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Heard and not heard at my grandmother’s wake

Jordan Nishkian

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                                 We pretend to bury her.
“Here, eat something.”
                                 In two weeks, we’ll pick up my grandmother’s ashes,
                                 her urn will join my grandfather’s
                                 in their nightstands, in their bedroom.
                                 My aunt
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m crying.”
                                 will sleep beside them: both
                                 room, tomb.
“It’s good we didn’t host this at the house.”
                                 Before America or Christianity,
                                 we would’ve given her ashes to water and mountains
“You were right about the egg wash, kiddo.
The simit didn’t brown,
                                 or her body to vultures on top of a tower.
the dough was bad.
I didn’t mean to quadruple the batch.”
                                 I want her to take up space.
“I want to go home,
Uncle Jimmy grabbed my face and licked it.”
                                 I want to carve a casket
                                 from agglomerate stone, Yerevan pink,
                                 fill its shell with pistachios and lilies,
“[insert endearment here]”
                                 tangerine peels, lengths of my hair,
                                 apricot pits sucked clean.
“You’ll apologize to Jimmy tomorrow
                                 I want to leave
for calling him a pervert in front of his wife.”
                                 her for archaeologists to find and
                                 pick her bones from her
                                 pearls and her cross
“[insert platitude here]”
                                 and the blanket of dust that
                                 (like her)
                                 used to be other things.
“[insert god’s will here]”
                                 They hold her in pieces, looking for marks
                                 that count her years and children.
“Mariam’s simit was horrible.”
                                 Under the zip of their bag, her skull
                                 is snowdrop pale:
“Yavrig, you’ll make the simit next time. The borags too—
                                                 –      a moon
                                                          against the sable night
—she’d be sad no one has crumbs on their shirt.”
                                                 –     a pomegranate,
                                                          seedless, pithy

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Jordan Nishkian is an Armenian-Portuguese writer based in California. Her prose and poetry explore themes of duality and have been featured in national and international publications. She is a winner of the Rollick Magazine Fiction Prize and nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories.

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