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My Son Rests His Cheek on the Wrecked Car

Lory Bedikian

An act can be many things at once.
We can be deliverers or takers both.

Was he saying thank you to the airbags,
thank you to the chassis for its metal

promise to stop the impact short of
breath and body and the bureaucracy

of the outside world. Praising all of it
today. Praising the collision recalculated

that it could have been worse. Where
is poetry if it is not at the base of

the wreck. Rich said it clearly. So clear
we could see the ocean’s bottom

as if the glass had been emptied out
from one last sip. My son and then

my other son and then the one
who knows what I’m talking about.

What if I say I want this poem to bless
you, the reader. Will you take it? Will

you trust that it, line by line, truly
means to protest harm, means well?

Lory Bedikian is the author of Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz–Shumaker Book Prize, and The Book of Lamenting (Anhinga Press, 2011), winner of the Philip Levine Prize.

Bedikian’s work has been supported by the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in California on the ancestral lands of the Tongva.

Themes

About this Poem

“In March 2025, on my deceased mother’s birthday, my children and I were in a terrible car accident. We all survived. The collision happened at a moment in our lives where progress seemed to finally be restarting. I thought I could never write about it, until my son pressed his cheek against the totaled vehicle—one we had saved for, had lived in for so many years. His gesture became symbol, then metaphor. It proved we can always write the impossible; we can poeticize almost anything, if necessary. Observation can sometimes heal, sometimes free us. There are gestures, moments, symbols everywhere for us to see, borrow, lend. The poetry helps create a path on which to continue.”
—Lory Bedikian

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More by this poet

The Book of Lamenting

begins on edges of highways

where the sun raises its swollen belly,
grasses outgrow themselves,
vineyards wither their nerves.

The sun cracks the dashboard,
slithers between rows of eucalyptus, juniper,
rolls along the wheels of trucks.

Past crows that caw, pod atop railroad crossings,
the engine cranks its monotonous pulse, distracts me
from posted signs, the yellow snake that guides me along.

This is where I find reasons to question the living,

Lory Bedikian

2018

The Mechanic

Stretching over the carburetor,
he shouts about the quality of life here
compared to back home, how they stood
in line for bread, how there were no cedars
more green than those by the shore.

He could be my uncle in Syria, 1948,
a man taking in fumes, a cigarette balancing
on a fender, hands lined with grease,
saving coins in a jar for his newborn,
losing relatives to malaria, to civil war.

Lory Bedikian

2018

Prayer for My Immigrant Relatives

While they wait in long lines, legs shifting,
fingers growing tired of holding handrails,
pages of paperwork, give them patience.
Help them to recall the cobalt Mediterranean
or the green valleys full of vineyards and sheep.
When peoples’ words resemble the buzz
of beehives, help them to hear the music

Lory Bedikian

2018

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My Son Rests His Cheek on the Wrecked Car

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