Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

Our Dead March the Paradise Parade

 
Slip that sunset into an envelope
and mail it off, leaking little orange
along the flyway. Turn the telescope
to where all our dead strike matches that singe
 
God’s eye. Time drags them around the eyelash
seconds of  each earthly clockface, a wire
across boredom. Our dead skip the moustache 
moon like a big jumprope of cold, coiled fire.
 
Speak to them not of life’s sly underhand.
Sad sparklers--meant only to render
the source text. The living just ampersand
any language the dead produce as tender.
 
A fearsome doctrine, but photogenic
such slickered blood-tears of pomegranate.

---

Serengetti Boulevard

Consider the trek of the antelope,
the rabbit’s bounds, the young hawk’s soarage.
A gun’s jaw, the jagged maw where end-of-hope
melts quiet down the throat as a lozenge.
 
What hunts here, veneered tooth and tail, hunts brash,
each smoke signal sung up from hapless fire.
No lion’s skill at mathing the herd’s rash
flash into range, just the bullet’s desire
 
to inscribe its story on bone, understand
pain’s need to inflict pain, the surrender
of breath to mortality’s reprimand.
Violence: both borrower and lender
 
somehow bleed. Towering, orogenic:
the victory of a wrong, puny planet.

 

---

Mind Like a Mirror That’s Been in a Fire
for CD Wright

January: just an envelope
of loss, numerous as hues of orange
contained in flame or autumn. Telescope
to pull the stars so close they cut, they singe
 
and then speed off. A sky and its eyelash
moon, the boneman’s wish, this new year all wired
to blow. I rummage through years, a moustache,
old hat, disguises of the selves we fire.
 
Some dark crop, this new year’s fast underhand
plucks her from the highest branch to render
as strike on our paper mache globe, ampersand
tear: starred hole. Out spills our her: attender-
 
come-shining, streams of gleaming, photogenic-
ruby-many-rains from pomegranate.



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Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis teaches at Columbus College of Art and Design and serves as faculty advisor to Botticelli Literary/Art Magazine. Her stories have appeared in a number of journals and won awards in Glimmer Train, Story magazine, Los Angeles Review and others. A collaborative chapbook: By Some Miracle, a Year Lousy with Meteors, written with Cynthia Arrieu-King, won the Dreamhorse Press Prize and was published in 2013, and another: Aloha, Vaudeville Doll was published in 2014 by Dancing Girl Press. Her previous collection Intaglio, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize was published in 2006 by Kent State University Press. Her second collection of poetry, The Rub, winner of the Elixir Press Editor’s Prize, was published in 2014.