Elisabeth Weiss

Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University in Salem, MA. She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She’s worked in the editorial department at Harper & Row in New York and has an MFA from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Porch, Crazyhorse, the Birmingham Poetry Review, the Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016 and was a runner up in the 2013 Boston Review poetry contest. Read more at: elisabethaweiss.com

DANCE AND BURN

for Talin Megherian

In memory of the one and a half million who perished
in the Armenian genocide April 24, 1915–1917

We collect kindling
on the mountainside.

I want the sun to rise so we can see
in front of us again.

My little sister
trips over beech roots. She’s tired.

My mother pours water into a tin cup.
We take turns.

Hovering in the air
are snarls and barks on chains.

In the valley near the river
road lamps glow.

The soldier with the gun shifts.
Bees swarm. I cough.

A bucket rattles. It’s like time
broke its gears.We walk back to the river.

Our braids are cut off by swords.
My mother’s skirt slides down

and then all the stars.
I am shoved near flame,

told to dance. Heat
whitens my fingertips

unfurling the fragrance
of almond branches —

the thickest and sweetest
I could find.

THOUGH I WALK IN THE SHOES OF AUSCHWITZ

Past steep switchbacks
up stone terraces
filled with olive groves, our bones
hiked the path to ruins, bells
around our necks clinking through.
Would we have survived
the death marches? I imagined
fate playing a game without a score, a thing
backlit by centuries, but there we were
on the steep curve of a wooded path.
I was not the woman you
thought. At that moment I was
holding onto barbed wire and
someone passed me an orange shielding
his eyes so I never knew who to thank
or identify.

PARADISE IN RUINS

I used to love the color orange
its reckless streak, exuberant flesh

of persimmon, the way
autumn light unfolds

across a sunflower field.
It’s the juice of tropics, upbeat,

but this week the town of Paradise
is an orange tunnel of fire.

Earthmovers plow abandoned vehicles
off the road. Horses and alpaca

race down burning hills
to the safety of sand then are tied

to lifeguard stations. A lone owl nestles
near the shore.

We are all first responders now.
The earth’s air drifts

blossoms of carbon monoxide and ash
and we can’t breathe

like someone walking through a swarm of mayflies
moments so thick we can hardly see

we are entering a new normal.
It won’t be long now

before the sun’s glow burns off
into the lost and found of nowhere.

Orange is a seducer. Orange is
a skull shaped peel. Orange is the devil

wind picking up again near Santa Ana
still blurting a noxious fragrance

rising over the smoky, ruined hills.