Theadora Siranian
Image by Ramy Kabalan from Pexels
Theadora Siranian’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ghost City Press, and Atticus Review, among others. In 2014, she was shortlisted for both the Mississippi Review Prize and Southword’s Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Theadora received the Emerging Woman Poet Honor from Small Orange Journal. Her chapbook, She, was released by Seven Kitchens Press in May 2021. More of her work can be found at theadorasiranian.com.
When You Come In, You're In For Good
I keep forgetting to say anything
besides loneliness
and I apologize lover, my imaginary friend;
I’m sorry mother dead three years now
—it’s just not enough to be alive
and I’m sorry for that,
wearing daily my small track in the floor
pondering the ailing plants
or touching myself absently after lunch
watching the light shift and the snow squalls
keen across the window
grooming and shedding like an ape
into the corners of the apartment
—I clean obsessively and yet still
keep finding pieces of myself all over the place.
There are flumes of coal smoke at the horizon and the air
is noxious. Tonight, a factory to the south,
maybe a chemical plant, will become
a structure fire, a livid red smudge against
the black blackness of the steppe.
Lately it seems everything is trying to kill me—
the sky, the water, the breath from people’s
mouths. I even look at the chicken I cooked
suspiciously—is that pink there just an artery,
a little bloody artery, a little bloody gristle?
I’m just a bit of bloody gristle, too, waiting
to be devoured. I tell a friend I’ve gone mad
—mad for grief for loneliness for chicken
and imaginary love
S. tells me there’s nothing romantic
about chicken but says Poe explained
I was never really insane
except upon occasions when my heart
was touched and so then howling
at the moon seems good, like I might
still have some semblance of a soul.
October, the month to be skinned,
rubbed raw by even the sight of the sky;
look at me now, give me witness: eating cold takeout alone
in a foreign country, my body filled with light,
filled to the brim—
to bursting,
my imaginary lover high in the clouds
elsewhere, deadwooding a giant tree in the salty sunshine,
and here,
and here,
and here and here and here
the obliterating fog outside waiting for me patiently.
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©2022 West Trade Review
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