Horatio Answers the Phone


Next time send me a text,

he says right away,

everybody’s calling,

wondering if those rumors

about my suicide are real:

I’m still here,

but yeah, Hamlet’s gone,

stabbed in Central Park.


You remember we’d see him

in the Village dressed in black

hanging around Washington Square,

muttering about his dead father

and over-sexed mom.


His shrink kept asking

about his mother and uncle—

what did he feel, how did she die,

who put the poison in her cup?


Wanted to know about his girlfriend too;

you remember she jumped in front

of the A train late one night—

claimed her father and brother

messed with her after her mother died.


But I gotta get back to NYU—

some professor named Yorick

is giving a workshop:

everybody gets to play

a corpse at least once.


My skull, he said, smells

just like a baseball

he found once down in the Bronx,

right after it connected

with his best friend’s head.



Michael Minassian is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist and photography: Around the Bend. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing are all available on Amazon. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com