Lory Bedikian is the author of The Book of Lamenting, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her poems have been published in multiple journals, including Tin House, the Adroit Journal, the Los Angeles Review, and Gulf Coast. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles. For more information about the author, visit her website. Her latest book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body (Nebraska, 2024) was published last month.

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent. In this five-part testimony Lory Bedikian reconstructs the father figure, mother figure, and the self. Using a sestina, syllabics, prose poems, and longer poetic sequences, Bedikian creates elegies for parents lost and self-elegiac lyrics and narratives for living with illness. Often interrupted with monologues and rants, the poems grapple with the disorder of loss and the body’s failures. Ultimately, Bedikian contemplates the concept of fate, destiny (jagadakeer), and the excavation of memory—whether to question familial inheritance or claim medical diagnoses.

Theorizing Vahan’s Departure

But what if the black hole is home,
what if where he lives now multiplies

song. I’m imagining that sand
doesn’t burn even in the brightest hours,

the zenith can be viewed without damage.
Mother, let’s not fear entrances and exits.

Instead, shred the photo album, make space
for his new childhood, which is everywhere

at once, resembling the windblown shore
they buried his brothers upon, Lebanon

galactic because it’s all he knew, cedars
their own type of kin, lined on roads that

know no differences of seeds, bullets, coins.
Everyone back from diaspora they never asked for.

Maybe the black hole of the sky, the light
years of the mind are the only way

to be swallowed up, released, transferred
into a constellation summoned, the sun

unnecessary, the zodiac, its outstretched words
finally giving us, in starlight, omens, signs.

Mother, maybe our lesions are gold.

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Apology to the Body

Sorry for mercury strewn in veins of fish,
for traces of carbon monoxide loose in the air,
for radiation that circles and enters the aura.

Sorry for deliberate puffs and sips
late in the night, for an empty stomach
burning with coffee grounds,

for words of magma, thoughts rough as tufa
scratching the indivisible cells, fragile nerves,
divisions of labor and function,

for scraping skin until it bled, garnet
scars in constellation form, for chemicals
bathing in a pool of genetics, under viral stars.

I’m looking to cleanse regret. I want to give
you a balm for lesions, give you evening
primrose, milk thistle, turmeric, borage,

feet moving toward a language
of trees, hands deciphering sediment, steady
rhythm back in the pulse, the breathing you knew

before you were born. Believe me that we began
together and I will mend each sheath of myelin,
reverse the dark that grows behind my eyes.