It wasn’t the coffee, I swear. Maybe the music or the barking dog across the street. But everything shrank and I was a little child screaming for a fair division. Screaming for a permission to sing, to be bare, to be fair, to be ...to be!

Whoever is reading this, you don’t need to sympathize with me. You don’t need to think about what made me the little child that I am always going to be. Carefully swinging on a big black tire hanging from a tree, anticipating death or another manifestation of life, I am still screaming, with a closed mouth; my eyes swell up as tears climb my nostrils with every gasp.

Forget about good or bad friends; forget about dishes and digital cameras. I can hear the atmosphere of Iran, I can taste the gasoline-filled air or the breezy hill-tops of Shemran. Yah, all of this Orientalist, mystical, shit, I feel it. You may not understand, so don’t pity the young aspiring writer /journalist in exile. She’ll go back, to finish screaming for a fair division of rights, land, ideas, the good, and the fucking bad.

It wasn’t the coffee. It happened when I realized that people who experienced the pre-revolutionary Iran, are getting older. I realized it’ll get really difficult in 20 years to know the truth about things, no matter how many 9-min clips there are on YouTube. Because now, all the blood that was shed, all the puppets carved out of infected trees, are silently anchored in some forgotten nightmare that no one wants to remember.

xxx

Kiss the cracks that weave and mingle on the wall
The careful folding of each cause

Sinking in a passerby’s exhale
Escaping through his teeth.


A whispering apex shivers in its disguise
Be further, away, apart,
Leave me
And this deluded sense of smile
Brooding
Dissecting the location of an unnatural suspense

The partial prostitutes hover by, waiting for my signal

And the late-morning seeds irrigate the kitchen floor
Impregnating the memories
of our empty cup-handles holding us.

Rotten apples
exiled in the fridge,

kiss them (don’t) kiss them all.

subway season

There are clammy handprints all over the poles, and every inhale brings in second-hand, rusty air. People’s body temperature gets confused as they sweat under their jackets, and go out on the breezy streets to uncomfortably dry up.They are all hunched back and nervous. Most of them are listening to their ipods, drafting texts and emails on their mega-phones, or doing Sudoku.



I wonder how we used to commute before and what it meant. I picture the adventurous roads we used to discover, and as I close my eyes I imagine that the noisy clash between the metal body of the train and oily rails, is in fact the sound of a horse trotting rhythmically on a stony street.

Then I realize its my stop, and embarrassed from my romantic delusions, I put on my favourite song and swiftly exit.