Diasporan Twisties

The Intersection of Three Cylinders World Map. From a 1696 Armenian world map in the Leventhal Map Center in Boston.(Photo: Philip Chapman-Bell/Flickr)

It starts when
Mind and body
Forget connection
Like place loses balance
When borders move.

History is testament
To brave versus invader.
Winners draw the maps
But new lions come
For the stolen places
And borders move again.

Twisties strike when the
Map that holds the nation-place
Is plotted on the wrong scale
So math is subtraction
And design is shrinkage
Until we remember:
That is not our map.

After refuge followed escape,
The ancestors charted a new map
With the ancient borders
To find the way back
Adding the unfamiliar places that were not ours
Until we made them so.

Indigenous and adopted in true scale
Reknit connection for safe landings
In spaces where we place the plot points
That show us where to be.

Georgi Bargamian

Georgi Bargamian

Georgi Bargamian is a former editor of the Armenian Weekly. After 10 years working in community journalism, she attended law school and is an attorney, but she remains committed to her first love journalism by writing for the Armenian Weekly.

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