Poetry by Perla Kantarjian

           Jack Blundell CC



for Alice, Alibinoni’s Adagio in G minor

a decade later: in it myself and the after-thought
of the waltz of a woman
she must have been
in her days — Alice,
the once black-haired, white-faced widow, 
orphan, 
pianist.

her two-bedroom home reeking naphthalene,
festoons of synthetic christmas flowers from Paris in the 50s 
celebrating the slow passing of every season sun-drying
in her ancient shadow, coloring her air & hair grey.

Alice taught us three the ways of the upright piano
that stood as her only companion, 

Steinway & Sons, &  Alice, all together all alone
in the two-bedroom home reeking naphthalene
and family heritage ending at her squeaking door --
chronic knee pain from all the pedaling and a mouth brimming
awful pale pink gums and a lingering voice straight out of a sinking sea,
on that first-floor two-bedroom home reeking naphthalene.

after every lesson there came her tragic hospitality
through a bowl of tasteless bonbons
directed at me in faded colors, take one for the sake
of common courtesy, mother would remind
before i took the stairs two stories down
to my twenty-Lebanese Lira for an hour worth
of naphthalene-infused piano learning.

a decade later and it pains me- this unknowing.

was it a sonata or a ballade or a nocturne 
she bid farewell to this earth with?

was she aware she was bidding
farewell to this earth with it?

i guess i will never know what rhyme
she sent into the walls of our shared building block
before she turned into the once-upon Alice, ancient woman 
from the first-floor, two-bedroom home, left dead
for two weeks before she was found,
a desiccated tuft of bones, 
once a wife, a daughter, sister, pianist,
playing the dirge to her own
funeral.
​



​
The Radical Response

they speak of you as though
tempests twirl about
your infamous waist unshaken, 

and how you, rose flower, spirit
poured as nectar, bask
in the foolishness

of it all.
near you, mountains gasp
into the sky for air.

you pelt meaning at the skeletal earth,
perhaps even push too much of it, into the 
most trivial of its bones.

they laugh at your awe.
yet i watch you enmeshed into the beauty
that reigns natural. we sit

by the breeze and wash its sweetness
down with water.
in our intestines grow silk

and flowers, quantumized dreams
turned translations of the content
of womb, retied grists of recreation.

funny, you say, how we are all seeds
of the same star, 
chrysalises celestial-borne

playing pretend,
city kids salivating at the mere
thought of becoming

something of the skies --
when all we are
is all there is to be.

we go to work dressed in all kinds of
earthly minutiae, masses of flesh
carried to and fro the rigidities of

the urban and the made-up,
exciting at the delusions of the
Anthropocene, forgetting to dance

synchronous, feet bare, moist
grass, pupils dilated in trance
of it all, moonlight dripping off

our eyelashes, visceral shivers
electrifying our cores,
reviving our return

to the elements.
​
​

Perla Kantarjian is a Lebanese-Armenian writer, journalist, instructor, and hulahooper. Her writings have appeared in various publications including Bookstr, Elephant Journal, Indelible, Panoply, Stripes, The Hellebore, The Armenian Weekly, Walqalam, Rebelle Society, and Annahar Newspaper. Kantarjian also teaches English literature and journalism at the International College, and writes for Bookstr.

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