Escapology

Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: There’s a wondrous mix of magic, mystery, menace, and play swirling through Bargamian’s poem. As each line culminates toward its final vanishing act one cannot help but fall deeply enchanted by their incantatory, riddle-like charms.

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.