By Lory Bedikian

Not every song on the radio is a great song. Usually
it airs because someone knows someone knows someone.

There are most likely a million songs that will never
make it to any Billboard top chart ranking yet will

kick the amp, graze the sound factor with tonal bliss.
I like calling it phenomenal. To give examples would be

dangerous. So instead, one could say, a song needs
to be a bit like paprika. Before we go there, let’s imagine

a punk band named Paprika. Perfect. Even better,
a vocal artist who goes by just: Paprika. Catchy.

We never really knew where it came from. Maybe
just another ground red pepper, but it was what

we always fell back on. Sometimes spicy, sometimes
smoked, sweet. Music. It’s what we are all looking for

all of our lives, just in different incarnations.
Let’s forget the song or I’ll never tell you the story

of how paprika was my mother’s diva and crooner both,
the spice she believed, with all her soul and lashes,

could save any cooked dish from ruin. Paprikah tuhrehk!
Meaning “put paprika on it!” However, in Armenian

addressing you in the second-person, plural, formal,
sounds like, although only two words: all of you, listen to me,

before it all gets thrown out, get the paprika, sprinkle it on, damn
you all! My mother. A woman who saved nothing,

but thought almost anything could be saved from ruin.
Mended socks, shortened the cocktail dress because

she never went anywhere really, but shorter she could
wear it to work, to her job selling formaldehyde-filled

furniture at Montgomery Ward, waited for commission
checks, came home late because it was her turn to close

the register, waiting for her between asphalt and neon
lights. Almost forgot we were talking about the belief

that one could save things from ruin. Last night I almost
forgot that my mother was dead, gone for four months now.

I know paprika is not my style. At least as a spice. Just as
I’m certain that there are too many songs not being heard

because someone’s got to know someone and someone
else has got to close the register before the walk home.

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Lory Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize. Her forthcoming book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Raz-Shumaker Prize from Prairie Schooner. Bedikian received the Neruda Prize in the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is included in Border Lines: Poems of Migration, (Knopf, 2020). Bedikian’s poems received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.