Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label USA. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

UNTITLED by JOSEPH POLADIAN

I

Am Cupid’s daughter.

Mistake and design begot me.

Under the silver sun,

I brush away my identity.

A few blots here, a few strokes there,

And all the men gather round me.

The people above,

Impeached,

Glare down at me,

Yet, still I dance

And cherish this ineffable circumstance.

I spend the nights

Swinging between restless arms,

Swathed in sordid kisses

And garnished with love bites.

Beyond this place

Of discord and hate,

I move my hips

And feel the night

Gently stroke my face

With the long, dark blades of its fingers.

I go home,

Smelling like a thousand men.

My flamboyance

Lures natural nonconformists

Out of their comfort.

I shake their grounds

With every coaxing sway,

Until I mitigate their pangs

Of unjustified guilt.

Passersby under the sun

Think I’m a harlequin.

But all I am

Is a goddess,

Devoid of coarse remorse.

My very being is nothing

But benign poison.

When the harrowing hour of the dawn strikes,

Ghost-quiet as every truth awakes,

Then,

And only then,

Does my freedom disintegrate

Back into the infinite sunset.

Only then,

Do I see

What they see

Only then,

Just then,

Do I remember,

I am somebody’s son.


This poem was previously published in Rusted Radishes, the Beirut Literary and Art Journal, founded in 2012. 

Joseph Poladian

Joseph Poladian is a 20-year-old student of English literature at the Lebanese University. He has been passionate about the written word ever since he knew what different combinations of the alphabet can do. Being an avid reader, he started writing his own poems and short stories, experimenting with words, genres, and structure.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Arpine Konyalian Grenier RIP



Suchness, What Noise


Daftar blue dualities intervene to convene
lines and shapes of context and word
levitation surmises

        remember architecture?

the tool-master’s need stands in the way
congruence and correlation fester
main tenant
                    full scale social/political lungs oh yes

        transience

how different that is from all things durable
to come together to just become so
this and that
experience

conditioned and mediated ausgang haben
how is ownership generated then?
(some rocks at Death Valley are walking they say)

gauge symmetries are unobservable
what I say to my love is the song
chew it slightly for taste

I wanted a last word with you
no schnell no halt
no gyavoor
                    the rub is otherly
déjà rêvė déjà parlė
déjà lu
                    vėcue



what social basis do I come from?

Published in Word For/Word




I and U at IU and the Dogwoods



Ajune in Armenian is what remains after passing
Ajine in Arabic is yeast which makes bread
living continues Ajine to Ajune
to Ajine and so on

                        said Arpine, and passed



Arpine Konyalian Grenier, a frequent contributor to APP, died on January 9, 2024.


Sunday, October 22, 2023

Remote 3-Hour Workshop: Lory Bedikian: The Ode

 Lory Bedikian, a long time poet, award winner and APP collaborator will be teaching a virtual class on Thursday, November 16, 12-3pm ET   at Poets House




The Book of Lamenting
by Lory Bedikian

begins on edges of highways

where the sun raises its swollen belly,
grasses outgrow themselves,
vineyards wither their nerves.

The sun cracks the dashboard,
slithers between rows of eucalyptus, juniper,
rolls along the wheels of trucks.

Past crows that caw, pod atop railroad crossings,
the engine cranks its monotonous pulse, distracts me
from posted signs, the yellow snake that guides me along.

This is where I find reasons to question the living,

my father’s face held
in his hands, his brows etched
in the stained glass of the missions,

my mother’s sacrifice dwelling
in deserted turnpikes, her eyes
gazing from overgrown orchards.

Trees disappear. Dried brush crumbles
into camel’s fur. In the distance, no horizon,
but tumbleweed large as sheep.

This is where I am when the world has closed its ears,

alongside rusted tractors, abandoned fruit stands,
roaming for hours, nothing but barbed-wire fences,
nothing but the smells of harvest and gasoline.

The road matters more than the earth,
more than those on the road, it turns
into a spine, ladder of teeth and bone.

In the passenger seat, my grandmother’s ghost
holds a palm full of seeds, scatters them
skyward for the crows to eat.

All of it behind us now. She tells me
not to tangle my nerves, not to stop
the creed of the open road—

nothing that runs can stay the same.


Copyright © 2011 Lory Bedikian. This poem originally appeared in The Book of Lamenting (Anhinga Press, 2011). Used with permission of the author.


Thursday, October 19, 2023

Raffi Joe Wartanian: Phantom Tongue

The Armenian Poetry Project is proud to share this unpublished poem by the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Glendale, California,  Raffi Wartanian, and his pictures of Խուլավանգ, which is the church in Kharpert that he referenced in the poem.


Phantom Tongue
by Raffi Joe Wartanian

Somewhere in the world 
my history is erased
my name is changed

Րաֆֆի Վարդանեան 
կլլա
Րաֆֆի Վարդանեան 
glla
Raffi Vartanian 
becomes
Rayfee Wartaynyin

Wartanian
Like the tan on your wart
Stylized melanoma
Signifying the end

Or Wartanian
A song of war
Death, destruction, murder
Nothing I stand for
Mixed into the moniker 

Not here: Vartanian
Warrior sons and daughters 
Defiantly defending a people
Only to have their nom de guerre lathered
Like suds swirling down the drain
Of the car wash on Jackson Street
Under an American sun baking flesh white
Calls for change, or at least a discount, stifled by the heat

Somewhere in the world 
my ancestor’s creations are destroyed
          crosstones of a medieval Armenian necropolis on the banks of the Araxes River reduced to rubble
a stone church, Խուլավանգ, in the golden wheat fields of Kharpert, on its crumbling column defiled with a spray-painted swastika
homes in Hajin, Adana, Zara, and Kumkapi
 never to be known
only to be evoked
during visits, with maps, in verse
their names are ghosts who saunter in meadows of the amnesia I recall
so that sometime in the future
I can sit down with my boy
look him in the eye
and have “the talk”



Will the news destroy his innocence 
The day I tell him
That we were, are, will be
Objects of genocide?

How will he come to understand the unfathomable?
A series of moments…by osmosis…
Lighting candles at the church
The old typewriter hanging on the wall
A grainy image of emaciated corpses
Their sunken eyes somehow familiar
Protestors demanding recognition from violent nations we now or once called home

Or will he already know? Was it coded in his bones? 

When will he learn that the imposed tension 
Between erasure and endurance
Is not just a thing of the past
But a choice today
Between internalizing the oppressors’ will, 
And facing the question
Answers illuminating a path
Fraught with the promise of truth’s daggered thorns

Poking holes in our language
“Endangered” like a fading phantom living in my throat
Կոկորդս, Լեզուս
Spoken to my child
Hearing him voice the revenant

On his tongue does she live or die? 
Maybe both. Maybe none of it matters, especially once we’re erased. 
Have we already arrived?
And once we’ve arrived, can we finally begin to return?








Sunday, October 15, 2023

Banned Books Week 2023

 “This is a dangerous time for readers and the public servants who provide access to reading materials. Readers, particularly students, are losing access to critical information, and librarians and teachers are under attack for doing their jobs.”

- Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom 






The Armenian Poetry Project supports the FREADOM to read. 

For more information, visit the American Library Association's site


Wednesday, September 06, 2023

Knar Gavin:APPTUS INTERRUPTUS

Up early

flirting, knucks

jambed

into

the reel.


Some hungering

line unfolding

along a

plastic

wire


haggard as a hedge

ha-ha’ing

at the edge

of the

lawn.


But the way we are rapt

now is nothing

like you

in the sun.


I was free with the nectarine

blossoms, a

tree in the world

that was

our life.


At least


it’s summer

forever

now.


Tiny fuzz-less

heads rolling

into mash.

Tuesday, September 05, 2023

Knar Gavin: After Meriye B. Ouzounian

O, captains of infamy, again 

you’ve battered and eaten the world. 


Borges had it almost right. Every cata

clysm happens for the first time, 

and in a wash that is infernal.


                         With fighting

fossil capitalism 


               there’ve been attempts — over the sink

               and under the moon, some white-lit

               trying, as if 


               to cleanse 

               buttered hands  

               with cold water.


Our bodies are shitting credit cards

               by the week, so plastiform is this life. 


Some things work themselves into you, 

               and that is the only getting them gone.


Where we might’ve broken bread

               or even 

broken it off with the land-swallowers


instead capital’s tyrant uncles drove

their straws beneath beautiful surfaces

to guzzle past and future all at once. 


When we think of tenure

we ought to think 

of the land, & 

of those who 

would hold

nothing 

back 


to get 

to a settled future. 


Catastrophe fills the scope, but my Armenian blood knows

brutality is as old as the fossil record. 


I remember my great, great

               grandfather, Krikor. Buried alive, but first


                         he put mud on our faces

                         so we wouldn’t look pretty. 


               I realize, now, that I am in the situation of communication 

where Krikor could not be.

 

The truth is 

in the pudding, 

& its still blood. Or, 

               the medium is

               the massage that

                              structure will have been.


Krikor, 


               he had pigeons

                                             he left all.


This full world is in flight for the stationed few. 


               O, Sinemas and, likewise, Pelosis and Kochs,

               O, Manchins — hot wives in cold houses

                              amidst this inferno 

                         of a near-future 4-degrees. 


I vow this: to cut the arms off every lifeboat. (1)


               To let them, all lovers of pigeons, survive the road out,

               to tear the fossil-hankering factory down, glitch

               the bone machine


                         with the incandescent power of those 

                                             neither wealthy nor insatiable 


               to wretch and howl the brute money men down.


Petes Buttigieg, Brians Deese: we’re coming.


               We’ve got mud on our faces 

and pigeon eyes in the millions.


We will not look pretty. 

               We will not back down.  


Wimmer of the 2022 William Carlos Williams Prize, University of Pennsylvania 

Friday, July 14, 2023

Luisa Muradyan: My Favorite YouTube Channel

think Beetlejuice without Michael Keaton

but with one hundred Geena Davises
 
dressed in floral nightgowns


think absolute freedom


standing in a house

of haunted women


listen to the music

furniture moving

without explanation
 
in this video

you can clearly see

the outline of a face

in the fireplace


This poem appeared in the Missouri Review, November 2019

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Luisa Muradyan: Schwarzenegger in Prayer

There's a scene in Predator
where Arnold Schwarzenegger slaps the hand
of Carl Weathers and the camera focuses
for a moment on the flex of their palms
and I think this is how prayer works.
Two tulips brush against each other in the rain
And when I watch action movies I believe
there is a reason Bruce Willis
can jump out of a helicopter
and propel into a circus tent, that perhaps
Yippee-ki-yay is really
another way to say Baruch ata Adonai
that perhaps the choppa is a temple,
and when he says Get to da choppa
this is the call to return or just a call
to stand in the garden and marvel at the beauty
of wet flowers.




This poem appeared along with an interview in Houston's Public Radio.

Sunday, June 26, 2022

Nueva York Poetry Review launches a series of translated poems by Armenian authors

 Nueva York Poetry Review, established in New York and led by Marisa Russo, just launched a curated series of poems by Armenian authors translated into Spanish.


The inaugural poet is LA based Shahé Mankerian. His poems may be accessed here


APP welcomes this collaboration, with many thanks to the editorial team and the translators. 



Լօլա Գունտաքճեան/Lola Koundakjian
Curator and Producer,
ArmenianPoetryProject[at]gmail[dom]com





Thursday, April 28, 2022

Aida Zilelian: Arshile


PictureLast Painting (The Black Monk), by Arshile Gorky (USA, b.Vilayet of Van, Armenia, Ottoman Empire) 1948. Oil on canvas. 78.6 x 101.5 cm, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Inv. no. 564 (1978.72)

Arshile jan[1],
if we had been friends
I would have smoked cigarettes with you
until my throat was raw and made you listen
to Billie Holiday (did you know “Strange Fruit”?) while
nursing vodka (I would have hated but conceded to) just for you.
I read you loved vodka.

Arshile,
you could have rung my apartment bell
at any hour of the night
and I would have let you in, cradled your face in my hands,
consumed by your wild, vacant eyes
and said nothing.

Love could not transcend the
shadow of ghosts that claimed you long before you escaped,
fled the shores of Lake Van,
your mother’s bosom cold from death –
a body that could no longer soak up your child tears.
This is not why I love you.

Arshile,
I would never have been so star-struck
that your death could have surprised me,
but I would never have forgiven myself
for not deciphering the suicide note
in the slants of your abstractions
and unsettling hues of teal, magenta,
annihilated by frenzied strokes of black.[2]
They incriminate you but,
I would not have seen.

All I know is that your face,
your dark moustache, the grace of your troubled eyes and swept back hair
leave me to think that I could not have saved you, and
loved you nonetheless.

Aida Zilelian



[1] An abbreviation of the Armenian word ‘janig’ (a term of endearment – i.e. darling, love
[2] Arshile Gorky’s last painting, Last Painting (The Black Monk) 1948


Aida Zilelian is a first generation American-Armenian writer and educator from Queens, NY. Her fiction explores the depths of love and family relationships, culture and the connections between characters that transcend time and circumstance. Her first novel (unpublished) The Hollowing Moon, was one of the top three finalists of the Anderbo Novel Contest. The sequel The Legacy of Lost Things was published in 2015 (Bleeding Heart Publications) and was the recipient of the 2014 Tölölyan Literary Award. Aida has been featured on NPR, The Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Poets & Writers, the New York Times, and various reading series throughout Queens and Manhattan. Her short story collection These Hills Were Meant for You was shortlisted for the 2018 Katherine Anne Porter Award.

Originally published in The Ekphrasic Review

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Theadora Siranian: Belle Reprieve

In upstate New York you wake
every morning to a field blue with frost.

Every day is perfected: not a blade of grass moves.
This is the world you need; we always knew this.

Even in that January, endless month,
cutting through the air a gyre of possibilities,

touchless. Huddled together in empty
store doorfronts, such tender animals,

feather and oil, pinions holding palms to mouths,
whispering secrets the wind ripped away,

fragile words flung into the well of winter.

A nanosecond’s grace unraveling, just another
tiny spool of thread lost to the universe,

bodies breaking against air sharp
enough to crack skin, and even now,

in the recesses, the locked corridors
of admission, it still exists: the endurance of the desire

to know nothing better than the shape of your face.


Originally published in Amethyst Arsenic, Winter 2014

Monday, March 21, 2022

Theadora Siranian: The Unguarded


for A.B.


Even in sleep, past the road’s soft shoulder,
you are the dark circus tent sitting at the edge

of town, your memory emitting whispered
threats into the landscape. In the stumbling

dark I design highway markers: this is the night,
the early morning, the moon a thin wafer of light.

This is my skin slick with the sweat of dreams,
the exertion of finding my way back to the body.

Athena was hammered from the head of Zeus,
sprang battleborn and screaming. Before

there was conflict, there was the anticipation
of violence. You are the ghost, the penny dropped

down into the dry well. Lying awake I see
you, bent toward the counter, whittling away

at your teeth with the blade of a kitchen knife
and a glass of bourbon. Determined sufferer,

unlucky caulbearer. The stars are wounds
carved from the sky, interminable, accusing.

We weren’t always such poison. Once, we were
as if lovers, closer than lovers, closer than sex,

each scar and ritual of the other better memorized
than the folds of a spouse’s body. What they call

abandonment was escape—our own design. We’d been
planning it for years. Temptation made the sky throb.

Our parents’ violence may have become our own
but we cast ourselves into the darkness. In truth,

we never planned on finding our way back from
the forest. Some myths say Athena had a sibling

or friend, Pallas, whom she accidentally killed.

Heartbroken, Athena took her name.

In some they were opponents in battle.



Originally published in Meridian, Issue 39, 2017




Sunday, March 20, 2022

Theadora Siranian: Fata Morgana

I.

Two nights ago I dreamt you were dead. You, dead for months.
All this time I had been talking to a ghost, face pressed

to the telephone, imagining you doing the same while staring
at a close horizon of snowslashed mountains.

I drift past sheets of blue ice and what we called civilization.
Nothing is left but broken concrete and trees.

Everything an armature of itself and the world silence.

I slip beneath, the water is cold. Toward the sea.

II.

I disinherit myself again and again so that when it’s time to become
nothing I will be ready. There is a bend, always

a bend and always a bridge, weeping, always, when I pass beneath.

Last week I discovered a phrase: anticipatory grief.
An entire category devoted to what I’d always known as waiting.

Abject, brutally finite and yet limitless, waiting.
Hunger without the appetite, without the desire.

If you died tomorrow I would die tomorrow.

The moon is a wafer of barren light in the river.

Anything pressed too far becomes a sin. Toward the sea.

The naked trees are bruises hammered into the sky.
Somehow I know they love me, somehow I know they don’t care.

III.

When I arrived the beach was washed away. The river ran uphill.

Along the ridgeline there is a red horse that can’t stop running.

Even untethered it runs red against the red sun as though trapped
against the sky, back and forth, wildly.

I dreamt you were alive. I dreamt you were unbroken.

Beside the sun burn the stars, glowing embers of paperweight
balloons floating, soaring. Only birds, gliding white

against white turned golden, slowly.

Their wings are burning, or, the sky is a cinder.

The sky a cinder a cinder a cinder and my mouth pressed to the atmosphere

a flame.

I woke and I was the ghost and it was true, all of it.



Originally published in Poetry Northwest, Vol. XIII, 2019

Saturday, March 19, 2022

Introducting Theadora Siranian




















Theadora Siranian is a poet and teacher currently living in Kazakhstan. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ghost City Press, 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. Her chapbook, She, was released by Seven Kitchens Press in May 2021. More of her work can be found at theadorasiranian.com.


Less the Rescue

The year I tried to trick grief
we stood in the airport
parking garage, smoking

cigarettes and staring at one
another, grief finally kissing 
me firmly on the mouth

before smiling knowingly
and heading for the stairwell.
In truth, it was the years

of waiting that kept me going,
M. warning me over 
the telephone as I stood naked, 

staring into a motel mirror:
beware the void, the void.
But that was only one of my

lives—each more lovely
and vicious than the previous,
each earth turning on its axis

adamantine, the standing waves
of endless oceans offering gifts 
below you must be willing

to drown to discover, wreckers
waiting at the shoreline for
the moment you lose your footing.

In one life I lost my freedom
to a man in a tent
staked to a barren hillside,

his fingers finding my hair
in the morning to toss me toward
his waiting truck.

In another I had sisters, three,
and each told a different
story of our conception.

The first claimed our mother loved
a bull, the second that our father
was a hypnotist who tricked

fairgoers into sex involving blood
rituals with the snake charmer’s 
python. The third sister told me

her version while I slept, and I can 
return to it only in dreams. Then,
a woman wearing a wedding 

dress makes love to me
in the grey dishwater waves
of some cold, abandoned shore.

Here, then, I know I’m not 
mad, to be so divided, to love
and loathe in equal parts like some 

ever-bending switch in the wind. 
She stands soaking and bedraggled
beneath the ferrous sky, no longer

looking at me, and walks away 
down the beach. I watch her go, slip
a stone under my tongue, a token

to ferry between this world and the waking.


Originally published in South Dakota Review, Fall 2019

Monday, February 21, 2022

Melanie Tafesjian: Three poems from the LA Review

 The Journalist 

 

At the bar you read Lolita alone, 

charm me with talk of Foucault and Bikini Kill,

I haven’t seen a man read a book in months. 

Later, I soak in the ceramic tub

at your apartment rental, 

overlooking the sea, the black night air

thick with salt, jasmine.  

 

The next day at the beach, I order mussels,

suck their little bodies free, purple shells

rattling in a tin. You insist on pizza,

your pink neck brightening under the sun. 

When the bill comes you claim 

they ripped you off, those boys 

smoking cigarettes behind the kitchen, 

laughing at the lanky Englishman, scuffing 

their feet on the sandy tile floor. 

 

Of course, you’d prefer a local girl, 

to roll you fresh byrek, 

stir pots of beans on the stove, 

but you won’t stay long enough for that. Anyway,

the men here intimidate you, with their round bellies 

and oiled skin, their chest hairs curling 

into the sun. I tire of you, but stay

to buy grapes and plums 

from an old woman, who winks,

reminds me to marry an Albanian. 

She weighs our fruit. 

I tell you we got a good deal. 

We chew meat from pits, 

watch the sunset. 

 

Soon you’ll be back home

clacking your Mac keys for the online travel journal, 

saying, what a quaint and affordable beach.

The locals were so kind.

 

 

 

The Gift 

 

What I remember most is the way 

…………….you could peel a cucumber 

…………………………..in one strand, the dark green

 

ribbon floating to grass at your feet. 

…………….The fire smoldered— ready for meat. The pale

    …………………………..pile of cucumbers grew. You sliced one,

 

presented it on the knife tip,

…………….nodded toward the white cheese. 

…………………………..Bare grape vines knotted above us, in the dark

 

garden. A black coat edged 

…………….my shoulders, like a grandmother’s. The moon

…………………………..a milk scone, creak of the blue iron gate, you 

 

with plastic bottles of raki— fire liquor. 

…………….Near the stream where bagged kittens 

…………………………..were thrown to drown, your tight jaw—  

 

what comes from losing a father young. The bottles 

…………….crackled under the clutch of nervous hands. You didn’t

…………………………..try to touch me— held the liquor 

 

out front of your chest, instructed, 

 

…………….Pour the raki in a saucepan. 

…………….Over the steam breathe deep, 

…………….burn everything away.

 

That night, in the house, I did as you told me, pulled 

…………….muslin— made a tent of hot breath. Liquid dripped

…………………………..from my eyelashes, rippled in the pan. Steam clouded

 

my vision. I was ill— you cared.

…………….Later you undid me, peeled the jeans

…………………………..from my hips, by morning you had split 

 

a stack of oak for the fire, swept 

…………….every web from the floors.


 

The Harbor

 

A photo. You on the edge of a ferry. A message.

The police are waiting for me. You were a boy once

emerging from the river, flicking water 

from the ends of your hair. Girls falling in love

around you. Did you make it to London? 

Does that smile work there? Today, in Albania,

your mother— cut out by grief— knits doilies. The evening

news blares on. She slips a splash of sambuca in her tea. 

I remember when you brought us to the cafe

with the caged bears. Those giant mammals above us, 

their faces like sad dogs. I believe if I write about you,

I will never lose you. There was the time you knelt 

before me in the shower, a mouthful of ocean,

two boats knocking in the harbor. 

 

Melanie Tafejian is a writer and educator living in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Raleigh Review, Willow Springs, Asheville Poetry Review, and The Kenyon Review.

Published 2 August 2021 in The Los Angeles Review

Sunday, January 09, 2022

Լեւոն-Զաւէն Սիւրմելեան։ Ասացուածք ծառ տնկելու մասին

Տէր, օրհնէ՛ ծառն այս մատղաշ։ Ես կը տնկեմ զայն ահա
Փխրուն եւ սեւ հողին մէջ ուր պապերըս կը պառկին.
Ես՝ անոնց թոռը հսկայ, այս հողին տէրն եմ կրկին,
Ու արեւուն տակ կ՚աճիմ՝ անունն իրենց շուրթիս վրայ…։


Պիտի բանայ ծառն այս մեծ իր բազուկներն ու հոգին,
Գրկած իր մէջ պապերուս արեւոտ շունչը անմահ.
Տէ՛ր, միսմինակ, նազելի, այս ծառն աղօթք մը ըլլա՜յ
Ու փաթթըւիլ իր մարմնոյն գան սիրողները գիւղին…։


Էրկաթագիր պատութիւնն այս մըտերիմ հողերուն
Աչքիս արցունք կը բերէ… Փառք ու մեռել շատ ունի
Երկիրն իմ հին, ալեւոր՝ որուն ես թոռն եմ վայրի,
Խոկումներով բեղմնաւոր, երազներով օրօրուն…:


…Մեռելներուս իբրեւ խաչ՝ ես այս ծառը տնկեցի…:



Լեւոն-Զաւէն Սիւրմելեան 1905-1995


























Thoughts on Planting a Tree


By Levon Zaven Surmelian

Lord, bless this sapling. Look, I am planting it
In the crumbly and black soil where my ancestors lie;
I, their hulking descendent, possess this land again,
And grow and flourish under the sun, with their names on my lips.

This tree shall stretch open its great arms and soul,
Cradling the undying, sunlit breath of my forebearers;
Lord, let this lone, graceful tree be a prayer,
And let those, who hold their hamlet dear, come and hug its trunk.

The narrative of these cherished grounds, writ in ancient, majuscule script,
Brings a tear to my eye… This ancient, hoary land of mine
Has many dead and glory aplenty, and me as its wild offspring,
With fertile ponderings and swaying dreams.

As a cross for my dead departed, I planted this tree.




With many thanks to the Armenian Institute for providing the original text and translation.

Tuesday, December 07, 2021

Lory Bedikian: On the Way to Oshagan featured in "On Being"

Click here to hear an audio clip of this reading by Pádraig Ó Tuama.

“I stop the car, cross the dirt road
to see what the old woman’s selling.
Hoping for a cold drink, an extra
postcard to write this evening, I find
her tucked behind a table, under a tarp,
fly swatters swaying above her head.
Stacks of Marlboro boxes, packs of gum
are the only things I recognize among
the odd Russian, Armenian labels.
She must not hear me, because she keeps
rolling a square of newspaper into a cone,
fills it with roasted sunflower seeds.
I ask for one, saying ‘meg hahd hahjees,’
fumbling to find a dram among my dollars.

Her eyes, the color of two almonds
rise for only a moment before she asks
with a low, coarse, parrot-voice
if I like America, if I’m married and where
exactly is this place called ‘Glendale?’
With an awkward smile I drop indifferent
answers for her, like coins in the palm.
Until this exchange I had convinced myself
that I do not look like a tourist. After all, having
an ancestral name, firm family tree, the language
ironed to my tongue since the day I was born,
how could I be just another Amerigatzi? I say
this to myself, though I’m the one with the walking
shoes, the camera, the plaid-patterned pants.

She interrupts my thoughts with ‘Welcome
to Armenia. Please take these seeds for free.’
When I extend the money, I notice her face
shrinks in the afternoon light. Back in Los Angeles
I would have insisted to pay. But with this unexpected
visit I simply remembered how I was raised,
before the textbooks, the corporate cubicles,
before I learned to get fashion magazine
haircuts, attend culturally sponsored events.
I hear my parents say, ‘Love this seven-member family
all your days and nights, learn to take every offering
with grace, no matter the given size.’
I bow my head, say thank you. She insists
it’s nothing, asks that I come back soon.

Forgetting why it was I stopped at all,
I walk back across the dirt, cracking
one open. Its shell tastes of the same
salted seeds tucked by my grandmother
into coat pockets for evening walks.
Like a small communion, I contemplate
the seed with my tongue and swallow.
I almost turn to wave, but get back
in the car. For miles around, there is nothing
but land I follow on the map.
There is nothing but this old woman
and her convenience stand
made of brick and woodon the edge of a beaten road.”


 

From The Book of Lamenting




Monday, December 06, 2021

Lory Bedikian: PANDEMIC TALLY: AT ODDS WITH MAY

Click here for an audio clip of the poem. 


Apologies, mother, that you had no funeral. It was too close

to call the priest. Shovel of dirt. Flowers. Strangers with masks

in charge of lowering the coffin. Cyber condolences. Incense.


My sons face the screens. My sons face a future without most

of the people I loved. The teacher calls on those who are fast,

fed what they want for lunch. My sons clench their teeth.


All the funding has gone to the birds. Beautiful creatures, gleaming

feathers, whose babies have their feathers combed by aardvarks

and stool pigeons. These fledgelings always get to bed on time.


Postpone the check-up, the procedure, the poetry of mourning,

there’s a pandemonium of voices coming from a white tower

full of more fowl. Where are they all coming from?


Bombs. Children and mothers die together. They didn’t get

a chance to contemplate as they did on school days. The forests

destroyed. Their husbands already buried. Conveyer belt methods.


I don’t want to talk about kin, kinship or cognac. It always ends

with maps, my father’s voice, my ancestors kneeling by graves.

I want everyone to stand up to choir it out. Even the dead.


There is no such thing as writer’s block. There is no such thing

as writer’s block. (Their favorite pencil was left in their usual café,

while the chandelier doesn’t give its typical, shrewd light).


Prison. In prison because they always wrote, even when they were

told that you are pissing off the guy in charge. The guy in charge,

when he was a boy they should have given him ripe apricots, pencils.


A reference to Donna Summer doesn’t seem to fit the tapestry. Don’t

see why not. Donna Summer lived in Los Angeles, she sang, ignited,

died. People still play her songs on the corner of Hollywood and Vine.


Dad, did you find Mom? Before she died she wanted to hear Elvis Presley

sing I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You, but I don’t know if that ever

was taken care of. She never told me if she missed you.


An antimicrobial resistant infection is not an easy thing to take care of

when almost everything is limited, when almost everyone seems

daunting with their masks and no masks and deranged attitudes.


I hear Grant Green’s Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

while I wash another sink full of greens. Sometimes motherhood

is a well without rope or bucket. Even the blue sky still hunkers down.



Lory Bedikian

Published in Adroit Journal

Sunday, December 05, 2021

LORY BEDIKIAN: BEFORE THE ELEGY, SPEAK TO HER

Click here for an audio clip of the poem. 

Zevart, before you decide to go

anywhere, let me construct a ship of books,

sailable & plenty, free of disease & car rides,

a ship anchored to everything & nothing,

Zevart of my birth, a name I will not

simplify for them. Let them say it.

Zevart. Zevart of rose petal jam & calluses,

your mother, a desert walk, her mother

hovering above sheep’s brain stew,

Zevart. Zevart. All I have left

of my first blurred sight. All that’s

left of my own name, its song —

leave now & I won’t find the impossible

argument of daybreak. Depart if you want,

but the phone will keep ringing.

Voice of Zevart. Body of Zevart.

Bathing Zevart. The weight of your body

on my arm, as if holding a country.

May you never read this, never learn

what I’ve done. A tradition never yours

this scrawled before it should be, your name

a drum, the only part I’ll borrow, and so,

Zevart. The rest can stay in their glass

cases. Remember how our folktales began?

Gar oo chee gar. Once there was and was not

a life we knew full of produce & price

tags, tell me again before you go there,

how you & one brother took James Dean

to be a god. Aleppo tired of you.

Your mother never done in the kitchen.

What is it now that I’m doing?

Did I actually think this would preserve you?

How can I close this, when a train could take you

through a tunnel, a bag of dates & walnuts

on your lap, sudden darkness while you chew,

snickering at what you were never taught.

What did I promise? Oh, yes. This.

Zevart. Zevart. Zevart.


Lory Bedikian
Published in Adroit Journal