Everything leaves you, in its own way

The time will come for me to let it go--
To let it all go gently drifting down
The sad expectations and dazzling hopes
To watch them all dissolve and then fade down
The time will come for me to sigh and say
No, in fact I did not think of you today
Or the day before the day before
I’ve let you leave me slowly, but for sure.

______________________________


In Yazd at my Aunt Pooran’s house I could never sleep with the mosquitoes puncturing holes into the nighttime quiet, so instead I told myself stories. All of that has left me now. My Aunt Pooran sold her house three summers ago and the mosquitoes don’t come anymore. Sometimes I wish they would. I got used to the bug spray smell and even now it welcomes back those memories, warm and soft-skinned in the light. I have learned: everyone leaves you in some way. My Aunt Pooran turned bitter after her husband died and in that way, she has left me. Still I think of her often. Especially today while standing in my room my ears quivered alive with a familiar sound: A mosquito, like a broken apostrophe, flitted noisily across the surface of the glassy air. Before, I would have fought it with my slipper. Now I barely flinch. It’s funny how the right memory can attach a quiet sweetness to even the most annoying of things. Mosquitoes: long summers at my Aunt Pooran’s house in Yazd. Now, neither the house nor the city exist. The government towed away most towns with its militia-men and guns and sacks of rotten blood. Everything leaves you, in its own way.

Thoughts from an Iranian Grandmother

I will plead yes! when I mean no. My lipstick might match my shoes: neutral. My hair will match my voice: veiled. Someday I will laugh as he unfastens the sticky-tape and lets his diapers fall. He is 82. Years, not days. One day I will tell him NO. But that day, like the others, might not ever come. My words live through kitchen utensils: the wooden-chop voices my complaints. He stopped hearing long ago. There is car outside, it is waiting for me. I must buy the cantaloupes before they are all snatched--he likes them honey-sweet and supple, milky like licks from a cow’s broad tongue. I am not going to regret the day I married you because that would mean I would then regret each day afterwards that I did not divorce you, and my life is not a chain of “what-ifs.” Still, I wear deep tunnels in my tongue where the curse words go, when I long to set them free. It is too late. Somewhere, the skies are a pale blue like dreams that make you squint and then the sun a hole in the sky that shifts, from one sidewalk to another.

The summer after he turned 83 my grandfather had three women visit him throughout the week. The first, Maria, stood tall and sturdy with a long nose and a uni-brow. She was from Pakistan and often spoke of the warm weather that smelled sweetly of boiled nectarines and her parakeet--that I imagined, secretly--resembled her in more ways than one--in more ways than their shared tendency to explode into chatter. The second visitor was Sima. She always dressed in bright, cotton shirts and jeans tight around the thigh. She always dressed and smelled nicely, and stopped before and after her visits to talk to me as I walked through the kitchen in search of something to eat. The third visitor was Monica and I most enjoyed the way she spoke, because she had lived in Buenos Aires for most of her life and therefore spoke in a wandering way, as if her words were finished before she had thought them up, and longed to race to the door and leave. Thankfully, Monica herself was not that way because she stayed for the longest out of the three.

My dear grandfather, milky-breasted and quiet, prickly chin hairs give him away, digging into my chin as we try to cheek-kiss before bedtime, I will lead him to his bedroom, balancing a bowlful of cheerios and a glass of red wine, the smells swirl together and are warm and fermenting. I trace the bulge of his belly in my mind. He is fading away. It’s funny and amusing how we slip from one mold to another. Before, he flaunted a crispy orange tan and pastel polos. He ate lunches on the patio next to the palm trees, with the sun white-hot. Now he sits in his room, the humidity pours from the carpets and lingers above his shoulders, scooting in to his nostrils and encouraging my head hairs to uncurl in frizzy contemplation. My dear grandfather, you are so weak now, nodding through dinner because Parkinson’s secured its hold, and grease drips into your mustache and slinks its way on your knees. I watch you smile, teeth broken, waiting for sleep. You fall asleep with a lamb chop in one hand.

Small, Crooked Things

I ate breakfast with my grandparents today. My grandmother sat beside me with two halves of whole wheat pita and an oily lump of cheese. She looked at me in between bites while my grandfather nodded through his coffee from across the table, his nose squished like an arrow pointing down drawing attention to his gut, pale and sagging, barely concealed by the thin shirt. My grandfather struggled to remember the name of a movie he watched four years ago and really enjoyed. For about eight minutes they argued about the main actor in the film.

The sky is flat and blue
I feel very hot in my wool sweater
I feel like Iran
The country, not the boy
I feel hot and dry
My tongue is sobbing in my mouth
It is wet with old
Saliva
I look out of my window and see
Stabs of green and pricks of yellow
All over, spread everywhere
So beautiful. And I

miss you.

Five people in my living room:
Short, asian
Tall, asian
Chubby, asian
Pretty, asian
Skinny, white
Pitching water bottles at one another
Where their balls sag
Except for the fourth one
(pretty, asian)
Who sits
Hand planted near her vagina
Weeping after laughing
She is so pink her panty line might explode