Associate Editor Lisa Low: Arthur Kayzakian’s compact ekphrastic prose poem “Anna Walinska” takes on one of poetry’s oldest subjects: rain. The size of a small window or portrait, the poem’s form operates like both, letting us look both outward and inward. As the poem progresses, a dreamy logic navigates big-picture questions of art and consumption; “the shape of something absent” ultimately leaves us with a new sensation of rain.
To hear Arthur read the poem, click below:
Anna Walinska
The softest form of silence I’ve ever known is
rain. Even softer than a burglar’s hands with the
thirst of an art collector. It was raining the night
Anna Walinska sold her portrait to make rent.
Nobody wanted to buy the painting by Arshile
Gorky, so the price was low. The portrait hung
on the wall of her apartment. I don’t know the
term for this kind of devotion. What is the word
for a lover who cannot be seen, who cannot be
sold? Money is the worst form of conversion for
this sort of silence. So that word remains unsaid.
Quiet. The shape of something absent. 22 × 16.
Now it rains on the city in the wall.
Arthur Kayzakian is the winner of the 2021 Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series award for his forthcoming collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, and the winner of the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition for his forthcoming chapbook, My Burning City. He is a contributing editor at Poetry International and a recipient of the Minas Savvas Fellowship. He serves as the poetry chair for the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA). His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from several publications including The Adroit Journal, Portland Review, Chicago Review, Nat. Brut, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness Magazine, and Prairie Schooner.
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