Links to my published work:

‘Reverie’, in Summer 2021 Issue of Off the Coast literary journal:

https://www.offthecoastmag.com/summer-2021#/cover-summer-2021/

‘Memory of a Star’, in Sparks of Calliope (September 2021):

https://sparksofcalliope.com/2021/09/02/the-memory-of-a-star-by-evita-arakelian/

‘Laurel Leaves’ and ‘Metamorphosis’, in Grand Little Things (November 2021):

https://grand-little-things.com/2021/11/12/two-poems-by-evita-arakelian/

‘Wasted’ scheduled to appear in WestWard Quarterly in early July 2022

 

You will find some of my other poems below.

Some of them may be a bit shy, others

quite sure of themselves. But here 

they are, waiting for you,

in their word-clad polka shells!

Somewhere

Our door—my door—locks
into the hereafter of footsteps—yours;
the street absorbs them, the one that we
still pretend
was meant
for no less, no more

than this. In some other place
—or so I fool myself—among the slivers
of another tale, I roam—
a vagrant newly in love with a stranger—
somehow towards home,
and then,
somehow towards you
again.
I wait

more willingly, even if but one or two
messy moments more,
to fall
into the canopy
of a noticed look,
a mated smile,
or just a joke–all, in other words, that you
no longer leave
me fumbling for.

No more proof
required, silence
reeking no more of pain;
I’m still laughing
every time you stroke
the cat, and you still love
what you call “my ways”;

Do you think we know
that somewhere there’s a you who’s leaving,
that somewhere there is a me who stays?

The Dark, Too, I Am Afraid of It Seems

The dark, too, I am afraid of, it seems,
—as well as earthquakes and spiders and strangers and heights—
“Close your eyes, take a note of your dreams.”

They say doubt begetteth doubt and fear breeds
fear—the more it is the more it multiplies
The dark, too, I am afraid of now, it seems.

A child, I’d wonder at the rustle of trees
at night, “Mummy, can’t sleep! Mummy I’ve tried!”
“Close your eyes and soon there’ll be dreams,

No monster’s idle enough to lurk beneath
your bed, hoping for a little bite!”
Yet it is the dark I’m afraid of, it seems!
“Close your eyes, take a note of your dreams.”

Coronation

‘Don’t slip!’, ‘Don’t fall!’—about all you can do
as last night’s rain sits stubbornly upon
the barren ground, enthralled, mesmerized;
simple, shapeless, and raw; hallowed, as if
ordained by the fall of the last surviving leaves.
November abdicating, advanced in age;
and shaping the horizons the dawn of a new hymn.
A lifetime ago the harvest, much too late
for barefoot-dancing and aster crowns; the only
fire now lit, is the one that warms our hands,
while the fading grass kneels to confess her sins.

Not even a lilting lullaby that seeks
asylum in the slumbering stillness.
Hushed the embrace of the statuesque sky,
holding the frost-kissed twigs of a swallow’s nest.
The trace amount sound of the wind on tiptoe
all by itself a brazen sacrilege;
the silence, a world promising to be.
Our eyes woven into the warp and weft
Of all they see; art transcending mere methods.
Who said that beauty cannot shape a sky,
A canvas, a poem, or a tapestry?

Divination

Yes, it’s been known to let the stars
divine the way to go
about our lives, or to let dreams
decide the ebb and flow

of our daring jokes and gambles—
the sheer wishful thinking
of generations, amassed and twisted
into wildfire, tricking

eyesight into subordination—
certainty enthralled
by lies. Some say to study the flight
of birds, others, the fall

of a pair of six-sided dice,
if only to conceal,
but for a while, the creeping fear
that swoops in for the kill.

We Said

We printed them on glossy
paper, all the places
we were to go, our desires,
‘buy ourselves some time,’ we said.

We taped them around, you
on your computer, and I
on the nicest wall I could find
in my tiny office—

‘one day,’
we said, ‘one day we’ll fix
this mess, we’ll find a way’.
We worked

hard, tooth, nail,
and knuckle to pay
for the overpriced commodity
of freedom,

for you, for me,
to pour our years
of wages, our loveless dollars,
into our dreams. Yet

you sold your guitar
a year (you always were the finer
romantic!) after I gave my Paris postcards
away to a stranger;

in the end, safety is the currency to use,
is it not,
in the heedless purchase of regrets?

Altruism or…

Go your merry way, sweet Dreamer,

And whistle as you go,

Paint the darkened rocks with silver,

Coat the blood with snow,

Fool the silence with a ditty,

And whistle as you go.

                      –Evita Arakelian

Art: "Dancing Gypsy" by Anna Rose Bain

Dandelions

A drowsy night, as thick as opaque paint
Wrapping the candlelight in slumber, as I,
My thoughts fading, now finally face
The light-nourished path of time long past;
A field of dandelions;

Soaked in sunlight, and soft in touch to hands
That tinily fumble with cotton heads
Lacing the proud outskirts of Faeryland;
A land well guarded by these flower beds,
This field of dandelions.

Father’s cheerful voice “Please tread with care”,
Mother’s, reminding, lest I should forget
To wish, before I saturate the air
With fugitive faery dust that crests
This spread of dandelions.

How welcome a task simply to confide
One’s wish to the apostles of the breeze!
And so I close my childhood eyes,
And whisper a dream for them to keep,
This host of dandelions.