Four Poems

by Luisa Muradyan

At the Kansas Flint Hills Museum

my son rips a prairie violet out of the wall. If he does that again, we
will have to ask you to leave. He wants to save it for later, to hold on to
something beautiful. He grabs my hand and marches me over to a
sprawling map of the United States. Where was I born mamma? I point
to Houston, there. Where there are crocodiles? Yes, darling. Where are you
from mamma? I have nowhere to point to. My favorite crocodile is a
melancholic cartoon named Gena who plays the accordion. Ukraine
is back in the imagination of my well-meaning acquaintances who
fold their faces into the shape of concern and ask how my family is.
Somewhere a television is showing stock images of war and all of them
are on fire. How many people will die? The television doesn’t say, and
yet I hear the field of wildflowers. Each one has been ripped out of the
ground. Somewhere my grandmother sings.

As I Get Closer to Death I Become Full Poem

I often tell my husband
that the strawberries in Odesa
are smaller but sweeter
and these ones we carried in
from Costco are as big
as the American Dream
the size of Texas
and the color of ketchup
which is another American fantasy
that tastes nothing like tomatoes
but has a tinge of blood and sugar.
The strawberries in my memory
aren’t of course strawberries at all
they are similes of what was left behind
ripped from the ground like a weed
who could not bear fruit or like a mother
in want of the child that was taken from her.

The 800

They had no other races left
to assign me when I joked
that my body was mostly decorative
and yes I was slower than the other runners,
not a natural athlete by any means
though I signed up for track the way
an animal would who was trying
to escape a predator that waited
for her out in the wild. The gold painted
Ford LTD with broken windows
rolled faster than my legs could take me
as I ran to practice where the chain link
fence seemed to hold a paradise full
of sweat and dust. What more did I want
back then but to survive? To be as clear
as an empty bottle of Gatorade,
as untouched as the smooth surface of a
rain puddle before galoshes
made the sound of galoshes.
What I’m really trying to say is
If you see me running know that
I am running from a memory
and that with each gasp
I am shoving fistfuls of air
into my lungs like a balloon artist
bending a long appendage
into the shape of joy.

He Didn’t Know How he Started This Habit but he Did
After Linda Pastan

BB gun in hand he would make a sport out of
shooting the squirrels in his yard.
He told his wife this was a form
of stress relief, a way to blow off steam.
At first, it made his neighbors uncomfortable
but they decided it was best to keep quiet
and to their own business.
It wasn’t until one night in the dead
of winter when his children saw
the murders taking place
that he finally did what he thought
was the right thing and stopped killing
in the daylight. Of course history
compelled him forward,
burying the bodies in the dark,
where the moon was his only witness.

February 25, 2025

Luisa Muradyan is originally from Odesa, Ukraine and is the author of I Make Jokes When I'm Devastated (Bridwell Press, 2025), When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027), and American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). She holds a Ph.D. in Poetry from the University of Houston and won the 2017 Raz/ Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Additionally, Muradyan is a member of the Cheburashka Collective, a group of women and nonbinary writers from the former Soviet Union. Additional work can be found at Best American Poetry, the Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and the Georgia Review among others.