[05/14/2026]

[POETRY]

Even the Bones

Three Poems by Adelina Sarkisyan

A Myth of Object Constancy

“He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you / but he thinks / this is a lie, so he says in the end / you're dead, nothing can hurt you / which seems to him / a more promising beginning, more true.”

— Louise Glück, “A Myth of Devotion” 

That night, I hunt him by the bathroom of the restaurant.
Love disciple I am now with a keen love ethic—devour
what seeks to devour you. Finger pricked, I descend 
into the realm of the unconscious while a friend writes 
my number on the receipt. This way I am the seducer, 
seduction meaning to lead away but away from what? 
In this room, it is summer and I am naked, that is to say, merciless. 
Unwinged, I tend to a courtship beyond garden, beyond warning.
A taster, a toucher, I invoke the unnatural gods, and 
despite my turn at love, I beg I beg for my life.   
When I see him again, I’m open like a grave or a tulip bent 
backward over the sky. There’s no me to speak of, just a feeling 
and my body in his hands, folding from its own heavy, 
shrinking violent. At Christmas, he hands me a book
by Lauren Groff and tells me we’re not meant to be.
I eat its pages, grow into my tongue the oracle I have made of us.
His moon is the worst, a friend tells me as she reads his birth chart. 
We analyze planets and text messages and attachment styles, 
our eyes devouring everything, even the bones. 
Three years later, he is ending things on the phone, 
saying, I feel like you belong to me. Suddenly, 
I’m undreaming our paradise. I stop eating. I go on long walks. 
On the phone with my friend, we craft long messages to send him, 
phrases like if you don’t dream me and
love works for no one. Oh god—
how inelegant my desire. When it’s over, when 
it’s my turn again, from girlhood, since always, 
begging for love when I only meant permanence. 
To ask how he feels means I have already misunderstood.
When I say I miss a certain smell of you, I only mean what’s owed.

death bird at midnight

and perhaps I was born for this 
quiet, dear body,
smaller than you were this time last year
easier to carry
you are what you are by what you are not
o creeping miracle
softness no longer your purpose 
some days you lie so small
I don’t recognize you at all

god of me, who are you?
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t hold you 
in, your flatness the flatness of men 
& I hate the way men hate,
with a touch of the vampiric

maybe I am for this — 
this this this that is drawn to the wet wet of living
like a babe I feel with an open mouth
the sweetness of bodies like falling geese in a rainstorm
one terrible thing swallowing another

and so it goes, I into you into mouth into you
into pupil into you into spring into you
into air into you into body into you
into you into you into you

into birdsong and you the great, sharp beak of night
I can’t help it; I am so many things at once
so many things without even the thought to be
and they come and go like no particular promise

oh listen — 
there is an old love of the unnatural in me
into which I once fell and keep falling
I cannot help but smile
I cannot contain you who contains me

Unlearning My Birth Chart

But how to enter this part of sky? That in the dark, all gods look the same. That love has made me as small as I thought I was. You misremember and I am so full of remembering. I want to ask what you’ve made of these years but every answer an annihilation. I wonder if I have been looking for a god among pale horses. Or some kind of revelation that I was right yesterday. By yesterday, I mean years ago. And by that, I mean, I don’t think I believe in time. Someone should tell me to read about boundaries. I read about my 12th house Venus. I am infinite, I say. I slip through your teeth. Seven years and I am still slipping. Saturn hangs on me. Where is it, this that you owe me? Can I find it in any man, like any old limb? I’m afraid I have run out of excuses. You have come back suddenly. Yesterday is today is this morning is this look of terror and our bodies settling down into quiet night. None of this is permanent. But I don’t have to remind you. Once again, I claim that which is not mine. I tell a woman to write beloved on my body. As if naming a thing will make it true. As if the next man who lays his hands on me will know better. He doesn’t. In the beginning, there was you. What to make of this spring? Inside my heart is a mouth and it is starving and merciless. I am only here because the birds kept me up with their living. Next to me, you are crying. All I want to do is end this. All I want to do is go on. When your mouth finds my beloved, I don’t dare ask. I howl so loud with my strong delicate tongue I lick the moon right out of the sky. This is the secret. This is the face that let you go. Some days it’s true. But not today.

ADELINA SARKISYAN is a poet, writer, and editor. With written work appearing in CRAFT Literary, Atticus Review, hex literary, Rust + Moth, HAD & elsewhere, she is a multiple “Best of the Net” and Pushcart Prize nominee. A therapist in a former life, she has certificates in Jungian fairy tale analysis at the Assisi Institute and is on the editorial team at Undivided, which supports families raising children with disabilities. Sarkisyan was born in Armenia, once upon a time, and is a first-generation immigrant daughter. She lives and writes in Los Angeles. You can read her work at www.adelinasarkisyan.com.