Ambert, round towers
black fortress remains
battlements cast down
dressed stones scattered
chunks broken off walls
gaping breaches
And parts still standing.
And she
helped me softly,
down to there,
by there,
beyond there,
and back.
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.
“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
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.
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
Armenia
By William Zeytounlian
There is a dual dimension of history written from the testimonies of a survivor. It’s certainly a speech about the past. But first of all, it is a discourse about the present, or rather, a discourse about the project that the survivor has about the interlocutor. With a survivor, we enter the collective ditch of the past with our present-day clothing, like the apostles of a Renaissance painting in ancient Jerusalem or Dante in hell.
The alphabet on the shield
Unveils the grass,
The abridged sand
We – weak morrow
Muffled breath
Us – oblivion, memory
Of a breed
Ottoman moon
Shiny epidermis —
Reveals the seed,
The sober aria
Over sand:
Before we’re past
Breaths we were
Translated from Portuguese by Shushanik Hovakimyan
Di-áspora:
sêmen somos e óvulo
lançados de novo à terra –
um dia duvidaram do gérmen;
hoje somos bifurcação incontável.
Di-áspora:
como um auspício,
Tumanian leu o futuro
no voo de um grou.
Mas teria imaginado
que entre as bananeiras e arranha-céus,
entre as catedrais góticas
e os rios de leite da Califórnia
prescrutaríamos
apenas com a memória,
todo o deserto da Síria?
Teria imaginado que
buscaríamos o que fosse,
lasca de osso,
feixe de cabelo?
William Zeytounlian
William Zeytoulian (nascido em São Paulo em 1988) é mestre em História pela Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP), esgrimista, poeta e tradutor.