3 poems
Farnaz Fatemi
Farnaz Fatemi is a founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective and was formerly a writing instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book of poems, Sister Tongue زبان خواهر, won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize selected by Tracy K. Smith, and is available August 2022 from Kent State University Press (pre-order info here). Previous publications include Poem-a-Day (Poets.org), Tahoma Literary Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, Grist Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and several anthologies, including Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora and Halal if You Hear Me. More at farnazfatemi.com
Twitter: @sasqitoon
Instagram: @farnaz._.fatemi
Traces
Put the arm in the sleeve
of an unscheduled morning.
The day is disappearing dew
and dust specks.
Here are the shoes
that didn’t get laced.
Here, the other shoes,
stains of past tense.
Noon has its sails on,
no place to linger.
Here is the stillness
before disease.
Smoke at the beginning
and the end
of the fire:
Twilight
smoldering inside the glass.
“Forgiveness is all there is”
⎯Dolly Parton
Some
days, though,
I’m still afraid
of being forgotten, an erasure.
My father: blind curve. I the speeding hurtle.
Ancient fear like blight, remembered by soil. I wanted to cry. I pretended nothing hurt.
I wanted my parents to wonder where I was and come looking. Instead, I worry my worry and leave it, frayed.
There was nothing to shake me from this story. My sister was nice enough, but not enough. She was also lost inside her pain. Now I see it: four people, four boulders of ache.
One bellowed, one sobbed. I swallowed, dust of need in my throat. I still wish the story was different—
that my parents could shapeshift into streams to surround us. But no.
I see we weren’t magic. I notice.
I tell this for them.
For myself, too.
I’m done
carrying.
Clasp
How you haunt me, keep me company,
on the days I think I am learning
how to be alone.
Paring my clutter, I ask (as if you could answer)
Can you imagine me
wearing these pumpkin-colored shoes?
You flaunt your own light load: You need so much less
as a ghost. You cart the jewelry around,
sift your pile like a magpie,
ropes of precious metal. A minuscule violin, a lucky horn,
hearts without centers,
gifts from beloveds.
You take them between your ghost teeth,
swallow this one, that one, smile. The little house,
your cut-out name in gold.
I join you, suck down your sterling Torah,
the eternity ring you treasured.
You glow, of course.
