Tourniquet by YAPA 2025 Winner Sarine Shahinian
Read Sarine Shahinian’s poem “Tourniquet” – one of the three winners of the 2025 Young Armenian Poets Awards in honor of Tamar Asadourian.
Tourniquet
I sit toward the back middle of the tiny classroom,
Stare through the overgrown bullet-hole windows,
My eyes fixated on trivial droplets of earthy water
Escaping from the ash-clogged gutters.
The usual sight would be proud troops
Marching through the streets in perfect unison,
but this time–
“These are the ones that got lucky.”
Our teacher sighs, catching my gaze.
Not much of a troop, just a painting
Starring the reality of survival.
Each pitiful soldier drags himself forward,
A pathetic stick, the only thing keeping him from crumbling.
Proper medical attention is scarce at the warfront.
These burnt-out warriors are now rolled in tourniquets,
Trying to seize their bleeding limbs.
I try to redirect my focus, but
There’s this cloud of smoke,
Spiritless and sickly,
A ghost between my eyes and senses.
It clogs throat and thought,
Dries my nose and lungs.
It stings the crease of my eyes and–
I can taste it.
So can the sky.
Like forced tobacco on the clouds.
I hate the way it curls beneath itself as it grows,
How it shifts, greedy and restless.
Its spoiled claws snatch at anything they please.
Like a void of swirling madness
Bullets poke through tiny slits,
But never come out the other end.
The sharp crack of the barrel fades,
Drowning away,
But never forgotten.
My mind shatters into the field of honor…
Which flame was that of reality?
Soldiers twist tourniquets around the root
Of their wounded limbs
To stop the bleeding.
I wonder–
Can’t a tourniquet,
Twisted above the collarbone,
Dam the river
Of bloody thoughts rushing to my mind?
My ears burn red,
My brain–a canvas to be painted with the bloodshed.
And I imagine the dawn
When my mother stares in stunned silence
At my finally pale face .
Sarine Shahinian is an eighth-grade student at St. Gregory Hovsepian School. She is passionate about art, poetry and music, and enjoys painting, drawing, and reading books. Her favorite school subjects are English and History. She loves Armenian culture and wishes to visit Armenia someday.
You can also find this poem published on IALA partner h-pem’s website.
YAPA Director Alan Semerdjian on Shahinian’s “Tourniquet”:
Sarine Shahinian’s fascinating poem “Tourniquet” is not just a well-crafted depiction of the brutality of war on the courageous individuals who tragically endure it, but it is also a triumph in empathy, an ekphrastic imagining of how the poetic mind can paint the picture a fractured world needs to see. When the “cloud of smoke” enters the poem, the line between the billow caused by gunfire and the fog the mind must navigate through when considering what soldiers go through begins to blur. This is one of the most compelling elements of Sarine’s achievement. She goes inside the painting/experience at the heart of the poem and dives inward, her mind becoming “a canvas to be painted with the bloodshed.” This powerful poem suggests to us that art should be not only immersive but also transformative for both the writer and reader.
Alan Semerdjian is a writer, musician, and educator. His works include In the Architecture of Bone (GenPop Books, 2009), The Serpent and The Crane (a collaboration of poetry and music with Aram Bajakian), and several collections of critically-acclaimed albums covering a wide range of genres from singer-songwriter to free jazz and alternative rock. He has taught English and Creative Writing in public education for 25 years and is currently the poet laureate of New York’s Nassau County.