, California and teaches high school English. She is currently working towards her MFA in poetry through Antioch University. She has been published in Inscape, UCLA’s Wisteria and CalState Northridge’s Edges. In 2001, her prose poem March Eulogy was selected by Terry Wolverton’s Prose Poems at Work Postcard Project and can be seen on the Web at www.writersatwork.com. In June she read her work for the Rhapsodomancy reading series and her work appears in “Lounge Lit: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction by the Writers of Literati Cocktail and Rhapsodomancy.”
for Anne Sexton
"The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.
The touch of the sea is sensuous,
enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace."
- from "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin
