AIAW Featured Poet: FARNAZ FATEMI

Farnaz Fatemi - Writer and Poet

I.

By myself sleeping
after you are gone
I sometimes forget you are rather near--
measuring scoops of coffee
or letting the steam into your milk.
The kitchen you are in, the day you are already beginning,
still unfamiliar to me when I wake
and I must learn my role in them
all over again like a visitor.
You see it in my face and
you falter.
You want to know already
how we fit. You do know
but the question mark you see I have shaped myself into
makes you forget.

II.

By myself in bed I am different
than myself with you in bed.
You know the feeling, when I forget I am with you
and my heel digs back into your quadricep
or hip, and you have to protect yourself
instead of being reached for by me, my arms
like wings cocooning you and my legs like koalas around your thighs.
When I am by myself I am reaching forward and back at once,
scooping up the world and feeling it root down into
my deepest depths.

III.

By myself in bed I am different
than when we share it.
You can see it on my face:
you want to kiss my cheekbones awake
and take up the space next to me.
When we sleep together, you wake
and turn to the edge of the bed.
Rub your head, legs,
aching knees, stand up and go to your espresso.
You return when I don’t follow,
call good morning from the doorway,
and wait.

IV.

By myself sleeping,
I go far away from my body,
gathering perspective.
You can see it: when you tell me
to wake up, my face reveals the confusion
of hearing a language I don’t understand.
Did you speak to me?
It is as if I am watching my own face
wondering how I am going to respond
to your endearment, whether I recognize
who I am,
who we are.

Incantation from the Betrayed Lover

Please surprise me. Surprise me,
make me hold my breath again,
then appear without the ghostly edges
of a mirage. Squeeze between my lashes with light.
Give me something to compare to our past.
Or let this stone I’ve swallowed
sit lower in my body
comforting. Let it root.
Grow into a halfway house for my heart.

Sister

Mehrabad airport, Teheran
Outside the terminal doors
We are a crushing pre-dawn crowd,
We swarm out between the glass exits
And the taxi stands:
On one side, my grandmother,
the other, my mother.
My first visit
since my grandfather’s death
Years earlier.

The sister disembarks,
Trails us by meters,
is round, middle aged,
Draped in black veils and skirts.
She begins to scream in anguish
Sags with the folds of cloth, downward,
Drops to her knees
Arcs her arms upward,
over her head
Then down, like two axes, down,
While she cries,
As if to pray and thresh the ground
In punishment,
pray and punish
Pray and punish.

She is wailing:

My brother--
My brother,
The only one I had.
I only had one brother
My brother
He was the only one I had.

Strangers, a dozen deep,
surround her, drawn by the keening
of her loss.
Her pitch rises as her body falls
Sideways, she leans there.
The only one I had.
A ring of women,
Now wailing,
reach her.
The sky above us swells
with their sounds.

We hover near the sister
My grandmother’s face opens wide
Cheeks flush, eyes pooling,
My mother’s face, an answer
Lips trembling, parted.
And my aunt’s, my sister’s, my heart
All flail open
toward this crooning
while my grandfather’s memory takes shape
between us, sprung loose
as if by incantation
He was the only one I had.

Marie -Therese Speaks

If I was a cubist painting
You wouldn't know where to look first.
Your eyes wouldn't linger on my chiseled nose
long for my rounded pink lips.
My upside down elbow
and my skewed sense of shoulders
would call to you instead
and your eyes would follow a tortuous line
to traverse the way through my body,
teach you that all these parts
gathered up into this pile of parts
hold clues which unfold upon each other
in a mobius strip of locks and keys.

Your eyes would tell you
stand back to assess the assemblage.
They'd direct you to resist the urge
to straighten the asymmetries
and squint their request that I might show myself,
stretched onto all four corners of the canvas.

Only then would you begin to see the mass
eked out from lines and curves, paint
and brushstroke, light and shadow.
You'd be forced to question
whether you really see wings growing out
either side of my back, incongruously sized
though stunning, or perhaps I am simply
sitting in a large, crooked, pink chair.

And somedays gazing at me
you must admit my head seems akimbo,
sidelong, and you will ask me
"why do I see you so many different ways?"

And it won't be a consideration
that one of my breasts is many times smaller
than the other breast.
Instead, standing back, you will notice
an astonishing sense of balance,
and it will be difficult to pinpoint why.

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