how long ago, it seems, i started out

Family is sometimes a question.

In these rare cases

my mother is the answer--my mother

with her pesto chicken pumpkin

My mother

dainty and perfumed as a soft,

gloved hand. My mother

so dear and lovely

looking out of the window at the weather

then telling Nessa:

Put your sweater on or else the cold

will catch you! It doesn’t happen

that way--I wanted to say,

stooped over cereal, counting milk

bubbles, to make sure I could still

count. I had lost it all

so many years ago--but I lost

the number of years

and now I never glance back. This

is the only form of time travel
I know:

Looking out for a moment unto

the thin fog and feeling

an eye of light, a clean origami

flower, unfold inside me

and present itself as

Family, the answer to that

long, sweeping question:

Mother? Family.

That is all I know.

Veruggia

              In Veruggia the houses resemble tin boxes--the ones that often carry tea leaves--and they are arranged cleanly along the streets, each a different color.  There are thick-waisted palm trees and the clouds are ironed flat against the sky. When I first arrived it was late afternoon and the sky flaunted a gold dust hue. I felt light and hollow, almost as if I could suddenly float away. The nearby fried-fish smells, huddled with the scent of hot, splattering oil, made me feel a little dizzy and peculiar. Then there were the ripe, bright smells of blooming flowers and the less pleasant stench of dog shit smattered on the sidewalk and car exhaust trailing around street corners.            

I walked until I found myself atop a squelchy knob of land that overlooked the pale pink ocean. The earth beneath my feet felt porous and I soon discovered that it oozed ocean water. From afar, the ocean had resembled a melted gumdrop, and upon moving closer, I discovered that its pink color was the result of several million squirming shrimp. By now the sky had purpled and the temperature settled into a firm chill. I watched a flock of birds fly past until they resembled a scatter of peppercorns across the sky. Then I noticed a mother and her child sitting upon a bench and blowing bubbles through a bubble wand. There was something strangely peaceful about the bubbles, which moved so slowly that they almost seemed frozen in place. It was then that I remembered how I first arrived.            

It had been an oppressively warm day, so I had decided to leave my house and indulge in a short walk. As I walked, the oily air slid around my elbows and greased my fingertips. I had thought, mistakenly, that the outside temperature would be cooler but I soon discovered otherwise. I quickly began to feel thirsty, and just when I thought I could no longer withstand my thirst, I came upon a water fountain in the middle of a park. It was smooth and silver. I placed one finger upon its cool, slippery rim and felt refreshed. Then, before I even swallowed a slurp of water I saw the bubble suspended perfectly above my nose. It was so beautiful that I found myself instantly distracted. I searched a moment for its source, but my gaze fell too soon upon its shimmer, its swirl of greens and blues.  Then, not a second later, I arrived in Veruggia.

I pondered the possibility of Veruggia being a world within a bubble. It seemed like the only explanation that would make sense, so I decided to adopt the theory in place of the others that had begun to take shape inside my mind. I then wondered what might happen if the bubble were to suddenly burst. The prospect only filled me with a watery discomfort so I decided to walk again among the streets and relish the green and yellow of the buildings. It was then that I came across the young girl and her glittery bubble wand. She was seated on the porch of a house that I did not remember from before. It was painted lavender and there was just one window, at the top, and it was left slightly open.

Veruggia is most beautiful in the falling moments before sunset. I decided this while studying the hills in the distance, speckled with smudges of pink. Then, of course, the sky, which boasted a cornucopia of rich color. A rare breeze suddenly plucked a bubble from its place and drew it towards where I stood. I swiveled around, in search of the young girl, but did not find her. Instead, I suddenly felt weightless, like my insides had whizzed away. Then it ended as quickly as it had began.  I stood, once again, before the water fountain and inside the park. The world around me was submitting to its own slow darkness and the park was nearly empty of all people. I stepped forward and decided to continue my journey back home.

disco ball recollections

I don’t like thinking of all that I will miss—the dance, as silly as it might be, with balloons bobbing, skimming the ceiling then dropping a moment before rising up again; and the streamers, plastic and shiny, stretching your face into a fish-like reflection; and the brownies too sweet, and too crispy-edged; the punch, never enough, as if you were meant to find its bowl, each time, empty, with only a warm slurp of liquid left. And the music, every song snapped from the top 40, the songs too familiar and too ordinary to inspire a certain rhythm to steal your feet and sway you into motion. But then, of course, there would be you. I envision how you might look. The image cuts quiet slivers from my heart and throws them into the wind. I want to find you, as clichéd as this sounds, bathed in the webby blue of those disco lights you hate, all the other dancers, crazy and sloppy and orbiting around, and you in the middle: that thin prick of light that gets me going through it all, that makes me whimper with a long-forgotten ease.

To Ricky

To Ricky

You were thirteen-
And pulling past the library shelves.
The image unfolds, warm and precise,
of your round face
pale like the opal-moon
or an onion. And how chubby
your cheeks were, then.

Now, somewhere,
with a wife and children. I imagine
you slow-unraveling for work
when the sky feels dusty.
You might hurry
to conquer breakfast in the car:
an apple,
a moist smudge of banana.

There are some moments
that feel like the loose ends
of dreams: That library afternoon,
do you not remember?
As you drifted past,
a hot clip of sun
sifted through the open window
and illuminated your edges, so
like a delicate plink of light,
you hummed alive.

Meanwhile, I sat at a table
on the opposite side,
quivering wild with worries
that I can no longer
even remember.

One morning my grandfather...

One morning my grandfather ate so much that his chair disappeared. It was a Sunday at the Pancake House, and my grandfather sat across from me with his fat pink cheeks quivering through speech. All the while I knew he was only thinking of eating and eating and eating. Breakfast finally arrived, and the waiter set before my grandfather eight sausages, thicker than his fingers and slippery with grease, and four crinkly twists of bacon, crunchy-edged and chewy with fat. Then there were four eggs, scrambled and glittery with salt, and two brick-slabs of toast, thick and soft with butter. My grandfather ate all of this and then, in between bites and in between gulps, he often found, mysteriously, a pancake-plunk on the left side of his plate. A sailing strawberry even managed to find his mouth, along with three gulps of chocolate milk. And so, by the end of the meal my grandfather had devoured so much food that he could no longer stand up. No, the chair had melded into his bottom like gum into its wrapper when you leave it on the dashboard of your car during a warm day. He left us with no choice, then, but to steal the restaurant chair.

I am certain that you have forgotten me
as I sit here in the center of this fat, floppy
bed and look out of the window that looks out unto
the pregnant clouds and the thin lines
of road. I occupy the edges of your memory, now:
The distant plop
of a spoon slipping into suds.
I am not
the bubbles that jewel your arm
and fingers, up to the puckered pink
of elbow
when your search
for the slippery
spoon
is complete. I am a faintness
growing fainter

the outline of a sound

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

I am
the only one who now can see

past the swelling, tangerine sunrise
And the scatter of chubby stars, to where
My father slumps, easing sleep from his eyes
With knuckles, rough and pink, while my mother
Hums a warm, liquid tune of a long-lost life.

My tree, revisited

no attachments: all things go
Fi ve cle an chunks
across the lawn
one morning on my way
outside.

Hot-pink summers provide
Tan-crisp faces
Pockets scratchy with sand
and heart-biting, igniting images
of boys in bookstores, in buses
Stooped
over novels with jagged names

These darlings invite
lavender-pink daydreams
to feed the fat vacancies.
We imagine pathsm(cr)ashing
Love-sparks will zip free
So we, too, can leap

Then--
The heart-hack of beautiful boys
Who feign interest just to prove they can
Seduce us into a face-slam
With a pole,
Or an ouch- slip into a
ditch.

While rubbing raw bruises
And shrugging off wormy
dirt clods,
We will glance at them--strong--a phoenix
born from the ashes of heart-burn

And think:
Did the lumps in our throats betray our careless expressions?

I remember
Long, liquid afternoons inside my grandparents'
Shiraz home. My sisters and I
Skipped the spiral staircase, while my grandfather, small and round,
Wob-bled behind. And those slow nights of potato salad on hot bread:
I ripped out doughy middles and formed heaps on my plate. Then my grand-mother
glided past, warning me to
Feed the cats and feel the hunger
That poked their insides blue.
I am nothing
Without photos of my mother, my father
My parents
At the wedding my mother's hair curtseyed
My father still wore his hair
Proud and black and frosting-thick
With their thumbs they scooped up cake
But fed promises. Years later,
My mother
Is spinning away and
Unwinding. There are bits of her
Creased
In the laundry room, near the plastic baskets and the dirty bras,
Like mango holders. There are bits of her roaming with the house flies,
From one watermelon chunk to another.
And there are bits of her shivering in the May breeze
That smells like tulips and warm
pool water.

My Tree

My tree--the one,
Richly-rooted--
With leaves that dripped
Fresh shade. I found in
Five clean chunks across the lawn
This morning on my way
Outside. Its gold-hue
Hips still burned so
Beautiful.

Poem written as I slipped into sleep...

I dream bright, tangerine dreams.
The inside hollowed out,
Crammed with French fries and
A sticky stoop of licorice string. I once roamed
Those smooth-water streets, where children drifted cool and quiet. They wore
Entire shells in their hair, while twigs danced from their ankles. I am slowly
Spinning away and sinking down. There are entire light bulbs dedicated to the hope
That we can see without our eyes alone.

If one designer inspired me to dream, it was you, Alexander McQueen

I was seated at the coffee table
It was a clean, February morning
Cold yet inviting. The sky
flat and blue.
I peeled my first orange of the day
The smell sang citrus

My phone quivered on the table
I received the new, and learned
That
They discovered you in a London apartment
Your London apartment.
I was just

about to finish peeling my orange.
There are still bits of it stuck to the smooth
Insides of my fingernails.
I can smell you, now, wherever I
Go. You smell like oranges. I know this now,
I didn’t know it before.