Luisa Muradyan
Imagine
You are floating in space
and not in that Sandra Bullock
and George Clooney looking
galactically sexy way
but in that my grandmother
disappeared when I was a child
and I pretended she was
abducted by aliens way
Imagine that science experiment
you did in seventh grade
when the teacher kept adding
pennies into a glass of water
and no matter how much grief
you poured into your body
the surface wouldn’t break.
Imagine your grandmother waits for you
in the field of the dead.
You are wearing your purple
dress, she is wearing her purple dress,
the field is wearing its lavender dress.
Imagine being sad only some of the time.
In the spaceship when they took her
they did not call her Jew,
only human
and that fantasy brings you comfort.
Luisa Muradyan is originally from the Ukraine and received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. She is the author of American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press), which won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. She was the editor-in-chief of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from 2016-2018 and the recipient of the 2016 Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She is a member of the Cheburashka Collective, a group of women and nonbinary authors from the former Soviet Union. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Poetry International, the Threepenny Review, Pleiades, and Jewish Currents, among others.
