Aaron Poochigian

December 16, 2022

“Unromantic” by Aaron PoochigianPosted by

Aaron Poochigian

UNROMANTIC

In a torn hoodie, out of spite, 
a beggar is alive tonight 
beneath great failure and a gruff 
snowstorm. He can’t get small enough. 
 
Look how that innocence of his 
diminishes, diminishes 
as no hand ever offers up 
even a quarter for his cup. 
It’s hard to grin and keep the faith 
when threads from Goodwill on West 8th 
can’t keep the bitter from the bone. 
None of us should be that alone. 
 
I know his story: from the prairie. 
He lives on eleemosynary 
pittances but won’t go back, 
since, out of spite, in spite of hack, 
spit, shivers and a telltale fever, 
he is the truest true believer 
that ever took a Greyhound bus 
to Penn Station to be with us. 
 
I, who have starved, like him, in hope, 
have nothing much to help him cope 
with hunger, unsuccess, hard times: 
just poetry and a couple dimes.
 

—from Rattle #77, Fall 2022

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Aaron Poochigian: “Auden said, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ I don’t agree with him but, more and more, I find myself wanting to, more immediately, make the world a better place. That is: I have poetry but it is not enough. All I can afford to do right now is foster kittens.” (web)

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May 31, 2022

“Strawberry Fields” by Aaron PoochigianPosted by

Aaron Poochigian

STRAWBERRY FIELDS

72nd St. & Central Park West

After you leave the banks where moist sod yields
beneath your feet, you labor up a steep hill
and reach a garden called “Strawberry Fields.”
Our poem hoped never to reach this scene,
but here we are, and we will see this through.
 
Look at the flowers, every bloom, bud, sepal;
look at the trees, dogwoods and river birches
from all around the world. Here’s what they mean:
America is good at shooting people.
Yes, we are violent, we are sick—it’s true.
Not just the wars, I mean the annual quota
of massacres at schools, shows, stores and churches.
Here’s an example of what our worst can do:
 
In 1980, on December 8th,
a person of perverse religious faith
followed John Lennon back to The Dakota
and pumped him full of hollow points because
the former Beatle had proclaimed his band
“more popular than Jesus” (and it was).
 
So now, across the street, we have a stand
of elm trees, we have flame azaleas,
and geriatric strummers sit and croon
songs like “Imagine” in the afternoon.
To shrive a crime the world will never pardon
America gives prayers and a Peace Garden.
 

—from Poets Respond
May 31, 2022

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Aaron Poochigian: “I am working on an epic poem about Central Park, and America’s most recent spate of mass-shootings has prompted me to write this section on ‘Strawberry Fields,’ the assassination of John Lennon, and our nation’s homicidal tendencies.” (web)

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January 8, 2020

“Centralia, PA” by Aaron PoochigianPosted by

Aaron Poochigian

CENTRALIA, PA

I.

Up a collapsing asphalt road
there is a quaint coal-mining town
that lost its priest and postal code
because brimstone will not stop burning
from casket-deep to two miles down.
When no amount of higher learning
could suffocate the fires of Hell,
the Feds bought all the locals out
but me. Me. Someone needs to tell
the tale of still evolving wrong.
Call me Gasp the Landlocked Trout,
and ragged is my song.

 

II.

A coughed updraft
through crack and shaft,
Cretaceous
exhalations stain
a vanished Doughnut Shop,
a lost Laundromat, absent St. Ignatius.
A purple sign on Main
says Stop
to vapor. There are no police
cruising what had been neighborhoods,
and there is no disturbance of the peace.

Sometimes, out for a Sunday drive,
I’ve seen odd fauna in the sooty woods:

a stiff
stag jutting from a sinkhole, smoke
issuing from his nose and eyes, as if
he had been burnt alive.

And once—no joke,
and I’m no drugged-out tourist—
what were
the noxious dead, I guess,
in indignation swirled
out of the cracked earth screeching “Leave!”

(And the indignant forest
echoed, “Leave!”)

Come close, now, world,
and heed a burr
that is a mess
of phlegm:

may no reprieve,
no trick of time, redeem
the reckless them
who zoned a dump
atop an old coal seam.
And him, the chump
who, by igniting trash,
birthed an inferno, hollowed out the land
and turned our breath to ash—
I curse his hand!

—from Rattle #65, Fall 2019

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Aaron Poochigian: “In the Spring of 1962, someone burned trash in the Centralia, Pennsylvania, landfill. The fire reached a coal seam and spread to the massive coal deposit underneath the town, which has since been evacuated and demolished. Some few remain. The fire is still burning.” (web)

 

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January 1, 2019

“The Countdown” by Aaron PoochigianPosted by

Aaron Poochigian

THE COUNTDOWN

10, 9, 8, 7, 6 …
so many things are tough to fix—
love-lives and people, politics.

Me? On the threshold of the year to come
I hope to lose at last
the sad reluctance of my past,
like a grasshopper shedding his exuvium.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 …
now, with the old year nearly done,
my molting labor has begun:

I swear harder than I have ever sworn
that I will live all-out
and all-in and to Hell with doubt.
You hear me, everyone? I am a man reborn.

—from Poets Respond
January 1, 2019

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Aaron Poochigian: “Here is a New Year’s poem that performs the transition from 2018 to 2019.” (web)

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October 29, 2017

“MMXVII” by Aaron PoochigianPosted by

Aaron Poochigian

MMXVII

1.

How late’s the age we live in? What I mean
is now, a Thursday in the Holocene,
wildfires are singeing Anaheim, and sea
levels are rising, and I can’t escape

the sense of living in a libertine
empire, the sense payback will wipe us clean
out of creation. Hey, you hearing me—
yeah you—my countryman, my fellow ape?

2.

Listen: on Sunday, when a brute wind gusted
through the trailer in my pal’s backyard,
a dirty window tumbled from its frame,
and I said ‘shit,’ went out and found it busted.
I slit a finger picking up a shard.
The stars and stripes is smashed like that. A shame—
all those shivers lying in the mud,
their edges threatening there will be blood.

3.

Our world is breaking down as squirrels play
in tall grass underneath a cottonwood.
As lizards easy in their creaturehood
sun on a stucco wall, I have to say

the world is breaking down, down, down for good.

If I could wrestle hope out of the way,
if I got past “You know, I really should
try doing something,” if I understood
time isn’t working toward a better day,

I would be beast-content and bask for good.

4.

Absent an eschatology,
bright birds are singing, We are one
with ourselves, the children of the sun,
while fluttering from tree to tree.

5.

Too much is broken, and there will be more
headlines for hopelessness to wallow in:
angrier hurricanes, American
disintegration into civil war.

Sure, we might want to flit away and sing
in private heavens sealed against the news,
but such escape is cheap—as cheap as booze.
What’s hard is to affirm the following:

Despite the bad times now and worse to come,
despite disaster and a crass regime
of lies and thugs, despite the national scam,
I will be conscious. I will not play dumb.
Eyes tracking everything I can redeem,
I will be right here; I will give a damn.

—from Poets Respond
October 29, 2017

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Aaron Poochigian: “This poem grew out recent news of California wildfires, hurricanes damaging Texas and Puerto Rico, and the whole political climate of the past year. The affirmative message at the end came out of nowhere—a blessing.”

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August 25, 2017

“Divertimento” by Aaron PoochigianPosted by

Aaron Poochigian

DIVERTIMENTO

There had been no attraction, no surprise
for fifty miles, just crows, Holsteins and stubble,
and now, atop the only local rise,
like an ungatherable

iron flower, this looky-here wind turbine.
Sure, it turns a hair-harassing day
to zaps that, routed eastward, power urban
transit, say,

or crab canneries further up the coast,
but in this yawner of a Bronze-age Now,
among the ruminants, what matters most
is just, like, freaking wow—

Bravissimo for the kinetic sculpture
dangling upward from a snag of earth
while juggling, with acquiescent rapture,
three arms’ worth

of gale-force wind. Oh yeah, I wanna be
that gleam with crazy feelers going round.
Thank you, Ohio, for reminding me
how Art should astound.

—from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

[download audio]

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Aaron Poochigian: “I have lived with mental illness since high school, been institutionalized, undergone experimental treatments. My mental illness has affected my poetry primarily in that, given to periods of lethargy, I am especially grateful, as you will see, for the shock of revelation.” (website)

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