Susan Comninos

July 19, 2021

“Imagining Abraham” by Susan ComninosPosted by

Susan Comninos

IMAGINING ABRAHAM

as my silent immigrant parent

My father was a wandering Aramean;
he placed a dead deer in my hands.

My father was a wandering Aramean
and erased for me the path to his home.

My father was a wandering Aramean
whose goodness was the oar that rowed him

in the boat of his soul. Alone

my father was an Aramean. He
spotted the dark in blurred halos,

my father. Was an Aramean wandering
because he’d been cast out by beasts?

My father wandered. Like an Aramean—
his feet were his indigent’s shoes.

He unveiled himself
to the air like a shivering bride.

My father, my wanderer,

walked on the ice near our home
like a heron. My father

was ice of the lake, a bird
of sparse plumage. He wandered, as feathers

fly.

—from Rattle #72, Summer 2021
Tribute to Appalachian Poets

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Susan Comninos: “I was born and raised in New York State’s Southern Tier—near Endicott, to be exact—a working-class town in sharp decline since the 1960s sale of the Endicott Johnson Shoe Factory, the area’s leading industrial employer. Growing up in the small Rust Belt community wasn’t ideal—for me, at least. I remember the chronic smog overhanging the shops on Washington Avenue, the commercial block leading to the high school; the preferencing of football over academics; the experience of being one of two Jewish kids in my grade. Though I never loved the place, I did learn there to love books, reading, and writing. Later, in encountering Alice Munro’s dazzling short stories, many of them set in the tiny towns of British Canada, I recognized in them the same brand of wild smallness and cruelty born of frustration that I often saw as a kid.” (web)

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August 23, 2016

“How People End” by Susan ComninosPosted by

Susan Comninos

HOW PEOPLE END

up married or not, or dead
or cramped in a crisis
of denouement: an atomic
shrill of insight, landing

post-crisis, limp
and late, after the ash.
Grilled into sight, landing
like denouement’s atomic.

Late fingers of ash
brush to formation: a peacock
of denouement. Atomic
as raised blue veins

of rush, as pea-cocked
as foolish feathers, empty.
If raised blue veins are
quills, are bones of no weight,

foolish as feathered blood, emptied
for space—how’s the crush
from quills, bones, the weight
of the terrible, released?

Out for space, we squeeze
our own reckless organs.
Terrible, released
by freedom, we skirt a ruined sky.

Our organs play
the push towards
away, the lewd sky
lumbering past. Elephants

keen the push
on disaster. While we
lumber past, our
massive, veined ears flap.

Disaster, what’s
invented for us: a show of air?
Massive, veined ears flap
applause. Worship

invention, a show of air,
a dry dust dropping
to applause. Our denouement?
It’s married or not, and dead.

—Poets Respond
August 23, 2016

[download audio]

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Susan Comninos: “This poem was written in the wake of an August 14th op-ed in the New York Times on American nuclear weapons policy. It’s rare that I even try to write a political poem because—to my mind—it’s nearly impossible to make a preachy poem into a readable poem. (And by readable, I mean: bearable.) So, although ‘How People End’ claims to talk about nuclear war, that’s really a conceit. The poem’s not so much about literal destruction, but more about emotional waste. It tries to understand what comes at the end of a life of avoidance, other than a finial of nothingness.” (website)

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