February 25, 7 p.m.


Jacob Minasian


at MOTR

JACOB MINASIAN
 received his MFA from Saint Mary’s College of California, where he was the 2016 Academy of American Poets University and College Poetry Prize winner.  He is the author of the chapbook, American Lit (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and his work has appeared in publications including Poets.org, Gyroscope Review, Causeway Lit, Linden Avenue, Museum of Americana, RipRap Literary Journal, and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California by Scarlett Tanager Books.  Originally from California, he currently lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he teaches at Cincinnati State. 


Launched by poets Mark Flanigan and Jim Palmarini in 2014, Word of Mouth  was inspired by the late Cincinnati poet Aralee Strange. Poets of all stripes are welcome to show up, listen, and mouth off.
                        

---

 Communion
 
Punctured freeways bend
around late February, 
its empty Ohio branches,
water jumping off 
the road onto the bones
under the back of my
hand hanging
out the automatic
window.  A train
is a rusted postcard
with its red clay and
white, gray steel rivets,
refineries depositing cloud
against cloud, odd out-
of-place superimposition.
Neighborhoods appear
colder from their unsupported
mortar and brick.  Traffic layers
from an overturned truck,
red blue lights reflected in
eyes, reflected
in side mirrors, which
render at a bit farther distance.
I try not to hold on to the unjust 
honks in my direction.  Horns
twitter like audio glitter across
car hoods.  A hawk 
stilts the sky its dazzling
wingspan.  The freeway levels
to a plateau, over-
looking the metal wasteland,
plumes rising from the stacks
like some brutal aftermath.
The nearer we draw to the boiling
coffee behind counters,
the more the un-focused
thoughts arrive 
from perceived stillness.
Everything is
fighting at the molecular
degree.  Concrete
becomes a jam.  The ology
of formation.  My phone screen 
doesn’t react to a tap, 
and for a sharp second 
I wonder where my 
life has gone.


From a Bridge
 
The river’s toxic
affix is hidden in 
height’s distance.
I stare past the metal fence,
bent like a web,
to the soap factories, how
they match the crimson 
brick at the corner
of a porch I don’t 
remember in California,
a shade darker than
the quotidian plant pot,
whose fate I can now
only picture in the
optimism of soil.
The snow has 
lasted late into March.
The tracks empty 
their broken
grins into the train yard.
Robins, with their bright
bronze chests, seem
to be the only 
ones who know  
they’re part superhero