It’s been so long I can only half remember
the pain that lived in some strange world behind their eyes.
How the morning sun felt warmer on Sixth Avenue Beach.
Sand surrounded by Armenians
carrying small rolls of multicolored woven blankets,
or beige straw mats and towels
and tsemeroug tucked underneath their arms,
holding my tiny hand
like a traveling caravan
headed into the abyss.
The vast Atlantic just beside Convention Hall,
separating a people displaced by time and space,
by tragedy, memory, loss,
and love and light.
They shared luleh kebabs next to pilaf and hot dogs,
wrapped in lavash or hamburger buns
washed down with Coca-Cola or Budweiser,
and conversations and laughter
which they held gently as if it might disintegrate at any moment
before the sun swung like a pendulum
from east to west over our heads
in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
I didn’t understand it then—later at dinner—
why we grilled and ate and drank and danced and sang
as if we might never do it again,
as if this great nation, like the one before,
might swallow us whole.
July, 1990.
I loved how America the Beautiful
rang out from Armenian voices
through fireworks that set the night sky on fire,
like homes and churches once set ablaze.
1915.
The Armenian neighbors’ porches glowed
under fluorescent lights in the cool summer air,
American flags standing like soldiers—
constellation of fifty white stars
set in blue beside red and white stripes that seemed to bleed
freedom, revolution, new beginnings.
A white ball with red stitches
floating through the blue canvas above Fifth Avenue.
My Armenian hand inside a brown leather glove,
stamped with a tag that read “made in the USA,”
catching pop flies in Atlantic Square Park.
How my Armenian name, Arman jan,
was followed by yegoor yavrisi,
all of it colored somehow
in red, white, and blue
from the boardwalk to Kingsley Avenue.
Just inside the Armenian Royal,
my father played his Gibson Les Paul guitar,
in a flannel draped over a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt
and paint-spotted blue jeans,
playing Jimi Hendrix’s version of
The Star-Spangled Banner
alongside strange Near East sounds
that soothed my soul
in a way I didn’t understand,
and still don’t.
My father held me tight,
as if I might melt like wax through his arms,
speaking sweet sounds of sh and gh
that penetrated and nourished the heart
like some forgotten bread.
I don’t know if we knew
why we held each other so much tighter
or took so much longer to say goodbye.
I only know
that the Armenian Americans I grew up around
carried the heaviness of genocide
like lead within their bones.
Generations of mourning and loss found them
and carried their bodies
from one world to another,
into the twentieth century.
We inhaled the American dream like a breath of fresh air.
Our marrow was Armenian
But our sinew was made of
America.
Illustration: A vintage postcard of Asbury Park, New Jersey, where Armenian Americans from across the Eastern seaboard flocked each summer, especially in its heyday from the 1940s to 1970s. The poet’s family owned the Armenian Royal Hotel, just off the boardwalk.
