Natalie Bryant Rizzieri: Graveside Voyeurism

        

              - Kapan, Armenia
 

City of our last two years valleys wide
and this, the longest I’ve lived anywhere

with you.  Otherwise, it is not home. 

Concise rows of gravestones stitch
the hill’s skirt in uniform grey.  Sketched
faces assign dead eyes to follow us

with their last memories of a war we know only

by name.   Fake flowers, wind-whipped and

toppled, deplete the stones.  The sky widens

blue and deserted, among unflinching eyes,
we stand.  There is nothing holding us here
or holding us back.  This pain is not ours. 

Copyright Crab Orchard Review. Reprinted here by kind permission of the author