Alina Gregorian

FLYING BARK 

America, I will sing for you.

Land of self-proclaimed dogmatic regulators. Offenders of the standard

78 degree room temperature. When you roll down the window, you say:

“Serendipitous to think so.” And the officer chuckles. The officer gives

you a handshake. You must reciprocate by throwing an equally ferocious

milkshake, or one of greater grandeur. Depending on the crossing chickens.

If it rains on your lawn do you spray disinfected solution on the branches

of the elks? Should you wipe clean your transmission with a rag made of dust?

Who will compare you to a fine summer’s clay? The fluorescent lights remind you

of Michael Jackson. You have a fever and no one will say: “Contentious grackle.”  

WHEN BEES CRY   

 The thought entered my mind. The thought entered my mind during the middle of the night. In the middle of the night, the thought entered my mind and I cried. When I cried, the thought left my mind. It left my mind, this thought, and I have never thought this thought again. It has been twenty days since the night I thought this thought. I have not thought this thought since. Now I am worried that perhaps this is the nail that shuts the lid or the hammer that claws the nail from the lid. Maybe now I will think this thought again. Now that I’ve realized that I haven’t thought this thought in twenty days. But I do not want to think this thought. And I have not thought the thought. It is lovely, I think, not to think this thought.  

A BIRD BROKE MY WINDOW  

Yesterday morning, a crow flew into my room

and said: “Sell your lawn for Exxon.”

There was nothing else I could do.

I read out loud a few words I was reading.

The bird dropped dead.

Why did this bird have to die in my room?

d on my favorite desk.

Alina Gregorian is a graduate student in the program at the New School. She has created with Bianca Stone a poetry opera recently performed in New York city. Her prose poems have a sense of surrealism and play both comical and startling in theirs juxtapositions. This is her first publication in Ragazine.