Poetry

Saving these children / means leaving their grandmother / to be swallowed by bullets and a lake

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.