The Armenian-American

by Alan Semerdjian

“Poetry as aesthetic imagination shadows history...casts its own kind of illumination.” —Peter Balakian 

1. 

I write to transform silences in love 
with history that sit like empty rooms 

swallowing the far ends of long hallways— 
the windows are open, seasons have changed— 

quiet the forget. I write to tell them 
all you are too in love with what you see. 

We are still halved in the spectacled night, 
our words dancing across fantastic seams. 

2. 

Because I want to know why the hating 
begets a storm in me, why the house is 

then lifted in the gale, why the windows 
shatter, why rooms empty, I write these words. 

Because a romance must never be sad, 
lover impossibly not critical 

because the blade silencing argument 
leaves me orphaned in a new muted scene, 

I drive away from the burning field, but 
the burning field must always follow me. 

Because there must always be this bridge 
I must cross so I understand myself. 

Because of still questions, my history 
(will there always be questions, history?), 

because resolution does not forget 
the conflict without reason, there is no 

reason for conflict. So I can’t fathom 
the century’s screaming. Some noiseless thing 

in me is broken, and I pound the guts
out of it sometimes, and only sometimes, 

yell for god’s sake so the whole building shakes
free evidence of life in the remains. 

3. 

Remembering is a salve. Remember 
the outlasting. Remember beautiful. 

Remembering is a landslide of dams 
that comes inside of dreams I never could 

possibly have. Remembering I am 
still in the range of denial’s turret, 

the shapeless tongue, ziggurat’s on new fire,
the road a knife dulled by emergency. 

Hold it close. Feel its contours to know how
it breathes and turns in the dark’s legacy. 

Remember history is a brutal, 
shimmering act, like some love, dazzling 

the insides when done right, much more when hand
eclipses all of the remaining light. 

Red eddies poster each generation’s 
patience, and I am that child marking height 

against the hall closet door, readying 
for his final voyage, making this fist.

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Alan Semerdjian is an Armenian-American poet and essayist, musician, and educator.