Georgi Bargamian: Escapology

I am a mutant who inherited a predisposition for casual lying.

 
My father was an escape artist who could vanish into Oriental carpets.

 
My mother was a suggestion who drifted into escape hatches.

 
The drawers in my house overflow with uncollectable IOUs.

 
Money ferments in my pockets and pools into tar pits around my ankles.

 
My parents were raised by mothers whose corneas were pierced by Ottoman needles.

 
Every day the ghost of Gomidas drags 1,200 folk songs through haunted Armenian highlands.

 
A family recipe taught my mother to cook with the same wooden spoon she used to spank me.

 
My brother invaded the body of a mafioso to eat his omertà.

 
I planted two placentas under a dying tree and watched cabbages bloom.

 
My family’s stolen gold fills the cavities of executioners.

 
I belong to a tribe of escape artists who swallowed the evil eye.

 
My parents’ gravesite is a crime scene of treasure hunts and body snatching.

 
Sometimes I exhume my parents to polish their bones.

 
My grandmother came to America with two gold coins and a thousand premeditated ghosts.

 
I perform forensic autopsies on innocent family photos.

 
My father burned down buildings to feed an oxygen addiction.

 
My mother could swallow insults whole like a crocodile.

 
I bite into memories and chew on pixels when I’m hungry.

 
You don’t need to take escapology classes to learn how to vanish.

Georgi Bargamian was a 2025 International Armenian Literary Alliance mentorship program mentee. Her poetry has been published in The Armenian Weekly, The Songs of Summer poetry anthology (Waters Edge Press, 2025), and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

This poem appeared in The Cincinnati Review

Georgi Bargamian: North Burial Ground, Providence, RI

Driving through the gates
Of this sleeping place,
We pass potter’s field
and turn up the hill
Dotted with flat, tipped stones
Toward the Armenian section.
When Yankee names turn Greek
We know we’re close to the place
Where an underground suite holds
Bone and dust in separate boxes
Capped by granite dotted with moss and lichen
That we scrape off with our shoes.
We run away down a hill and move among graves,
Alert for ancient letters that form names
Chiseled as they were in the old country.
We shout when another ancestor is found.
We read names out loud.
We take photos of headstones.
We are buoyant and alive,
Still visitors in this place
Where faint murmur and hum
Draw us closer together
Like children preparing to hold hands.

North Burial Ground, Providence, RI was published in The Armenian Weekly on 7/13/2023

Georgi Bargamian: Measuring depth with the drop of a stone at Dudan Gorge

We gather around the gash in the earth
Called Dudan/Duda/Yudan Dere
To commune with the dead
Through time and space
By measuring depth with the drop of a stone.
We release one into the gorge/gouge and
Hear it ping downward,
Like a lost tooth
Searching for home.
We drop more stones again and again
Into this quiet hellhole
Where millions of bones from thousands of bodies
Receive the rocks and confound the living
Who search for logic in an elegant equation.

Measuring depth with the drop of a stone at Dudan Gorge appeared in The Armenian Weekly on 9/3/2024

Georgi Bargamian: Last night I dreamt I was a child

Half-awake in my mother’s arms
In a car where it was cool and it was dark.
My mother opened her coat and covered me
As my father drove home carefully.
And I felt safe, and I felt loved.

This morning, I read about a baby in Khan Younis.
Her name is Siwar and she is starving.
Siwar’s mother needs food for her child
In a place where descendants of exile and holocaust
Withhold sustenance and mercy as strategic maneuver.
A photo of Siwar shows large eyes in a wasting body,
Published to prick response and stir still-unmoved.
Siwar is loved, but she is not safe.

Last week, I watched a film about a boy from Artsakh.
His name is Vrej, child of mountain and stream.
Vrej roamed mined fields under fragile skies—
Before and after Artsakh’s 2020 war—
Playing soldier, dreaming of future,
Wishing for safety.
Vrej is loved, but Vrej is exiled,
Torn from inheritance waiting to be recovered,
His name a reminder of his truth.

Tonight, I write about
Amorality’s power and love’s survival
And wonder whether dreams visit babies
And memories soothe children.
Do they feel the distance?
Can they touch the sacrifice?
Will they punish the shameless?
Can they forgive the shamed?



Georgi Bargamian has been writing for many years, rooted first in journalism and then law. She has been exploring written expression through poetry for the past several years on issues of identity, heritage, loss, longing and more. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Last night, I dreamt I was a child was published in The Armenian Weekly on 5/22/2025