now

The photo above is an outtake from Gran Fury’s 1988 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” campaign. It was shown as part of a video loop at a Gran Fury retrospective exhibition last year. Seeing our young faces from before we were married reminded me of this poem I wrote for James around the same time that the photo was taken.

Letter to James

This morning after you left
I slept until the phone rang,
and I let it ring. Then
the woman upstairs threw water
down the fire escape, which set
the pigeons off. I was hoping
a few of them got clean.
Sleep again, and dreams that
our house was besieged by starving
cats. I set bowls outside both
doors, filled with heavy cream.
My mother hung over the house
like a great bat, that kind
of shadow, that kind of fear.
But when finally I couldn’t sleep
any more, I had some cereal like
we do each morning, and thought
it sounded funny, one bowl and one
spoon. Some mornings the spoon
against your teeth bugs me, but
living with someone is like that.

Nancy Kricorian

originally published in The Mississippi Review, Spring 1991

The Armenian Church holiday of Diyardendarach, Derendez, or Candlemas Day, was originally a pagan fire and sun festival. As with many pagan holidays, the Armenian Christian Church found it more efficacious to adapt the fire festival rather than to suppress it. It was Christianized as a celebration of the Eve of the Great Lent that is observed on February 14^th, 40 days after Armenian Christmas and coinciding with Valentine’s Day. In Armenia bonfires are built on the eve of February 13 or the early hours of February 14. These fires are made in churchyards and backyards where people gather to watch the flames. As the flames die down newlyweds from the previous year, holding hands to strengthen their union, leap across the fire. In earlier periods, the ritual entailed circling the fire three times. Once the couples have had their turn, children and other adults jump over the embers. In the 19^th century, the ashes were strewn over fields to promote fertility, harkening to pagan times when this festival was also a celebration of the coming spring and a new season of growing. After the fire ceremony, there is music, dancing, eating and drinking. On the morning of February 14^th, a Divine Liturgy is offered in Armenian churches, followed by the blessing of newlyweds.

Nancy Kricorian

Armenia is a landlocked country in the Caucasus that you can find on a contemporary map. For my grandmother, Armenia was the “old country,” and more specifically the town of Mersin, Cilicia in the Ottoman Empire. This poem from 1994 is about my imaginary homeland, written before I had ever visited Yerevan. And the photo above is from a trip I made to Armenia in 2007.

My Armenia

Armenia is a country where someone is always crying.
Women punch in and out on the clock, grieving in shifts.
1895, 1915, 1921, the thirties, 1988, 1992, 1993, 1994…
White handkerchiefs flutter in their careworn hands.

The Armenian orphans have oversized heads and eyes
the color of bitter chocolate. They don’t complain about
the harshest winter. They are grateful for the same dull food.
In their faded uniforms, they sing off-key for visitors.

Cher, who was born Cherilyn Sarkisian, traveled to
Armenia where she wore a scarf and kept the tattoos covered.
She visited the orphans, and brought them Barbie dolls.
She said she would star in Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

I want to direct a bio-pic of Commander Avo, Cher’s
distant cousin, who died a “freedom fighter” in Karabagh.
How did Monte Melkonian of Visalia, California come to
join the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia?

The camera, the handkerchief, the rifle, the massacres,
Monte dead in Artsakh, a shrapnel wound to the head.
Plum blossoms, apricots, we will make a picnic under
the trees, fresh bread, madzoon, cheese, garden greens.

Children will race through the grass, and when the sun goes
down the field will be lit by the moon and a thousand fireflies.
The men drink raki , and sing: A person dies only once, but
fortunate is the one who dies for the freedom of his people.

Are there fireflies in Armenia? Do the women edge their
handkerchiefs with lace? Armenia is a country in my body,
the right side only because I’m half-Armenian. I choose it —
my imaginary homeland, my handkerchief, my name.

Nancy Kricorian

Originally published in The Antioch Review, Spring 1995

In November 2003 when I went to Paris to do research for my third novel, I interviewed a number of elderly Armenian who had lived through the Occupation. One of them was Nazareth Peshdikian, a Genocide survivor who was born in Zeitoun in 1909. Orphaned in 1915, he wandered from Aleppo to Baghdad to Jerusalem before immigrating to France when he was twenty-five years old. In Paris, he had worked as a shoemaker and a cobbler. He was also an amateur actor in the Armenian theater. He told me that he had performed in plays and theatricals with the Aznavourians (the family of Charles Aznavour).

The interview was conducted in French, although he frequently slipped into Armenian.  At age 93, his memory was a little foggy and when he forgot a name he was looking for, it stopped him in his narrative. Nazareth brought out his photo album, as well as an array of identity and membership cards. He told me he was “a Marxist and a humanist,” and a proud member of the Armenian Hunchakian Social Democratic Party. During the war his resistance work entailed delivering clandestine letters and putting anti-Nazi tracts in mailboxes.

In 1943, he said, the American had bombed the 15^th Arrondissement of Paris where he was living. His home was destroyed. His rabbit hutch was upended, but the rabbits survived. His first wife was wounded and transported to the hospital where she died. He repeated in French and Armenian several times, almost in wonder all those decades later, “Les lapins, nabasdagnereh…the rabbits lived, but my wife died.”

Nancy Kricorian

*

For those who can read French, here is an interview with Nazareth Peshdikian (1909-2007) that was published in 2002. It includes a detailed account of his experiences during the Genocide.

The weather turned frigid in New York City this week. On my early morning walk, the spectacular Harlem sunrise viewed from Morningside Heights, which usually merits an appreciative pause, was little consolation as the dogs and I braced ourselves against the icy wind and rushed home. I pulled this poem from the archive in honor of  winter.

VERSES ABOUT WINTER

I.

My sister and I listen at our parents’ door
to the radio announcer lists schools by town
alphabetically: Action, Andover, Arlington…
We’re waiting for Watertown. The snow falls
deeper, bowing the tall pine, burying
the swing set in the back yard.
The shovel’s scrape against the sidewalk
is sweet, and breath wets the wool scarf
over my mouth as I lift and throw
carving a path from our door.

II.

The thin boy who loans me his sweater
says he loves me. He is the first man
I love. I would follow him up
a peak of ice with rope, crampons
and ax; instead a storm drives us
to a country inn where he signs
the register, I imagine, Mr. and Mrs.
Smith. His hands draw warmth into
my aching fingers. His hands are
strong, and I want to trust them.

III.

I search for you on the back roads
of Hooksett, Penacook, Contoocook.
Headlights cut swaths of bright
falling snow. I share the road
with no one and trust nothing I see.
You appear like the ghost of an angel
as I round each bend: not the
wide-winged angel you taught me
to make in the snow, but bearing
the face of a lost child.

IV.

I want you strong and young again,
in summer hitting a home run
the boys chase into the woods.
“Trouble with the ticker,” you say
as we slow our pace for you
to adjust your muffler. I would
unfold the fist of pain,
stroke open palm and fingers,
and smooth the lines from the
forehead so like my own.

V.

As I walk under trees lining the street,
they bend towards me like the curve
of ribs, bone white and luminous.
Even trash is made holy in the snow’s
ample arms. A woman walking a dog
in a plaid coat passes me on the corner.
I want to slide my boots into the prints
she cuts through the snow. I would
follow her down to the frozen river
and into another life.

VI.

I wish I could write this while you
sleep nearby, dreaming of things
you don’t remember. Hundreds of miles
from here you walk, shoulders hunched
against the cold. You are wishing me
beside you; I curse the empty bed and
the hours before your return. I would
take winter for a lover, that chill heart
slowing mine. What I know of love is
at once sweet and bitter with distance.

Nancy Kricorian

originally published in RAFT: A Journal of Armenian Poetry and Criticism, 1996