It's the Fourth of July, the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
are laid out like a parade.

And I'm grilling, I've got my apron,
I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish,
I've got a hat shaped
like the state of Pennsylvania.

I ask my father what's his pleasure
and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare,"
and then, "Hamburger, sure,
what's the big difference,"
as if he's really asking.

I put on hamburgers and hot dogs,
slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas,
uncap the condiments. The paper napkins
are fluttering away like lost messages.

"You're running around," my mother says,
"like a chicken with its head loose."

"Ma," I say, "you mean cut off,
loose and cut off being as far apart
as, say, son and daughter."

She gives me a quizzical look as though
I've been caught in some impropriety.
"I love you and your sister just the same," she says,
"Sure," my grandfather pipes in,
"you're both our children, so why worry?"

That's not the point I begin telling them,
and I'm comparing words to fish now,
like the ones in the sea at Port Said,
or like birds among the date palms by the Nile,
unrepentantly elusive, wild.

"Sonia," my father says to my mother,
"what the hell is he talking about?"
"He's on a ball," my mother says.

"That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands,
"as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll...."

"And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks,
and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says,
"let's have some fun," and launches
into a polka, twirling my mother
around and around like the happiest top,

and my uncle is shaking his head, saying
"You could grow nuts listening to us,"

and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai
burgeoning without end,
pecans in the South, the jumbled
flavor of them suddenly in my mouth,
wordless, confusing,
crowding out everything else.

There is no country called Armenia.
--a 9th grade geography teacher, 1999

Where is the country, Armenia?
Is it on the map I carry
in my pocket, creased
a hundred times, a hundred
different boundaries coming and going?

Is it an island floating
in my imagination
at the edge of the ocean?

Is it like a stone in my heart
lodging deeper with each step?

Could I retrieve it, could I say
Yes, here it is like a trick coin
in the palm of my hand?

And if it disappeared as before
into the darker folds of history,
would I remember its shining
or say gold like my grandfather's ring
or the speckles in my mother's eyes?

Quickly now, before the world
rehews itself with a clatter of knives,
let me close my eyes, ride the wind
from the Caucasus down to any village:

Where are the fruit trees
rising in every courtyard,
children as spry as lambs
before the slaughter?

What is the shape of the country
within a country that no one remembers,
and where is the map of that sorrow?

Alexandria, 1955

When we stepped out into the street,
Arabic swirled around us like smoke,
like a wind from the desert, it floated
down to us from the minarets,
it seeped into the folds of our clothing.

*

My mother would sometimes take me
to Hannaux's where she shopped for gloves
or a winter scarf, and all the sales ladies
spoke French and smelled of Eau de Nuit.

*

At Cafe Athineos, I would eat loukoumades
while my father joked with the Greek waiters,
and all around me there was silverware
clinking against the plates, like the sound
of gold teeth against coins.

*

I spoke too much or out of turn
on the school bus to Victoria College,
and for such sins a second grader will commit
I was caned behind the knees three times,
English rules, English justice, one, two, three.

*

One day, Daniella, our Italian seamstress,
told us how fearful she had been as a child
embarking to North Africa with her mother,
imagining the land wild and ferocious, the streets
of Alexandria full of prowling lions.

*

At the German School for Girls,
my grandmother had learned a song
about a beetle, and a father going off to war,
and she sang it, Mein Kaferfliege,
whenever I was ill or looking far away.

*

When I asked my grandfather
why there wasn't any Turkish to be heard,
"Never mind," he said, "let it be
as it is," and it seemed as if a wind
had come and swept it away
from every conversation.

*

Je ne like pas, a small girl was saying
in the restaurant, and it sounded right,
mixing it all up like that, everything
in a bowl, and no one way of serving it.

*

It was Armenian that we spoke
when we were together, entering it
like a house in the coldest weather,
shutting the doors behind us,
making small fires in every room.