Live from the Bowery Poetry Club: Nancy Agabian

Gartal and the Armenian Poetry Project are proud to release this audio clip recorded live at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on April 2, 2010. Click to hear Nancy Agabian’s reading of her poem Why I Suspect New York.

      1.     My first city is Boston.  A four year old squiggling at Fenway Park, I got a free tiny t-shirt, a red sock on my chest over the skin of my heart: allegiance beyond reason though I do not care for baseball.
2.     I lived in Los Angeles for nine years and I liked it.  It was a kind place to become a young artist; it gave me forward rushing in the car at night with the radio on: a communal privacy, creative down time.  New York artists do not understand this.
3.     I am critical of capitalism especially the kind that makes it perfectly reasonable that all the shrinks leave in August.
4.     The people who consider themselves New Yorkers and love the city are in the minority.  There are far more people who live here and hate it. But no one ever thinks about
a.  all the immigrants making money to send home but long for their culture
b. all the creative misfits whose day jobs don't give them time to make art
c. all the mothers staying home who imagine their children swallowed up by the

World Trade Center Bound E train the automated lady announced, as if it still exists.  She says world like whorl, emphasis between the O and the R, a verbal thumbprint.
The subway is the place I go to the most, other than my home or my job.
All this time I have been bound for a place that no longer exists, narrated by nothing. 
Living in the negative space, where history has already been lived, we are complicit in a name that we don't want to die, to save a place that hurt us.

There is excitement in suspicion, a pain in not knowing the truth.  
I will always belong and not belong, as everyone.