Ճանաչել զիմաստութիւն եւ զխրատ, իմանալ զբանս
հանճարոյ:

To know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding.

— Book of Proverbs, 1:2.

i cast my graces in this vestigial tongue, its alphabet
birthed off a tress of chimera in a forefather’s midnight dream– 

այբուբեն, այբ ու բեն, i say it again and savour
into the clutch of this body
politic this willow leaf
cherry bleeding red into the interstices of my storied
palm ancient and red as the slit of a spiked head
gifted in battle drizzled in all venerable glory;

այբ ու բեն– i say it again to dampen this forehead of my fevered youth
այբ ու բեն– it is in your thirty-eight peripheries that i eke out my flour
and fill it with tears to earth a river to you,
suspend myself in a fibula shaped like return.

i used to gut my days escaping their sealed greed;
now i strut my way through–

even my language is made of dreams.

how could they not slobber at it?









Notes:
According to tradition, St. Mesrop Mashtots (re)invented the ancient Armenian script in 405 AD and helped establish Armenia’s golden age of Christian literature. It is said that he, with divine intervention, saw the Armenian letters carved on rocks in a dream.

Book of Proverbs, 1:2 was the first Armenian sentence translated/written by Mesrop Mashtots after (re)inventing the Armenian alphabet. այբուբեն means alphabet in Armenian, with այբ signifying the first letter of the alphabet, and բեն the second. 

Perla Kantarjian is a Lebanese-Armenian poet, journalist, and editor with writings appearing and forthcoming in over 30 publications including The Hellebore, International Literary Quarterly, Rusted Radishes, Bookstr, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Perla's cross-cultural work explores multilingualism and transgenerational emotional legacies. She is currently pursuing her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia as the 2021 Sonny Mehta Scholar. She may be found on perlakantarjian.com.

Alina Mnatsakanian is a visual artist who lives and works in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Université de Paris 8, and a master's degree in Visual Arts from California State University, Los Angeles. She has exhibited in the United States, Canada, Europe, Switzerland and Armenia; she has received awards from the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, Swiss Artists in Labs and California Council for the Humanities. She has been artist-in-residence at the The Swiss Artificial Intelligence Lab IDSIA of Lugano, Grand Central Art Center of California and Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory (ACSL) of Yerevan, Armenia. You can find more of her work in her upcoming show with Tufenkian Fine Arts. The group show will feature work from her series “Connecting the dots” and will be on view from May 7 – June 25. You can also find her collected works on her website.