“Isn't It Only Stone?” by Alex Vartan Gubbins

Clouds surround Aragats peaks as we ride in a shared taxi to Gyumri.

She watches the grays slither rock to rock, plume like apricots,

retreat as snakes. She’s quiet. It feels like she hasn’t spoken for a year,

since the doctor looked up from his clipboard and said Adoption?

The body can live a lifetime without making another.

The body can live after pushing a body out of its own flesh.

Here in this bowled valley of cow pastures, where light presses

against the body’s blueprint and tethers its form to the stones,

I want to pour the sunset into my water bottle, pass it to her,

tell her I’ll always put poems about sailing the seas beneath

her morning glass of orange juice. I want to lug these stones

that have burned under the pasture’s sun to our apartment,

stack them high enough to block out the moonlight bending

around the roofs and onto our backs as we make love.

Here, in a shared taxi with strangers, I imagine last night.

Our skins together on a mattress without sheets.

But now she stares ahead. Sunrays in pupils.

I tell myself it doesn’t matter. The want to make isn’t

what the world needs, isn’t what it needs. The rays between us

is what matters. The whispers before we sleep.

These poems are influenced by Alex's Armenian heritage through his mother's side. Alex enjoys writing poems, translating Armenian and Arabic poetry, and the color purple on hazy days. He works as an educator in the Detroit Metro area.