Day 7: "Off Ocean Parkway, Long Island" by Lola Koundakjian

Day 6 of 30 Days of The Five-Two features "Off Ocean Parkway, Long Island" by Lola Koundakjian.

Feel free to join the tour with a comment, tweet, or blog post of your own. Here's the schedule.

Day 17: Poetry in Performance

A sixth-grade field trip to a high school performance of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", complete with sound effects, showed me words could jump off the page. In moving from The Lineup print chapbook series to a website, I took advantage of the Web's sound and video capacity to present poetry in ways I couldn't in print. Most weeks, I create videos incorporating poets' or performers' voices, but The 5-2 is also open to videos by the poets themselves.

For Day 17 of 30 Days of The 5-2, check out The 5-2's best contributed videos, by Jackie Sheeler and Lola Koundakjian.

Lola Koundakjian

OFF OCEAN PARKWAY, LONG ISLAND

To their pimps, they are prostitutes
Tits
And
Ass

To their johns, they are
Anonymous
Casual
Fantasies

To the assassin, they are
Unworthy
Unwanted
Disposable.

To their mourners, they are
Maureen,
Melissa,
Megan,
Amber...


Lola's video for "Off Ocean Parkway, Long Island":



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Lola confesses: "In early 2011, a series of New York Times articles captured my attention. Cadavers of prostitutes were found in a mass grave off the coast of Long Island, NY. A feature article in New York magazine followed in July 2011, interviewing the victims' mothers. I found the articles riveting and very moving at the same time."

LOLA KOUNDAKJIAN lives in New York City. She is a 2011 and 2012 Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance grantee. Her first collection of poetry, The Accidental Observer, was published last year and in 2012 she will be working on a new manuscript with illustrations. She enjoys reading on stage, translating, running the Dead Armenian Poets’ Society, and the online Armenian Poetry Project. Her bilingual poems were translated into Spanish for the 20th International Poetry Festival in Medellín, Colombia, where she read her work in July 2010. Visit her online at http://www.lolakoundakjian.com