The Wi-Fi is banned indefinitely. And so she wants to send the letter of her body home. Nastaliq shekasteh. Broken handwriting. She wants to join the protests, burn her hijab. I would forbid it if I could: her leaving me. I wish to be the patient stone. The patient stone listens. Absorbs the sorrows of those who confide in it. When two beings are inseparable, and is pronounced o. Layla o Majnun, Gol o morg, Khosrow o Shirin, my Bibi o her country. Séance of my ear harboring secrets, dribbling like a mouth at a fountain. Our voices cling to one another. Our eyes distend, bursting. As I wait to board my train, she asks how my Persian is doing as if it is a sick relative or a child in trouble at school. The man in me grovels his sorrows in the desert basin, his memory making mud from the dirt. Even I—Even I—Even I—I say and she listens, eyes downcast, waiting for her turn to speak.
There is a woman carved into helmet shell, now haunting the space just below my knuckle. Useless, I slip her in my pocket and take a watering can by its wing. I wear a new ring for every day of my life. I do this with most things, making them permanent. The face of a moon peaks out from beneath Isabella’s shirt-sleeve. She holds her dress at either side. Is it raining there? Is there mud? Born from the soil, dusted clean, put to my lips. I plan to have many. They will know who I am, accrued across my fingers, hung down hollows of my neck, waiting to be lost back. How do I mean? I am not meant for this. I stand in the rain, dumfounded and searching, wiping myself from my eyes. I wait for the right conditions to put my self to practice. I am told to express myself this way, just nothing permanent, please. I am obsessed with myself. Like a planet, I long for something I can’t slip off at night and forget to wear in the morning. I want to make it all wuthering, whatever that means. I want to be clothed, fed, taken care of. The hands of my love. Tomatoes so sweet my eyes flutter and moan. The accidental salt of fingertips, like an ocean at my lips, teaching me something about worship. That question there, sealing me shut: if she was too good for this world, as they say, what does that make me, still standing here, gathering myself at the gate?
~for Tahereh—poet, activist, martyr When the Eyes open, finally, they won’t yield to touch. Like ice- flowers reaching to catch the soil. To blossom, the mystics wrote, is to open her smile. A man sits, head wrapped, holding conversation with a parking meter. A real poet haunts, her mouth full of white silk, singing quiet Ta-das! to take our breath away. Ta meaning: so that, up to, until then, rather than—sometimes, even, when. Is translation the least we can offer? Is there even less? What remains down the well that terrify us so. That we offer pebble and coin to bury it. Some men learn to be ghosts before they ever learn to die.
The needle occasionally punched through her finger and nail / so a smear of red remained on whatever she was making. She seemed to elongate as she worked, growing wide / as an ocean, big and tall as Paul Bunyan with his ax. Confidently and forever / the story of a wedding dress, The Boy’s / mother, the thousands upon thousands of pearls inlaid, glinting like eyes. How it came to life beneath her / fingers. To sew is to see stitched / to an end. He watched her rings, wishing he could wear them. Everything came from her, even The Boy, even her own name. A name she stitched / together from The Boy’s pronunciation / of the cardinal considering Him on the balcony as He sat in His high-chair one summer’s day. Birbie…Birbie…Bibi! He clapped at the bright winged / thing alighting on the railing, light as the feathers that made it. She dropped / the tool she’d been using to feed Him (startled the cardinal, who disappeared into the burning, unblinking eye above, making The Boy frown) and ran inside, yelling with elation to no one, to anyone / who would listen, He said His first word! He said His first / word, and His first word was / me! At the end of the night, she rested / her ruined, arthritic fingers against the table, her foot lingering at the pedal. Una corda / sostenuto / damper. The Boy watched—it was all He could do—her foot slowly rising / winged, letting go the sound.
To be a Boy, there are rules. Chief among them is that I must not die, even when the words escape me like lightning bugs dying in my jar, making their short lives shorter. I must tell no one about the ghosts of them fluttering up against the glass. Flickering gray then grayer. Must act as though they never happened, hold my hands cuffed as I wait in line for security, surrendering my Real ID. A woman just ahead of me says to her child, over and over, her hand held tight to her ear like some body’s small chest: I’m not disappearing. I’m not disappearing. She is saying. Is sung. My mother once snuck her pet gerbil through like a fugitive tucked in a barrel, a toilet paper roll squeezed between her legs. All that, just so the secret body could travel a bit further and die, later and alone, taken apart in the strong maw of her husband’s boyhood pet. What can be done? My father used to laugh until he cried. The dog was trained to keep out pests and she was old and blind and miserable, anyhow. It’s the natural order of things. A story always comes to mind, knocking like a chick to be let back in its shell, prodding the membrane of my eye: my mother once mourned. Now, I walk past every officer, the after-lives of wriggling animals tucked between my legs like a suspicious lotion or IM hip rod or family curse. I can never quite depart. I feel their evil eyes sown across my shoulders like wings, just like my grandma warned, their tired lids are shut. But I think it may be harder to admit that when the TSA agent doesn’t order me step aside, when I glide through the gate—known traveler, transparent as Ghost—I miss those hands patting me down like earth. Halving me. Reminding me that what the crow does on the side of the hot dirt road is a kindness. To untie a body from itself, a kindness. Assuring me of my held breath. I’m there, in a body of delayed light—light that hasn’t happened yet—reaching me in the welling look of people I long ago survived.
Darius Atefat-Peckham is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021) and editor of his mother’s, Susan Atefat-Peckham’s, posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press, 2023). His work has recently appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Shenandoah, Rattle, The Journal, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Atefat-Peckham grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, and currently studies English and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard.
Still images from Drunken Angel (醉いどれ天使, Yoidore Tenshi), a 1948 film directed by Akira Kurosawa. It is notable for being the first of sixteen film collaborations between director Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune.
