TWO POEMS

Humming

What did I want? Everything
in the commercials,
what my parents couldn’t afford.
A talking mermaid
doll who lit up at night
and covered the ceiling in angel
fish, entire galaxies filled
with fantasy, a Milky Way, a Snickers,
as a child I stole so many things
and never apologized once. Eating Milk Duds
and dreaming about Slinkys, Barbies,
and Easy Bake Ovens.

You see our poverty was hidden
beneath my mother’s fur coat
smuggled on a train from Poland
and worn over another smuggled
leather coat on the flight to America

And I’ve been hated, truly hated
by a woman I did not know who
watched my mother use food stamps
to buy fresh fruit and vegetables

and by the classmate
years later who on my sixteenth birthday
finally gave me the Easy Bake Oven
of my dreams, the box
covered in swastikas.
He had been meticulous
found a doll who looked just like me
took the time to melt her legs and singe
her hair, I still imagine him standing in his
kitchen thinking today Luisa turns 16
and humming, humming, humming.

Yom Kippur

I know nothing of forgiveness,
it is a yearly tradition
for me to practice and fail
like the sonnet that I still
do not understand how to write.
I could tell you about the time
my mother forgave her father
for a lifetime of destruction.
She meant it enough to spend two hours
trying to pull his half dead body
out of the bathtub, tearing her shirt
and weeping. In his room–
a tower of Russian smut magazines
stacked so high, they almost
looked like a steeple.

Luisa Muradyan came to the United States as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union. She is the winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for American Radiance and has had work appear in the Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, Coffee House Press, and the American Literary Review.