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GLENDALE’S POET LAUREATE PROGRAM

Raffi Joe Wartanian is the City of Glendale’s first Poet Laureate. The mission of the Glendale Poet Laureate program is to promote the art of poetry in Jewel City. Through community workshops, public readings, and other initiatives, the Poet Laureate utilizes the art of writing to serve as an ambassador to represent, engage, and nurture Glendale’s rich culture and diversity.

Raffi Joe Wartanian was selected as Glendale’s first Poet Laureate in recognition of his accomplishments in poetry and his vision for the “Glendale Poet Laureate as someone who can utilize writing to promote self-expression, find common ground across communities, and foster solidarity that celebrates diversity while embracing individuality.” His poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Press, No Dear Magazine, h-pem, Ararat Magazine, Armenian Poetry Project, and The Armenian Weekly and performed live with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and International Armenian Literary Alliance. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, University of Texas Press, Outside Magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald, and elsewhere. Raffi currently teaches writing with UCLA Writing Programs, and his work has received grant and fellowship support from the Fulbright Program, Humanity in Action, and the Eurasia Partnership Foundation. In 2017, Raffi collaborated with Abril Books, the Lakota People’s Law Project, and In His Shoes to launch Days of Solidarity: Celebrating Armenian and Native American Survival, a multi-day performance and workshop that united Armenians and indigenous American tribes in Glendale. Raffi currently serves on the advisory board of the International Armenian Literary Alliance and advises the Tumanyan International Storytelling Festival. www.raffijoewartanian.com

Poems by Raffi Joe Wartanian

How To Orchestrate A Genocide

by Raffi Joe Wartanian

Tweak laws

Stratify identity

Threaten activists

Silence dissent

Round up the poets

Punish opposition

Blame the victims

Appropriate their oppression

Sing of your righteousness

Say it with the right accent

So that it sounds acceptable

Do it in a suit and tie

So that it looks professional

Kill them in the dead of night

So that it seems accidental

Give the weeping mother a care package

To appear sentimental

Tell us it was a mistake

To fan the flames of an inferno

Hate with such ferocity

That it could feel like love

Propel
by Raffi Joe Wartanian

Shadows illuminate
Beneath the infinite concrete frenzy

A leaf’s tranquility

For his mother a lost soul cries in tongues
Saliva splashing on the crack-kissed asphalt

It wasn’t his fault or mine or yours
It just is

Like fault lines grooving
Like rainbows after the deluge
Like the chain linking us together

So that we might lift each other up
To taste the nectar dripping from the bougainvillea

Lift each other up
To ride the current’s river

Back to its ancestral home
            To our land of mosaics
            To a road traversed by the power of a people’s pulse

We ride to the temple of no arrivals
            To the sanctuary of silently seeking the step
                        That propels us forward, outward, inward, together
A Theory of Time
by Raffi Joe Wartanian
I have a theory
That time is
Circular
Cyclical
Sun and moon
Seasons spinning
Leaves browning
Push and pull of waves shoring
Clock hands circling

Time is not linear
Though time lines help us
Situate ourselves
Inside infinity
Within cycles of
Progress before our births
Progressing after our deaths

I cannot put a circle inside of a line
But a line can lay
In the loving embrace
Of a circle
Doughy, warm, soft, flavorful metal
The scent of an elevator
The unexpected invitation
To an aromatic steel coffin
Approximating time travel
An oven where I enter and rise
Or fall
Arriving somewhere different from where I started
New location
Time morphs
Transformation everlasting
Even if I’ve gone nowhere
Even if the elevator has stopped
Even if I’m stuck
I’m stuck in the transformation
That I may or may not be ready
To accept
The aroma of transcendence
In Baltimore at the hospital where Baba worked
In Beirut where we entered with visions of severed limbs
In the parking structure
a seemingly meaningless ritual
the worker transmuted by a capsule of memory
laced with the perfumes of possibility
Previously published in 2023 by The Los Angeles Press
Love is a Jewel
by Raffi Joe Wartanian
June 2023

Love is a jewel
Sappho’s ruby red rhinestone
Emerald of elegance
Encompassing countless forms

Love is the jewel that is
Straight, curved, crooked, supple
She is not uniform
She is not cruel

The jewel love, however, that bedazzled rainbow,
She might be twisted
By false prophets pedaling distortions
Their moral panic mimicking moral dissent
Hate speech dressed in free speech
Theocracy presenting as democracy
Outside agitators disguised as caring comrades
White privilege appropriating minority struggle
As in erasure festooned with righteousness

I love seeing through the disguise
For doing so reminds me
That knowledge is power
Power is love
And love is a jewel
Inside of us all
Mama’s Dream
by Raffi Joe Wartanian
Lutherville, MD // 2010

My mother told my grandmother and me
About a dream she had
Last night.
Her deceased father
Visited
And said,
“Have you forgotten me?”
“No, I didn’t,”
My mother protested,
In her dream.
My mother is silent.
“What happened next,” I ask.
“That’s it,” she says with a shrug.
Then my grandmother inquires, “Did he ask about me?”
Originally published in 2011 by Ararat Magazine
Every Day
By Raffi Joe Wartanian
Every day
I paint you more
I play you more
I fix you more
Because I love you,
Mi Amor

Every day
You inspire me
And sometimes you disgust me
Because I know
Within you rests
This incomprehensible, beautiful you
For which I have toiled for years to extract
Only to scratch the surface

Every day
I play your melody
And search for harmony
I find a way
To (try to) add beauty to you
And come closer
To your purest, simplest
Essence

But there are days
Of thankless toil
And utter devotion
Peering through bleary eyes
Fending off exquisite dreams
Only to be met by resistance
Devastating resistance

Until I return to you
Seconds, Hours, or Days
Later
Seconds, Hours, or Days
And I am wooed again
By your enchantment