☀ Today's Poem: "The Night of Her Funeral" Jen Siraganian

Today's Headline: Letters by Late US Poet Laureate Donated to WashU Libraries

February 27, 2025 The Night of Her Funeral Jen Siraganian After bowls of kufta, platters of dolma, the clatter of pistachio shells and aunts and uncles simmering over with grief, we sought the basement's refuge. We were chins and limbs and knees criss-crossed applesauce on leather couches, across rust carpet, a dozen cousins in wrinkled, nearly new suits and navy blue dresses. Forgotten for a few hours, a VHS of Fatal Attraction discovered. I tried to forget my grandfather's howl in the church's incense fog, an animal sound I thought was laughter so I laughed, but he wasn't laughing, no one was. It was my first funeral, and now I was watching elevator sex and rabbits in saucepans and Glenn Close who reminded me of my mother until she squeezed her bloody wrists against the good father's cheeks. I held my pee until it burned inside me, begged my older cousin to accompany me to the toilet. She giggled, embarrassed, wouldn't come in, only stood by the door to keep watching the screen. I could still see Glenn Close's blonde perm spring from the bathtub, from behind my mirror's reflection, blood and butcher knives and hands around women's throats hidden everywhere. I wandered upstairs where the adults galaxied around our grandfather, a captivated audience of another film, except the film was him. I slunk past knees and porcelain cups of Armenian coffee. His words were relics gathered by the men with thick palms, by women with scarlet fingernails. My mother leaned toward my aunt who translated each story shard into English. I rested my ear on her lap. He spoke, for the first time, of his childhood, his father shot with the other men, the marches to nowhere, his grandmother, mother, discarded like husks along the road. from the journal MIZNA READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward When I wrote this poem, I was considering the layers of narrative, particularly the horrors depicted in Hollywood’s sexualized thrillers for entertainment versus the actual horrors my grandparents experienced when they were orphaned during the Armenian Genocide. I wanted to explore the irony of myself as a child fleeing the grief and trauma of the adult world upstairs only to be haunted by the images appearing on a screen. Jen Siraganian on "The Night of Her Funeral" Howard Nemerov's Letters Donated to Washington University "WashU Libraries has received a remarkable gift of 513 letters by the late U.S. poet laureate Howard Nemerov from a surprising source—the family of Nemerov’s lover. From 1972 to 1990—a year before Nemerov died of cancer in St. Louis—Nemerov wrote frequent letters to Joan Coale of Philadelphia about his work, family and life on the Washington University in St. Louis campus, where he served as the Edward Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor of English and distinguished poet in residence. The correspondence overlaps with a fertile period of Nemerov’s career." viaWASHINGTON UNIVERSITY READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES What Sparks Poetry: Matthew Cooperman on Reading Prose "How will we spend our days? How will we attend to our rapidly accelerating planet? One habit of response is to read bracing prose, and for me, it’s often “the consolations of philosophy,” to quote an excellent recent example by Alain de Botton. From the Affective Turn to the Queering of Nature, Object Oriented Ontology to Anthropocene Studies, there’s an incredible florescence of philosophical writing going on internationally, as if climate change has triggered all our cells to wake up." READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE donate View in browser You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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