AIAW Featured Poet: ROGER SEDARAT

Roger Sedarat - Poet

Dear Regime

After you've ground him into powder,
you can burn this to a fine ash. His family feels
it would be better off with nothing.

My Father returned from Iran with everything but his bones.
He said customs claimed them as government property.
We laid him on a Persian carpet in front of the television.
When I’d hold his wrist to his face
because he wanted to know the time,
we could see the holes made from swords in his elbow.
His arm reminded me of kabob koobideigh.
It was hard for him to look outside;
he said the cumulus clouds
were too much like marrow
and he couldn't stand watching the dog
sniff the backyard, searching
for the rest of him. My sister and I put him to bed
thinking that beside our mother
he'd turn into himself,
but through the door we only heard him crying,
telling his wife he could never again make love,
and through the keyhole we saw her shivering with him
wrapped around her like an old blanket
until he died one morning.
She folded him into a rectangle,
mailing him in a white shoebox
back to his country.

V.

Now open your mouth, Iran, and guzzle
The imperative tense in this ghazal.

Sold oil, thick enough to choke a poet,
Censors by spilling across the ghazal.

The “glug glug” of booze in Muslim countries
Echoes through most mosques (the devil’s ghazal).

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m turning
Over forms. I’m starting with the ghazal.

My Uncle N—led SAVAK for the Shah,
A dead letter left inside this ghazal.

Most Persians worship “Hafez,” but Hafez
Transcended his ego in the ghazal.

Double double boiling some trouble:
Eye of Khomeini plopped into a ghazal.

My Father’s Buick, a real gas guzzler,
Backfired, and wrote its own kind of ghazal.

You’re not supposed to be so post-modern
By saying, “Look, this poem’s a ghazal.”

We drank fizzy doogh on our road trip
Out of the bottle. It hurt to guzzle.

Behind the new nuclear power plant
Two lovers like two lines in a ghazal…

I will not put myself in this ghazal.
If you want me, you’ve read the wrong ghazal.

The Hysterical is Historical: An Interview with Haji

Interviewer: What do you see as your first transgression?

Haji: One day, when I was around 5 or 6, I put silly putty on the Koran and took it to the mosque. After Friday prayers, as men began putting on their shoes, I stretched that most fundamental of texts beyond its limits.

Interviewer: Were you punished?

Haji: For years I received both lectures and lashes. Worse was the feeling of being torn between cultures, wanting to belong to the tradition disparaged.

Interviewer: So you felt like silly putty?

Haji: I did.

Interviewer: How would you currently describe yourself to your readers?

Haji: I’m a four-leaf clover who’s been mown over.

Interviewer: Both lucky and unlucky?

Haji: The story of my life.

Interviewer: Would you say it’s also the current condition of literature?

Haji: Insofar as I embody such a spirit, yes.

Interviewer: Who are your greatest influences?

Haji: For this interview, Socrates. For the scope of my work, Holden Caufield, Omar Khyyam, and namesake, Haji Baba of Isfahan.

Interviewer: A couple of these are characters, not actual writers. This may be a touchy subject, but you are yourself invention, no?

Haji: It is as you say.

Interviewer: Can you define your relationship to your creator?

Haji: Can anyone?

Interviewer: Point taken. Still, there’s something different about you as a literary subject. What would you say of your author?

Haji: I figure this “Roger Sedarat” is much like Edmond Morris.

Interviewer: Reagan’s biographer, the one who interjected a persona within the life of the president?

Haji: Exactly, which was not a bad idea, except for the ethics involved.

Interviewer: Do you feel betrayed?

Haji: Yeah, and more than a little disappointed. Unable to truly write from himself, the poet invented me.

Interviewer: He could have done worse.

Haji: Agreed. He made me a kind of Rumi with balls. Still, under the guise of artistic construction, I can t figure how either of us could ever feel like a real man.

Gormeigh Sabzi

As I stand holding her up,
Grandma Taj cuts the blue-green vein
from her arm and yanks it like a string,
pulls leeks, spinach, green onion,

and parsley out of her paralyzed side,
scratches her right cheek, the skin
from a white onion cracking
between her fingers as she rips

out an eye that becomes a dried lime
rolling across the counter.
The strike, strike of a wooden match,
the blue gas flame

under the bubbling pot, the chanting
of verses from the Koran.
I watch the miracle of saffron rice
appearing on a platter, her bleeding gums,

the pained whisper of Allah Akbar
through missing front teeth.
I sip the wooden spoonfuls of sauce
she holds in her trembling hand

and know the magic of blood;
I eat the piece of tadeeg she breaks,
the oil and turmeric oozing
into the grooves of her palm

and down my chin and I know
what it means to give oneself
completely.
She asks me to carry her

to the table, her body folded
into my arms, the nails on
her working hand digging
into my neck as if to make
another meal, and in the pain
I feel such guilt, suspecting
I have too little inside to give until
part of me begins to die.

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