Three Poems
How Do You Talk to People Being Bombed
How do you assuage the sound?
What adjectives do you use to help them forget?
As they are running from their houses, their homes鈥� what advice can you give them?
Don’t forget to turn the stove off, don’t forget the necklace, the cat. Or perhaps, don’t worry, stay safe, this too shall pass.
No. Really. What is there to be said?
Do not succumb to the war machine that feeds on your soul? The sky can be many things for different people.
How do you ask how they are? What tense do you use? How is your father, how was your room, where are you now, where were you when, do you remember the garden,
do you remember how it was green
Making Lentil Soup for the End of the World
I鈥檓 watching the lentils swell when Trump tweets
VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS.
It鈥檚 day 24. 1,024 of us killed since March 2nd.
118 of them children. One classroom per day, says UNICEF. Everywhere I look, there is a full shelter.
1 in every 5 Lebanese is now displaced.
In the South, they鈥檝e blown the bridges over the Litani River cutting off towns from the rest of the country.
I imagine the goats bleating alone there.
The spring flowers for whom no one is coming. For us, no one is coming. So I fold the laundry. So I watch my mom store canned goods.
She did this in 2024 too, and 2020, 2006, 1982, 1975.
What a thing to keep writing about, what a thing to put your hands in the kitchen sink and wish
for the water for the earth to get up and do something.
I Don’t Want to Write Another Sad Poem
Do you know what it means to dwindle at the sound of certain words?
I wake up in the morning and look into myself and hope to see a garden.
But then the numbers start seeping in and I am gone. 1029 yesterday, 1,238 just now.
A school in Nabatieh. A car on the Tyre road.
A journalist bombed with her brother and colleague right after her live report.
What does one do with their hands at a time like this. Where does one place them.
Upon the ears to stop hearing, or the eyes to stop seeing,
or into the earth itself, up to the wrist, feeling for the ridiculous green of spring, begging it to come up.
Perla Kantarjian is a Lebanese-Armenian writer with recent work in Electric Literature, Wasafiri, The Rumpus, and Black Warrior Review. Longlisted for the National Writing Competition and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, Kantarjian has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has garnered recognition from the Southbank Centre, The Poetry Society, Palette Poetry, and more. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she was selected as Sonny Mehta Scholar. Her debut poetry collection, You Must Become Field, is forthcoming from Bad Betty Press in 2026.
“How Do You Talk to People Being Bombed” is in her debut collection, You Must Become Field. “Making Lentil Soup for the End of the World” was shared on Raseef22’s social media channels.