& In the Baroque Night We Lie Down

By Cleo Abramian

My aunt misses her flight
she is too busy arranging her Tupperware
of kotlet along the windowsill of Terminal B 
& when she hears her name on the loudspeaker
she just hears hey you & goes & turns on 
her megachurch like a ceiling fan in the dark
like a pike in brackish weeds & she won’t 
circumnavigate her bad tooth & when she 
touches her forehead to the computer 
she won’t say motherboard she’ll say 
where Noah finally landed his ship 
& with rollers in her hair say come sip 
on this peeled cantaloupe Jana & I have 
never been back to climb the mountain 
& I have never used the word lacunae 
without hearing Ofra Haza singing 
Shecharchoret my skin was pale & like a wave 
I watch it like a graph not the moment 
when it crashes but when it begins to lose
its breath & in Yerevan they mail dried 
honeydew & say where have you been 
& in Isfahan they say it’s still too soon 
& in the Powerball mashup the Christmas 
spirals chirp and coo & in the motel
my felt box swallows every baptism 
& in Tel Aviv in Tel Aviv I am sent 
into the breakout room with the men 
with the paranoid beards & we are touched 
& we go out with our white tongues