Blue Willow: A Poem

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Blue Willow

My mother sliced the cucumbers on a plate

and sprinkled them with salt and lemon juice.

A dragon inked in blue, fat as a goose,

shone through their pale translucent flesh. We ate

the puckering slices, my brother and I, then dared

each other to drain the juice. I wasn’t scared.

The jellied seeds quivered like dragon spawn.

Glazed with acid yellow, their mother glared

and I glared back, startled by my own

eyes on the plate. And then it was as though

when I tipped up the dish and sucked the brew,

the thick spawn burned my throat all the way through

and, hatching there, made my whole body shudder.

I grabbed the knife and pointed at my father.

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Armen Davoudian’s poems and translations appear in AGNI, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.