bloodline by YAPA 2025 Winner Emily Chamichyan
Read Emily Chamichyan’s poem “bloodline” – one of the three winners of the 2025 Young Armenian Poets Awards in honor of Tamar Asadourian.
bloodline
mama tells me I came from a pomegranate,
split in half, cracked into digestible pieces
by wrinkled hands,
when I give blood,
she tells me my blood
is the color of currents
that have been smashed between fingertips.
mama tells me my fingers were made
in a mortar,
their dough mixed
and kneaded and shaped
into boney figures
with little dents
to make them more believable,
mama tells me I was wrapped in grape leaves,
that were laid to rest on jagged stones
with little holes
that couldn’t keep my body in,
tells me my hair
is golden at the ends
because her mother’s was too,
today mama kisses me for the first time and tells me
to make sure I don’t crust at the edges,
or sit and watch my blood go dry
and turn brown
like pomegranates do
when they sit out too long.
Emily Chamichyan is an Armenian-American writer and high school junior. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and has appeared in sage cigarettes magazine, The Stardust Review, The Incandescent Review, and The Echo Teen Art and Lit Mag. When she’s not writing, you can find her reading or daydreaming. She loves burning candles, wearing rings, and visiting indie bookstores.
You can also find this poem published on IALA partner h-pem’s website.
YAPA Judge Gregory Djanikian on Chamichyan’s “bloodline”:
“bloodline” is an imaginative, wonderfully-written birth poem, the body slowly coming into being as if it were prepared as an array of distinctively Armenian dishes of split pomegranates, crushed currants, kneaded dough, veined grape leaves, the kitchen suddenly transfigured into a kind of womb out of which a daughter enters the world. It is a recipe that connects one generation to another, the bloodline descending from grandmother to mother to daughter through a process of continuance and survival. It’s almost as if the daughter realizes for the first time that she is part of that continuance and that her mother’s kiss is the first kiss she receives having this new knowledge. As part of the bloodline, she has the power now to carefully perpetuate it, preserving the cultural heritage that is within her, as blood, as memory written into the body.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt of Armenian parentage, Gregory Djanikian came to the United States when he was 8 years old and spent his boyhood in Williamsport, PA. He is a graduate of the Syracuse University writing program and, for many years, was the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania which he attended as an undergraduate. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, The Man in the Middle, Falling Deeply into America, About Distance, Years Later, So I Will Till the Ground, Dear Gravity, Sojourners of the In-Between, and most recently, Nostalgia for the Future: New and Selected Poems, 1984-2024. He has been awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, two prizes from Poetry magazine (the Eunice Tietjens Prize, and Friends of Literature Prize), the Anahid Literary Award from the Armenian Center at Columbia University, and multiple residencies at Yaddo.
His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Good Poems, American Places (Viking), Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem (Knopf), Seriously Funny (Georgia), Becoming Americas: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America), Poem in Your Pocket (The Academy of American Poets), Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (Norton), 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House), among others.
He lives outside of Philadelphia, PA with his wife, artist Alysa Bennett.