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A Letter to Father Father, this letter is to say good-bye to all the balloons whose short strings flew out of my hands in a confusion of games becoming the property of the angels of the wind. This letter is for the explosion of the tiny veins beneath grandfather’s belt buckle in the sharp stench of alcohol and smoldered opium braziers that jolt like walls in earthquakes, cracking and dissolving, into the soil like thin blood. This letter is for all the snow that had landed on your toes offering your torn boots an impermanent refuge beneath its white drape. This letter is for all the snow that used to share the same color as your childhood, that remote innocence covering your body like an invisible divine cloak, gradually transforming into a soldier’s ragged uniform, desiring, inventing, and killing enemies. This letter is for all the snow that melted in the large piazzas of war, unable to extinguish the fires ascending in the trenches of your heart. This letter is for the fears trapped in the caverns of my soul, those insidious snakes poking their heads out of the dark holes, slithering and stinging the sunlight. This letter is from a girl who can never get smaller to extend her hands towards yours to skip over rushing streams of water. Father, this letter is for the burial of the inherited resonance of words in the old vocal box of our home. This letter is for today: for the day that I have forgiven. Copyright © Leila Farjami Buddha’s Dilemma Tree trunks fall and you don't care, jungles burn and you don't care. Your mother parts, and you entrust the sweetness of her bosoms to a steamy alley at where it’s full of the sound of plunging the fetuses down the skyscrapers of your infinite city. Your father dies and you shove his comb, full of white hair, into your back pocket as you bury his yellow dentures in the lacerated gums of earth while you whistle, we sing, you whistle, we kiss, we don't care. We don't care why the occulted Imam who vowed to return will never re-emerge at the time of children burning in their classrooms, with rulers, notebooks, blackboards, and erasers, at the time of sacrificial wooden humans circling the squares and getting charred into coal. No, the Imam will never reappear… We don't care if we never again swallow cherry pits while we stand up under a lukewarm rain, making love like two dark apparitions, before I become imbued with embryos knowing you as their father. No, we don't care. We will never become human so, let's at least become decent lice like the ones adorning an orphaned girl's hair in Mazar-Sharif who will soon neither have a comb nor fingers. Let's become decent lice… This is Buddha's dilemma: where would you hold your God when you've got a weapon inside? Copyright © Leila Farjami Portal to Nostalgia I sip my ice tea in Tully’s, It doesn’t taste the same as the brewed teas I’ve had in or It doesn’t taste like dried up tea leaves soaked in H2O. Nothing else offers such consolation as the aroma of all things missed infusing my thirsty mouth with a colorful aftertaste of an unending homelessness. Copyright © Leila Farjami The Best Husband I've Ever Had I am a married woman whose husband is Death. My husband, Death, kisses me on the lips before going to work, picking up a suitcase full of obituaries, gently shutting the door behind himself as to avoid reminding the neighbors of the deadlines of their existence, rattling Azrael’s nerves who has worked overtime since Creation. Death has neither beaten me up nor bribed me, Death is content knowing I can never get divorced or accept a rival for him, Death tells me that he loves my teeth, skull, and spinal bones madly, that he’ll always preserve my jaws and delicate wrists as much as he would a tiny flying dinosaur named the “missing link” in his archeological museum of lovers. Death is so faithful that he will never leave me for another wife, and he’s so generous that he will grant me all the soil I desire inch by inch. Whenever I start feeling nostalgic by living on earth Death points me to the wings slung over the doorsill, whispering: “Contemplate flight.”
Copyright © Leila Farjami |
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Leila.Farjami was born in Tehran, Iran. She immigrated to United States with her family during Iran-Iraq war. Leila has been writing and translating poetry for many years. Her first book of poetry named " Seven Seas, One Dew Drop" was published in Her work has been published in many Persian literary magazines in |