Sophia Armen: We Want to Be Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, But We’re Armenian

me and you lived downtown

in the jewelry district
where everyone is named
harout or hussein

across from the place my parents were married
woke up everyday, no mermaids
dressed in white and saw it
dressed in light

on the third floor
above a piss alley
and the metro station
that brought tunes until the AM

we lived upstairs
where the soot fell from the ceiling
and the trash shoot clanked from all 22 floors above
where the water flooded the kitchen
and the balcony was
a fire escape without the escape
we don’t care if we die here
because we’ve
never felt more alive

i would beg you to go see the latino festival in pershing
and you would beg me to come back to bed
and we would both win
because i would come back to bed

buried beneath these tiger-eyed blankets
and in the kitchen up against where the drawer doesn’t extend
we were two young kids just playing pretend
telling each other who the other is

but we don’t run
we’re from here
and dad has worked three blocks away for
twenty-five years
and grandma down the street too
an LA breed and everybody
we know everybody and why the hell does
every body know we are with
each other’s body

me a short black dress
with my curls fist-fighting my bobby pins
your black-grease covered elbows
from a long day at the shop
you collapse on our ugly blue couch
and i collapse on top of you

our mothers are horrified when we bring them
there’s no such thing as experiments of life
for our kin’s kind
who believe they want nothing but to be free

but really all they are
is everything they’ve always been

family


Sophia Armen's poem appeared in The Markaz Review in 2022

Sophia Armen: soorj and silva

daughter of armenia
daughter of iran
you can’t have known what you have give me

offerings of coffee
offerings of warm bread
you can’t have known what you have given me

use 50% of heart
You said
in love,
50% of head

You can’t have known what you’ve given me
in the city that hums

daughter of paklava
brings halt a daughter’s roam
in my arabica-black eyes
you have known

surrounded i’m alone

one scoop of powder
one of cardamom
you can’t have known what you have given me

you have given me home


Sophia Armen's poem appeared in The Markaz Review in 2022

Shahé Mankerian: How to Erase an Armenian Accent in Junior High

1. No one cares if you buried orphans your age
in the ghettos of Beirut. Act like a pressed
flower or practice selective mutism.

2. Like canker sores, place pushpins or paperclips
under the tongue to force stillness. Swallow
the nonsense about the blind sniper.

3. If teachers warn you to stop chewing
on graphite, eraser heads, pencil shavings,
pretend you’re sucking on mastic lozenges.

4. Search for moldy lavash or slices of forgotten
cardamom cake in your backpack. Chewing
crumbs will keep you from damning God.

5. In the library, the Egyptian girl hiding behind
a discolored globe will never fix your accent.
Find the courage to mouth marhaba quietly.

6. During round robin, when asked to read
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury out loud,
drop your eyes and mumble, “I lost my place.”

7. Join the choir: a homeland, erased,
caught like chalk dust in your throat
goes unnoticed during a requiem.

This poem appeared in Markaz in February 2026

Peter Balakian: My Mother’s Sink

My mother hated the sink that came with our new colonial house.
Had it ripped out. Then found in an art shop a four foot slab
of Italian marble with a bowl of bronze fish swirling the white porcelain—
handles and spout –high legs—all bronze, a bathroom sink just for the kids she said—
Washing up each day— I stared through shaving cream and spit—at the
bronze fish under toothpaste, suds, and cream —

years later—it hit me every time I returned—as I spit and shaved:
the fish of Paul Klee, Matisse, Jan Breughel, slithering tails of Tintoretto —

all seeped in me—
the way that time patinas your skin.

Even now my brain sinks into the tepid water of that basin—
the bronze fish swimming around the black hole of the drain


where my mother, too, has gone—into the grainy waves of that marble.

This poem appeared in Plume.

PETER BALAKIAN: Pace and Tempo

You wake to a slat of light

sound of dogs barking in the warm air

the nothing that surrounds you is

far and near from the bombing in another country.

Not far from the dictator who wants to take

over your own country—nor from the brush

strokes you called up last night

from a still-life with oranges that you bit into

in thin air over the balcony looking out at the Hudson.

Riparius: flow from the source down a long

basin into the ocean beyond your body. You see

what you can and what you can— you take in—

to let go—- as your eye marks the horizon—

the moment    the flow goes back in

to— you—- and that ebb that is always

— on its way.

This poem appeared in Plume

Peter Balakian is the author of 9 books of poems including Ozone Journal which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry; his recent book of poems is New York Trilogy (University of Chicago Press, 2025). He teaches at Colgate University

 

National Banned Books Week in the U.S. is October 4-10 2026

 

A small but vocal group in the US is driving the current flood of book bans in school and public libraries across the country. It's important to counter those voices by uniting in support of the freedom to read in our local communities. Can you and your community unite against book bans?

I, Lola Koundakjian, believe: 

• Reading is a foundational skill, critical to future learning and to exercising our democratic freedoms.
• We can trust individuals to make their own decisions about what they read and believe.
• Parents have the right to guide their children's reading, but parents should not be making decisions for other parents' children. Specifically, a small group of parents should not dictate what books other people's children are allowed to read.
• Books are tools for understanding complex issues. Limiting young people's access to books does not protect them from life's complex and challenging issues.

Thank you for supporting the freedom to THINK, your local library and APP.


Lola Koundakjian
Producer and Curator
The Armenian Poetry Project