Thicker Than Blood | A CNF Editorial – Headline Poetry & Press

by Hokis, Founder & Senior Editor

firsts published in Reclamation Magazine, October 10, 2019

At the age of 22, I met the 63-year-old Armenian woman who had given me up for adoption. On the evening of that breathtaking day I stood in her bedroom. We spoke through our reflection in the mirror in front of us. I felt small, not in the five-foot way I was used to, but in the little girl-in-awe-of-her-elder way. She spoke brilliantly of Yerevan, of roasted lamb, and the importance of skilled tailors – all the while disrobing in front of me. For the first time my inner child gazed upon the future of its olive-heud shape.

This was not the tall, slim body of the European woman who’d raised me. This was a thick-hipped, unapologetic, Middle-Eastern woman. Her skin was freckled with moles, like the moonlit sky I would often look up to when my restless soul couldn’t sleep. I wondered if her heart might also be reaching towards that universal moon and, perhaps, thinking of me. I didn’t realize just how deeply I had longed for this quantum entanglement.

Mother told me stories of the Armenian genocide and of our Ararat. After minutes passed, she paused with intent, as to say “Pay attention now, my child.” Her spine was straight, fully embodied her matronly figure, suited-up with a thick strapped brassiere and delicate hosiery. It was then she told me that our ancestors leapt from Mount Ararat to save themselves from rape and murder; to save their children from Earthly suffering.

This drawn-out jolt caused my world to spin. I felt drunk and dizzy from skin and truth. “Skin, truth, and leaping to save oneself. Common themes of this survivor,” I thought. “She’d been looking over me through that universal moon,” I was convinced. “Why else would this be the first family story she shared?” Even a generation and 22 years apart, we both understood patterns of victimization are more than skin deep. She has since passed, resting in the galaxy with that universal moon. Still, our blood’s knowing is with me; It continues to save me in those moments when I cannot seem to save myself.