Theadora Siranian| She

She. Poems by Theadora Siranian, selected by Dan Vera & Ron Mohring as Number 15 in our Rane Arroyo Series.

Publication:  May 1, 2021 [100 copies]
35 pages
ISBN 978-1-949333-79-4
$ 9.00

Siranian_web

Cover art: “The Boat Conveys” by Angie Reed Garner

Theadora Siranian is  a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ghost City Review, and Atticus Review, among others. In 2014, she was shortlisted for both the Mississippi Review Prize and Southword’s Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Theadora received the Emerging Woman Poet Honor from Small  Orange Journal.

Origin Myth, Pt. 1 

There was a world before all this. A snowglobe, a halo
of light—the woman trapped within a pulsing bell of fluorescence.

Hot and curved as a tongue, the flame that emerges from her mouth.

The murmur she emits into an ear alluring
as a stolen orgasm, the hiss of gas before the explosion.

This is the world I will make for you, see
here, beneath the birches, above the fallout shelter

is a place where the bees don’t die and we never regret our actions.

We drink hemlock in the moonlight and cup our bodies toward
one another against the cold.

She tells me it’s not cannibalism, to consume ourselves.
She turns my face toward the starshattered darkness.

Oh, this loveliness, this loneliness, this feverdream.

And this perpetual version of her: luminous, blinding,
standing in the center aisle of a convenience store the moment

before the gallon of milk slips from her hand.

She whispers and the world shivers, splits, detonates.