Saturday, October 23, 2010

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.

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