Poetry

When your hand slit open on the metal edge of a
bulletin board, you kept it to yourself, embarrassed by your ordinary
humanness dripping onto the library carpet.

Today I think about all the / immigrants lost to the sea, / to the whirlwind of loss that / engulfs everywhere in this / land where there are open graves / for our dead.

Who are you, device for my undoing, mechanism of my mania unfolding?

in this monster / of a city we call Tehran, where the strands / of your hair became the biggest thorn in / the side of this regime ravenous

all the white gods of language: binary— / ain’t shit; shapeshift—code switch; articulate—Black / as fuck, smooth-talk DNA encoded; spell-caster— / gxrl, I’m mythical auntie, enchanting, making y’all / as black & free as America ain’t.

our mothers, red soled, holler resistance / eyes peeled and ready for love, toes planted / in terra cotta, they worship on knees 

How beyond years they pray for a heartbeat. How they set homes afire yet groan for their darlings. How even in grief, they hear music.

The kind my mother spewed over the phone each night when Papa sneaked out for a smoke, complaining to her sister about me, him, her period, the price of saffron, the thievery of mango season, and I heard by hiding the cordless in my room.