Talk to me, I do not say (unedited)

I do not utter words that are meaningless especially when I am not a person who matters or should matter to you. What I write here will remain entirely yours but not for the sake of destiny. I believe writings become reality. I don’t interfere with the folded and the unfolded. I let this piece decide for itself. It can be a fictional writing or a romantic prose. You can read it however you like, however you wish, however you choose. I am generous when it comes to you as you have been generous to me for more than a decade now. I don’t know why people cross paths. I don’t know if there is such a thing as pure and unexceptional love, an eternal emotion. I don’t know if the chicken came before the egg or the cream on top of the milk. I don’t know if there are imaginary lines on the walls or imagery on a rainbow bright. I don’t know so many things and so many things seem not to want to know of me but there are a few things that I know and that is when a shell opens there is a pearl. When there is an eye there is a lightning, and when there is a dream, mastery takes place. How I wish I could write you a piece that would shake you to the bone, and the impatience out of you, a piece that would balance the air, and unbalance the earth, and lined up the wave break. But glittering words are not enough for the heart mussel to fall in and out love. Woods with sands, sands with tooth marks made out of rocks, rocks with hidden messages written on the wall, Juliet with a flatten coffee cup and a debased city with clouds clocking jealous of a blue and bright sky could all become part of a feather written letter, untimely, unwanted, unasked for. That is of course when the mouth of envelop is licked, and the pupil of the paper with words of love are closed with a promise of peace. Peace.

A Brisk Sunday Morning (unedited)

I roll down your body as would a brisk Sunday morning on a city when streets are not busy by crossroads of cars and crowds and are tasty with bowls of fresh air, evoking nostalgia of scents, belonging, places and people. I roll down your body and lick the skin off the memories to make new. My face is against your chest. I hear your heartbeat and I count one, two, three, and four. I have waited for you, eight, seven, six, and five. I am a patient lover. I wait. I count. I dream and then it happens. I wait and count your fascination, desire, and falling in and out of love with other women. I don't fight the Pyrrhus of time. I don't. There is no battle to fight but to practice the art of writing you letters of love so that one day you recognize my love, this proud journey, the eruption and survival of the soul.

Came to Life (Unedited)

I look at your photos and they overwhelm me with emotions and the desire to inhale you like the scent of Diorella. When I left Iran I had a small bottle that belonged to my mother. It was empty and I filled it with water to remind me of life, my country, and the scent of my mother. The country I have never returned to, the mother who died three days from now seven years ago, the perfume which was born on the same year as I came to life is no longer marketed but you, like the scent in that bottle, are intact in my soul.

Hopes and Dreams

These are droplets of love. These are taking furniture from one room to another. These are walking in a parade and hoping to see you fully dressed in me. These are constant dreams and hope to open the rope to a peaceful future when infidelities are not reasons to kill and lovers do not grow apart in anger. All I want to do is to say I am a woman whose accidental birth secured her a public rape and public hanging, a woman who could fall because of an accidental birth in class.

How would she move, turn over to him, when they were in love? How would she glide him inside her to construct love and lust? I think about her. I thought about her all day. I think about how passion was fabricated into hate or hate into a crime. Who was the criminal? Who can cast love and cast hate and pour the cognac into an invisible glass. Don’t ask me whom I am writing about or what does love mean after all?

What are you meant to me? What was he meant to her? What do words have to do anything with the amount of my dedication in these writings? Why should it matter if a woman’s name is Shahla Jahed or Sakineh Ashtiani? They loved men. They loved because they could, and fell almost daily in love with the same man. Women who love, women who may or may not have had killed for love. But what I write is not their story. It is the story of other women, who love but love in short and long writings.

Every Morning (Unedited)

Sitting behind a kitchen table with orange juice and thoughts extending and rising in the glass I feel vulnerable. I open my mind to play across the calendar corner and seek you out but you are on the move again. Crusts crumble between my fingers as the realization throbs through the heart. Finding, losing, and finding you, is like trying to reach you amidst the crowds bargaining at a Damascus bazaar. You are ahead of me, many steps, streets, suitcases, and changing skin tone under the sun. I miss you already.

I have to confess. Every morning I wake up hoping to have had received a line from you, or to find your hand on the door knob to call on me. I want to retain my strength in not-writing to you. This silent is blinding as it takes its course to bring me down to my knees. The ecstasy of dissolving out of my flesh, in love with you, and in such a steady format is working against my nature. Am I in love? Am I not in love? Should I continue or should I not write to him, I ask myself everyday. I know what I want but what I want leaves me miserable when it is not matched with yours. Should I treat this as a short lived love? Or should I arrange to see you for a whole day to reassure you do not exist in my life? I don’t know. What I do know is I will eventually lose you in the bargaining crowd amidst a bazaar.

Days of Flowing Through (Unedited)

Talk. Listen. Talk. Talk. Listen. The word is an offing to the heart, mellifluous to the ear, and summery to the lover’s soul when she hears the intensifying joy in your tone. Talk. Listen. Talk. Talk. Listen. You talk and I listen to your tender voice. I hear you talk about your travels, your life, and my writings. I hear the straw against the glass. I hear the fork dancing on the plate. I hear your arm moving across the table. I hear you would want us to go to the movies. I hear you say I am tall. I hear you say you are shy. I hear words that don’t matter to us. I hear voices and sounds around us. I hear none. All I can think of is to take us out of the dark room to a place where temptation is more than penciling on a page or typing on the keyboards. A place where words find their true shapes as would clay in the hands of a sculptor.

It is rather unfortunate that I can’t read my writings to you as they blossom on the page. My asthma is in full force today. For every word I type and read, a cough and tears follow. I changed my woolen shirt to a cotton black with a white line around the neck. If I was close to you I would have you kiss my neck. Then I would ask to hear you read what I write for you. You are nine hundred and twenty five days of flowing through a mountain fog away. But it doesn’t matter how far and away you are. To me you live on these pages and in the room where I saw you first. And the desire lives. The desire of my body coming to life next to you glitters the heart and so does the ritual of tracing your voice through the crowded room.

Between Now and Then

When I love, I love passionately, deeply, and fully. I love the hands, the legs, the lips, the mind, the voice, the words, even hand writings of the man I love. I love to hold the palm of my lover and feel it next to my face. I love to caress his lips with mine without the need to touch. That is how I love. I love to love without a reason, without giving an inch of doubt, trading life long promises, or starving for attention from my lover. I love an undisturbed imagination where I can write to him without sorrow or pooling tears in his eyes, my eyes, or propelling an arrow through the heart.

Love is joy, joy of letting the spirit rise, and the body to sing, like a little slip of a poem where I can shrug off what comes written between now and then. That is the texture of my memory. The two empty glasses on the table, walking on a paved brick street, cross off the sounds, and an inviting "I love you" note without contemplation, the reflection of a glance, and the agreed upon time to silently go beyond compare. I love because I can. I love because there is no pressure, no demand, and no reason not to love, because nonbeing is not a scattered despair.

One Other Afternoon

Time is a sprinkler of life, hope, pleasure, pain, poetry, and you, and time wins its own promise. Here is one other afternoon with a freckled sun. A perfectly crowded time of day, full of colors, sounds, autumn, and smell of vegetarian lasagna. I think of you and how many pieces I will write for you before the glistened charm of the words gently pull you toward me, before humans, before hidings, before future, and before whispering dreams off the pages. I don’t have you therefore there is no fear of losing you. I don’t seek excuses to see you. I don’t go to places to get drunk in love and wait for you to hold my living body. I don’t tell you of my dreams, secrets, imaginations, rising, humbling, and worshiping. I have this replaceable love where sounds fight for ears, yours, to ripple and confess of love.

When your suitcase disappears I am not there to shed tears or wave at you with a smile. I am writing for you here. All of which can attest to the fact I am not shy but embrace love with all the divinity and desires it offers. Love comes to me in different ways; one is in your few lines of dedicating a book to me. You call in your handwritten note for me to get inspiration from the book. I do. I confess out of the book, out of the box, out of those lined cubic houses, and despite the intense complexity of these all I am ambitious to have my hands touched by yours. I will not have to live twice to make up for my mistakes or drink coffee with a thickened taste trying to avoid my weakness for you. The idea itself, to write for you, is a promise into making. A little slip of thoughts, a little touch of flirtation, pieces of writings and a short footage of my life. And here I might say it is strange to write for someone who will not write back. You don’t ask. You don’t need. You don’t want. You don’t estimate the time between this and my next letter to you.

If I walked to the window, or lingered through a dream, if I was to become a ghost of myself or a melting hill, you still would not want to know the reflection of reality and changes that ponder these words. I am misty. You are away and I have no desire to hide. I write and you read. That is the promise of time for now.

Twelve Years of Days and Seconds

Here you are. Here I am. Twelve years have passed. The days that I have lived knowing you will read me not as an editor, a lover or a friend but like a breeze through the pages. You touch and turn me around without having a history with you. There is no mystery in knowing you either. I know everything about you, how you brush your teeth, where you travel, who you visit or date. There is nothing to learn or expect from you. There is nothing to give or gain from knowing you or loving you. You agree to be my muse and I agree to write for you. As simplistic as it may sound I like you to read me knowing I write for you. I want to think of you leading me through images, those shadowing autumn leaves, empty surfaces of unbending ideas, and quarter hours of finding and folding. Nothing will split. Nothing will rumble. I will remain the same, a chosen life, an unchosen fate, large, small, pieces of love, grabbing archives of love notes, a rug at the foot of a doorway or a seat to sit and read to you in my words. Like a description on a ring or velvet next to the skin my words will dare you to constantly seek them out. The wholeness of loving you, loving life, watching passionate kisses of delight at the corners of your eyes, I cannot resist.

The foreignness in my presence, the oddness in the symbolical embraces of joy versus gray, the unmade promises, the ever faithful responses wave you closer to the shore. Closer. Almost as if I want you to remind yourself of retuning home, to hide behind bushes and watch your mother paint or bike-travel through liberation of your heart. And that, you will feel, an unveiling voice despite the limits of nurturing from this end. The hours pass. You will fly away to master a new day and no one will answer the phone you borrowed to receive calls. Everything is as everything should be. I write for you. You read my words. You wonder. I sculpt. You push the glass thin on the table; I pull the suit out of the suitcase. These have the same basic principle. They are transparent, red, white, green, blue, and see through…

Forever Knowing

Those moralists sculpt democracy through knocking colors of forever knowing: shout, ashes, throng, and the touch of never forget me, never forget me. But I have. I have exited the zigzags, the blush after drinking the wine, growing cold, warm, cold, paradise versus a steadfast wall and heavenward mortality. These dead poets knocking at my windows, these dead youth knocking at my windows, these tweeting revolutionaries with crusty words to be translated for the world, they grab my tongue, taste, touch, nest, tweets. I am anonymous and pretend their green velvet cracks domains and prints words in smiles.

When mussels drop, the grass root is not stoned, and love is not stiffening, I write for you again. So many of us want to kiss those great lips and sweeten wilderness of your skin. I will ride my mouth on another secret, a secret that is not inherited through birth, nationality, religion, and race.

You took my love as an offering.

The Winter

You may find ease in your silence but I find peace when I inscribe these pieces for you. When my heart, fosters an arched sun, a pen half curved, an eye half drunk, I carve you letters. Day one, I write you of my love; day two, I write you of my love; day three, I erase them all. This is life. Words are not blades but to heal, not to hurt, but to swoon with faith. To me writing to you is where petunias on the pillows dance their printed petals.

At fifteen, a mystic told me never to journey where the ocean pulses power into the ringed cliffs. I would rather live with the chance of seeing you than risk death along the way. Off the wallpapers, birds fly south for the winter, but I conclude my epic of love here in the north without you.

Why did you ask if you will ever lose me? Why did you say you will never leave? What was it that you wanted me to say or to have written to you so that you would not disappear again? I may never know the answers but I know one thing: amidst the misty bales of memory, descended from the fields of devotion, I am a woman to you made of best-to be forgotten-love.

Through the Night

I chanted for years, for you to exist, return, ensue, emerge, and to let me hold you. Then sudden as a sandstorm, you arrived, erupted in my soul, and left. I wake up, shivering in the cold and cry. Like the ocean waves I want to crown your name on the rocks, like the wind to crawl around the mountains and engrave them with your image, and write you out of these countless scars, out of my heart. I reached out my hands to you, to touch you, and in return I found my fists full of a pitch-black moon, hallowed like those sitting under the eyes of my words. I ran my fingers through my hair, my heart through the night, and my shadow from you. In Baha’u’llah's words, to the true lover reunion is life, and separation is death. Now you arrive and vanish; to me this is a nightmare. Unlike you, I believe we are gifted with a heart to love and not just to love a few selected. You regard life differently. I am not livid, not even mired by the turn of the events. I accepted this long ago. This is how you are, your remedy for a grave heart. It is our fate that insists to bid farewell at each greeting.

The worldly hope men set their hearts upon
Turns ashes-or it prospers; and anon,
Like snow upon the desert's dusty face,
Lighting a little hour or two-is gone.

-- Omar Khayyam

I turn off the lights.

Neither Night Nor Day

I want to hold you so that night and day can't find their way through. I want to write letters that were meant to be read only by you. I want to write you words that may find a life, but I don't know how far I can go, how much I can write. After all, there is a life, and there is a life.

Each word you read from me carries a thousand loves, each sentence carries a thousand more. Each time I sit to write to you, I need to get my conscious unconscious and my unconscious into a conscious state so that what I write is not burning down a heart or a house.

I love you. I don't know if there are other words that can carry as much meaning. I loved you when I stood with my toes freezing in the telephone booth twenty years ago, calling you oceans away, and I love you today, still oceans away. If there was such a thing as a parallel universe where life was what we wrote down, you could see me right now holding you in my arms so that neither night nor day could find their way through.

Glass of Time

You ask me to write you whatever comes to my mind and to send it to you. I will write down my thoughts but will not mail. You can read them like everyone else here on these pages. They have been locked inside me for too long, and the time has arrived for them to be unsealed. These are the letters that you had decided for us both to be delivered to a different dimension in eternity. The letters you never replied to, never kissed and kept, and never returned. They got lost with that girl I was, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of cities without streets, streets without names. They were never opened by you, the man who lived in a house not within the reach of my words. Now twenty years later, and continents apart, you send me your picture, a very simple premise, and my chest melts in my clothes. Twenty years ago I hoped someday you would find your way back to me. I didn’t know it would be a day in September, the month I flew into my future without the man I loved so intensely, the man, who like a drop of water ran down the glass of time.

Twenty Years After

Like a pack of drunken shadows, I waited twenty years to write this for you. I don't recall the day you first kissed me or the date I fell in love with you, but April 11th is when I first remember you in full image. Sitting in a room with a row of windows, I saw you leave the building and walk to the car. Your face silhouetted to the right, you wore a white shirt with vertical blue lines and a pair of dark pants. I looked at the clock; it was 11:45 a.m. I needed to keep that memory intact. I missed you, the smell of your cologne, the texture of your hair, and the sound of the echo of your voice. I leaned over to take in the hurried movement of your body as you sat with your back molded into the car seat. I felt like a banned book, or a song roaring out of a stereo in your life. What I knew was that my heart couldn't escape the anxiety of not being with you. When I could press my face against yours, I would lose my fear of falling. You were to me the sincerest essence of love. There was no magic formula or difference in faith that could keep my heart away from you. Even today as I write these lines I know to me loving you was my true reality.

I write and erase, write and erase. Maybe dizzy is not the right word, maybe a whirling sensation is closer to what it is I feel these days. I am going through overwhelming emotions, emotions that in the midst of the night have made breathing hard and my chest pound. I don't know how other people deal with losing their first love, but to me being away from you felt as if my arms were cut off my body.

You know, I wanted to be the one who reads other people's stories. It is not something I wanted to happen to me, to be the one who loved intensely and lost. But I forgive you not because you write me to seek forgiveness. I forgive you because before you, I didn't know how to love.

The Presence

God has no desires. I do. I, who makes love with her flesh and writes by hand so that you read me and recount the neon lights alongside Vakil Bazaar: the courtyards, old shops, and late night summer breeze through the mosquito nets. After all what is life but a wretched mirror if I don't write for you and you don't read me? Beloved! Your presence may be a swelled pulse, a modern consumption, or a collectible antique to possessive souls but to me it is the manifestation and the revealing compassion. For that reason I trust my words to be read by those who may not know what love is, and judged by wolves' eyes, so that emptiness will not remain their only path in life.

I cannot be shamed. I shame those who want to make me turn into a naive heart, bewitched by tainted rules as human rights friendly. My beloved! I have seen men die before my eyes, bombs drop, children flee, and women cry because they were ordered to observe a stifling silence. It is within all these things that I utter your name and want you to undress me into a world where you can dip your fingers inside me. I lie back and watch you as you move on top of me to uncover the mystery.

I point at the center, where eternal life flows, spins, and mesmeric memories turn into the heart of a child. I love you and in loving you everything becomes simple, clear, and content. Rules do not find limitations. I do not treat loving you as a guest or a visitor. When in love, pain does not have an authentic presence. Feelings avoid struggle, failure, and distraction. I am no longer a prisoner of tryouts, crust, and coated walls. I am not formless. I do not seek to find sentimental ways to satisfy you. My desire is not a fantasy to begin with or to be parted from. I am to feel the warmth without detention, I who wants to put a face on the godly presence of love.

Moon After Moon

I need you to say you love me. I want your words to touch me again. Look, who knows maybe I will break into a thousand pieces soon. Perhaps morning tempers and letters burn, but I want my body to learn new words, a fistful of words as sweet and sour candy that happens to be in my mouth; words that stem from the heart and soul, making rich feathery sensation on the back of my neck; words that tantalize like the tip of your tongue finding its path to my lips. These are simple adventures that fill, pant, and pour the depth of my body where I let natural forces find fever at every beat, every beat that is as strong as my desires.

To be loved by you, one must know how to swim. You live your love. In you, love is flesh and bones. It is so intensely real that it feels unreal. You are the life I haven't begun. You make my blood steam and my lips come forth to seek yours even in your absence. Every morning when we awaken and the sky strips off its black covers, my naked flesh awaits your response.

I bend my arms without reservation. I have never been this woman before you, before I found you, before beautiful became a little song that breathes slowly but continually. I can hear your heart like a shell next to my ears. Linger and whisper my name. Touch me. Sensuality remains a female quality.

Even in places where women are forced to veil and live under religious laws, sensuality remains intact. In places where life and lives are interpreted by men who are an expansion of God's legal exemptions on earth, women have to remain sacred with their lovers as unknown intimates.

Moon after moon these women's soft kisses are opium highlights while their hair, smoky eyes, faces, throats, and tenderness are forced to obey the rules of men whose logic lurks and shames God and goodness. Women, who at times are stained by the soil, covered up to their chests, lapidated, spools of white on their beds bloodied, or their bodies beaten by men who are tenants of an unpredictable God, men who act as His exhibitionists.

It is in all these when I need you most to hold me and let me stand naked from sororal feelings before they reappear, wrestle, and make me their faithful companion.

The Spring Snow

I open my arms. I am Shenandoah, daughter of the stars. I open my legs and become Shekinah for you to inhabit my body. To my east you will find my right arm volunteering to hold your back and to my west is the left arm trying to remove the pins from my bra and position myself in a series of moves. I am real as real gets, as are these exact things you are doing to me while your thumb removes the lipstick so to kiss my lips. It is spring, snowing here. It is an interrupted season, like the texture of your trousers, trousers that are waiting to be thrown over the bed. Your hands are slipping under me to find the right position for our bodies and I move to discover the sensitivity of this change. You go down on me. I love the movement of your tongue yet I haven't met you. Not having met you beloved feels like a razor sitting erect next to my skin. A razor I say, and I bite my lips. How dare I compare my physical aching for you to the pain of women who have suffered from Female Genital Mutilation?

It is not even close. I remember my Somali friend with whom I worked in the United Nations in Islamabad, Pakistan. Four thousand years of Pharaonic custom was practiced on her. A custom that is still practiced in some Middle Eastern countries including Western Iran in addition to many African nations.

There were many Somalis in Pakistanwaiting for resettlement to the West. She was one. She was a refugee, a Qax in her own language. According to the Pakistani laws it was unacceptable of the refugees to pursue higher education. The two of us worked voluntary or involuntary from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon. One day when the driver was taking us to our homes I realized she is in pain. I asked her if she needs help and she told me there is nothing anyone can do to undo the trauma she had suffered as a four year old, and the pain she experienced each month. She was one of many victims of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) an act wrongly understood as an Islamic law. In her case it was the infibulation, the worst case of FGM.

The home surgery had involved extensive tissue removal of the external genitalia, and the inside of the labia majora. Then her labia majora were held together and stitched. Such was her fate so that maybe a Nin Hun (a bad man in Somali) who was also a victim and product of such misinterpretation of Islam would joyfully cut the stitches on their wedding night.

She lived across the street from where I lived. I would go to her home where her cousin the son of an ex-Somali prime minister would often come to visit his aunt and my friend. We would watch the latest videos he brought along and talk about everything we found interesting at that age. There were also days when my friend and her sisters tried to teach me to move my hips to Soohor Caashaqa, the way they danced to the Somali song. I felt I was turning into a seductive Somali dancer, a native but then I wasn't a native. I hadn't suffered from a FGM like they did.

I bite my lips and ache for you. I want to feel your tongue and not the razor against my skin. It is spring, snowing here. It is an interrupted season, like the texture of your trousers, trousers that are waiting to be thrown over the bed. I want to feel you licking me inside out. I need to feel your breath on my skin. I want to be stripped of the nights and grays. I want you to read me like centuries of women wisdom and lovers walking side by side by the rivers. I want to feel your tongue and my flame offering warmth to the shadows. I want your mouth to be my mouth’s caretaker. Cut the thorns off me of this longing for you. I want to come to you all passion and summer sunny.

At Night

I want to disappear one day before my birthday arrives and arrive at your place and be handed to you like a gypsy's crystal ball. You know my cousin married a gypsy before I was born. She fell in love with the lover of the lakes and lands. I had never met her and we didn't have her picture. I only know of a woman who left with the wind and perhaps died at a mountain hill. I wonder how your hands would hold the crystal ball. The ball that can fall and break into pieces, like the body of a little girl across the town whose home was ruined by the bombs. I saw that house. My parents took us to see what the bombs did and how deep they could dig into the heart of Tehran, four floors and a half of the apartments next door. There had been a birthday party in the house we were told. And again the next day my father had to go to stand in the line to buy milk and eggs with the family coupon that was the gift of the Islamic revolution to each Iranian family. And again at midnight we were awakened by the sounds of bomb alarms and the wait to know if death would knock at our door or not. If not we could have the eggs and the milk either bought by the coupons or at the black market, the punishing black. I want to know how you will discover me and depart at night. I want to know how your fingers will hold the crystal ball and my breasts. How will you move your lips on my face before disappearing down between my thighs, my thighs that are as tall as are the Persepolis Pillars.

How many years have passed since those nights when feather dusters and chairs shook alike at midnight? How many years have passed since my father painted or covered the car lights in blue when driving to grandmother who lived on her own? Life back then had turned into a blackboard with multiple crossings and o's, the o's being my fists and those crucified by the religion and ideologies. Tired wrinkles on the people's face, cloths that were not ironed out because there was no electricity, and thick mustaches of men who in earlier years were communists and later had their balls sliced and handed to them on plates. We watched how the virgin blood was made into blood cakes with sticky rice and how noses were cut and hands were chopped off by the regime and the bombs, a combination of the extraordinary to begin each day without recalling the sins. I am coming down on you now to have you inside my mouth. To bring you to a satisfaction now that the lights are on and the bombs have stopped. I clean the house from my memories. I sing as I mop your floors and shake my bosom. I play a song and dance to the rhythm. I am the combination of my land and the bombs. If you drop the crystal ball, the gypsy will not read again. The gypsy will wander out and her tracks will just get lost. Hold the crystal ball, the ball and the gypsy who are both this woman who is in love. Caress me, let me love you before my pen becomes eternal and flies with the wind. This is not the last call. I will fold my body around yours as my poetry crystallizes your life.

I am rooted in your heart.

Sizdah Bedar

Every Sizdah Bedar I am sick. It is become my genetic code to have fever on the thirteenth day of this Persian celebration of the spring festival. The oldest memory of my first sickness on this day goes back to one of these Sizdah Bedars. Driving near Tehran after having Baghali polo --a dish of baby lima bean with dill rice and meat, the common cuisine for the day-- I saw a Haji Firooz, a painted face character in his red costume who is the traditional herald of the Nowruz season singing and dancing. Maybe it was watching the children jumping around him or maybe it was an incident from half an hour earlier that made me feel dizzy and sick. A group of armed Pasdars (revolutionary guards) had come to the area where families were sitting, and children were playing. The Pasdars had started screaming, punching, beating, and arresting a group of young men and women because they were not married or were not blood Mahrams (the legal terminology in the Islamic sharia for the permanent seven Mahrams, with whom a woman may not be sexual i.e. father, step father, brother, father-in-law, son, step son, or a man the woman has shared the nursing milk as an infant). The area was where up until the year of revolution my parents would take us for picnics, and to watch Shah’s army Para shooters falling off the sky. The images were incredibly stunning and to me a little girl they were the Peter Pans of the blue and white. After what I observed on that Sizdah Bedar, seeing a Haji Firooz who historically is known to be the fire keeper has became a reminder of those injured men and women. Maybe on each Sizdah Bedar I have fever because it reminds me how the green grass can be painted by red blood.

Today in the U.S. the thirteenth day of the Persian New Year has arrived again but I haven’t prepared Baghali polo. I have fever since yesterday. My body is hot yet I want to make love to you. I want to make love to you ten years ago, and ten years from now. I want to feel safe in your hands, to rest on the bed with a glass of water next to me. You come to me, lick my dry lips wet, put your fingers in the glass and circulate it on my cheeks, behind my ears, drawing lines on my forehead in slow motions. I am naked. You come on top to enter me. Inside me is hot. Inside me burns even more. I want you to repeat my name. I want you to read to me your words. I need your memory, not a memory, or any memory; I need to have this memory of being with you. I want my hands, your hands, and the pen to beat on the paper. I want you to teach me how to love you more. To me your love is my life itself a reality as well as an inspirational happening.

I want to be virgin of all the memories, and the life experiences but you. I want to be a markless paper and be marked by you. I want my past, present, and the future to have your name on it. I want to have a body that can be made love to by you uninterruptedly. I want to have a heart that has one city's name on it, the city where you ARE at any given time. I have been handed this love generation after generation to find you somewhere close or even from far to let you know of the truth. Take away the roaming features of Sizdah Bedar from my memory. I want to survive the aching for my homeland from the edge of this country.

Draw me closer. I love you.

Now That Spring Is Here

I want to die and wake up in your writings. I want to be frozen yet my eyes watch the path you walk in eternity. Add me to your moves. That is how I want to move. Encourage me to leave. That is how I want to leave yet live near you. I rise, I fall, and I fly to be touched by you for a second. I want to impregnate chili on my lips, on my nipples so when you lick me your mouth will burn together with my skin. Season me in your scent, school me in your words, I am risking, giving, daring, I am always awaiting you. You are my ritual. I bow to the manner in which you write. You are the energy and the evidence that the world tilts a couple of times and now at this time it is my turn to tilt around you, for you, to serve you, to receive you with all you are. I love you in my entirely human knowledge and existence. I love you in all the positions a woman can make love to you. I love you in all your varieties. You master the writing, the making, the being, the loving. You are the aroma, and the peace. You are love. With you morals are dispensable. Every principle I know and believe in I fold at your feet. I am the least mysterious and in my least complexity I love you. I am one drop of wine. I am one drop of tear, simple. Now wake up and kiss me. Wake up and let me hear your voice. Wake up and hold me. Wake up to me. I want you now that spring is here. I want you passionately. I want you to push your fingers inside my chest, to take my heart in your hands, and smash it so that the hurting goes away. I want you then to put the pieces back together and caress, kiss, and place it in my chest, and close me up. I want you then to heal me so that I am healed by you. I love you. I love my new skin that is rejuvenated by your words. I love me for I am now with my heart that has your touch all over it.

My Living Body Is Yours

I imagine you alone wanting me to come to you. I imagine you opening the door for me and taking me in to love you. I imagine you loving me soft and hard, reading me your words in low and in high, and letting me hold you as you read. I imagine you writing for me and reading those words for me. I imagine you then saying these are for you and I will keep them, hold them, kiss them, carry them in my bra the closest to my heart. I want your words to touch my skin. I want to carry you inside me. I want to have your words sit securing my innocent extra life. I want you to be yours and for me to be able to hold you as you remain yours. I want you to let me prostitute my way to yours. I don't want mistrust, tailored suit and cultural costume. I believe in your honesty. There is no daylight with more light than your words. I am the most grateful woman who reads you, and hears you with absolute knowledge and lack of it. You don't expect miracles. You are one. Dominate me. My living body is yours as are my writings for ever. I am your seeker.

Twice Every Morning

Long ago when I was about five years old and with my parents was driving through the holy city of Qom on the way to another state we stopped to buy Persian Sohan (a candy made with honey, butter, saffron, wheat sprouts, sugar, and nuts). My father took me to the bazaar where women and men all dressed in black loose clothing were coming at me or so I felt. I had expected the city to be white, the people to be dressed in white, and everyone look skyward and angel like. I had heard the city is holy after all but it wasn't. It was the year the revolution was starting and everyone was soon to see Ayatollah Khomeini's portrait on the moon! A woman approached us and in a cruelly cold voice asked me why I hadn't covered my hair. I was shocked. I was a shy girl whose lips started to draw down on both corners. I was frightened. I was after all only a little girl with long brown hair, dressed in a jogging suit and sneakers. My father I don't remember how he reacted. In fact I don't remember what happened after. I only remember the excitement of buying Sohan died away, that my heart was beating fast and the corners of my lips trembled.

I wanted it to rain so that the feeling of being ashamed was washed away, that my father had hidden me under an umbrella or I would be in my dad's socks so that the woman had to talk to my father's shoes. After all that is part of the Islamic teachings that a woman doesn't look straight into a man's eyes. I felt defeated by her belief. I felt hopeless, helpless and the hair on my head started crawling over my skull. The Muslim woman had me feel my hair was Medusa's. She was one of those many self proclaimed Athenas who were outraged at their sacred temple of worships being violated and wanted to turn my tresses into snakes.

Now after all these years I am concerned. I am concerned that when we meet and you look straight into my eyes you will turn into stone, but still I want you. I want a day that is entirely mine that I can have entirely with you. You don't need any proof to know of my love for you. I don't need any proof to know you will care enough to let me love you. That is the story of us, the story that I write in which you have decided to participate, to let me write us the way I want to write us. My heart is vast. It loves and loves until the day when it shall stop beating and the draught takes over my body. The rest is known but here within this March-snow I write so that you know with you a day doesn't wear out, that it is everlasting. I expected this love to be unborn yet of all the creations in the world you are perhaps the only man that I know who doesn't stand still. With you I am this woman who knows the depth of your soul and in your depth she finds her shallow and narrow estate of being. I love you for the pain your love causes me. I love you for the hurt into which it liberates me. I love you for what I am taught by you. I love you for what I am not.

You know beloved, I wonder, I wonder if you have tasted the moonlight when you are in love, or the sands in the mouth when you are in pain? If you have gazed through a window thinking what old soul may sit on a rocking chair or what little boy may run around with one shoe untied and the other in his hand? Or have you watched a little girl who jumps rope as her younger brother is green and red spotting her dolls while glancing at her every now and then to see her reaction? Don't insult the dead and tell me how many pills are required to kill or whom a car will hit or of whom the ocean will take. The waves will neither hear your pain nor will the chanting birds withhold suffering. Let me raise both your hands and draw you near so that you close them around me and watch me in flames and not drowned.

What the meat of the fruit is to a body, a body is to the fruit, and the fruit is to the bird when the bird flies over the seas, the seas that rain over you, and the pain is washed from your body, isn't it so beloved? You are the seed as the seed is to the earth, and the earth is to me, as I am to your life, dusting the gray off your sky whenever you allow me to do so, isn't it so beloved? You live and I love you. You love, and I love you for loving. When you are loving I dive through the air to inhale your breath into my lungs. You are tender beloved, ah, so tender that the skin on my lips is not that soft when touching yours. You know beloved, no one drowns twice every morning except for me in your love. You live and I roll over your footsteps after you to hold the memory of your feet with my body forever whenever you leave.

March 8th

For you I write. In you I want to believe there lives a part of me that I have been seeking throughout my life. You know more about me than any other man has ever known or any woman I have befriended. These writings are yours. You can decide what to do with this trust, how to react, to take or reject me. This is I, true and true. I love you. No matter how many times I tell you I want to say it one more time because I am afraid of losing, afraid that you stop reading me somewhere on the line I write continually to let it flow over and beyond.

With you I don't hold back. I trust you with everything I am. With you I want to believe poetry lives and more so because you don't write poetry. To me you are a poem I read everyday when I walk quick or slow. Your image casts no shadow on my heart but clearly free verse is not an issue when the thuggees follow my traveling footsteps next to the Ganga, when my feet burn to reach you yet the wounds on them aren't mending too fast, when the season denies the one day to the Iranian women who demonstrate on Women's Day, and are, therefore, behind bars for asking for their rights, the rights they seek with all their flexibility toward a regime that captures them like little hunts. In all these things I know I can find peace in your writings when everything seems too centralized to hope for a democracy in Iran. It is your delicate words that wash the pain off my body, and heal the scars on my feet. I know I can narrate my images with you. You are after all the one who holds me with all my nakedness, clear, without any shadow peering.

I am at times impatient to meet the hour when I can kneel at your shore, to cup my fingers to drink you. One morning perhaps will be the one when I will taste you without exposing the veins over these pages, when I can kneel or take my skin off to swim through you, to hold you not over but from my inside out.

Live. Live and sing like the River Krishna, meeting me at the Bay of Bengal. We two are the bay itself resembling a triangle. You are the Sivabuddha, and my arms holding you, three. You know beloved, all the caves of Maharashtra with all their sculptures and paintings cannot hold me back in awe from wanting to hear your voice echo and pour over me. Nothing is as beautiful as you are. Nothing is as intimate as your presence. To me you are my one chance to be true to myself, to be able to taste the fig, to accept the past however it was, to live, and to want to know what the future of this affair will be. With you everything is a creation and not a recreation, everything enters, and centers. With you the missing is found and the founded love is the Ganga. You cleanse me of all the sins, and hold me sacred. It is with you that my cheeks blossom from the sun reflecting down on the waters of that sacred river: Ganga meri (my Ganga,) your waters are warm.

If I don't write as often as I used to it is because the days arrive unwaveringly. I sometimes wake up at four in the morning to write for you but lately dreams and night understand one another all too often. Beloved, life is life. Right is right. I don't write to fulfill a mission. I write when the creation invites me, when my reflection or shades are not shadowing over my words, but despite the news of the battlefields, the dictators ruling over powerless people, despite the occasional coffee break discussions of peace, my love for you continues. Please know that like the song says I hope that one day you will let me tell you: Come lend me your hand, let me be your friend as we start again in this life.

Now Even Is Not Even

In 1972, on November twentieth I was born on the third floor of Tehran's Hashtroudian Maternity Hospital. On its east wing faces were expressive to my heartbeat, and I cried: I am here. How so much of it has changed, that eastern country, wings of good memories jacket me warm only now and then. With the revolution of 1979 the dark night expanded over the country, over Iran, and men and women fell on the ground and the fall continues to this day. I am not there to see the falling of the fireballs firsthand but I don't live on the green mountains yet not say a word of the threes that are chopped, the fields, the grains that burn, that die. Now I sit where the earth tilts hours apart from my place of birth. Now even is not even, is uneven, and night is like black herd of goats standing and looking at me, here I am. In all this it is you who has won my trust, my nakedness in full. With you I don't hold back. You know me more than any man has ever known me. With you I am a saxophone and beat the world in to beats, heartbeats. With you the ethical bridges are in flame, rivers boil, with you I have abandoned the immoral. There is no wrong, no right in loving you. There is no boundary. In you I trust to say: I love.

You are a big city with everything and everyone that can be found in it. You are the nature with all of its purity. I look at my hands. The hands that hope to single you out in detail, to brush over your ears, to discover the tip of your chin, walking through your cells room to room, aware of the layers of Persian regions, and the genes. The chaos of work sometimes surrounds me and I watch my words fog away before my eyes. I wake up in the middle of the night to write for you my beloved but the mirror opposite the bed shows an exhausted woman, a woman who evidently has eyes with corners that cry and laugh, eyes that don't want to see the danger of losing you. I see shades and shapes adventuring on the walls. I see you unbuttoning my muscles from under the gown. I say: Touch me. I want an encore. I want to open my mouth to you. To drink you like wine. My eyes close open close open, my lips too, my lips. I am so romantically in love with you touching me, with your heart beating, your mouth breathing on mine that I move in the most unnatural way for my body. I need more of you to ease the emptiness at my center. I want me to surface shine you. Let my thighs knit around yours. I am a poet in love, a woman with dreams deep surfacing my hands where the fingers ray over your skin. You know beloved I love you the same way one longs for democracy in Iran, where men and women engrave on the walls of the oppressive regime's prison cells: Freedom. Touch me. I want an encore.

I come before you naked from want, yet I want you. I come before you to speak of my love. I try to avoid the wires, the layers, the edges, and the nick of time. If I don't write for you how am I to know how the voiceless are heard? I don't want hearts that are hooked in an unknown time space. I want this nature, my nature to be frost free, head free, tale and tail free, to be in flames, to burn by your eternal fire. I want it to fly and sit on your skin so that you are filled by the love I send your way in this now. I have no plan to nest with you because I already am nesting. I don't expect you to be in-love with me either because you already are my coming home after a fantastic walk, rolling over the grass in that summer down a hill in Birkerød high school back in Denmark, or the time I stood to watch a circle of gypsy children in Poland playing and letting me enter pass their social and regional sufferings.

Beloved, I have cut me free of the kings, the queens, all the cards, the catered-tailored expectations so that my days are kissed by you. I write words of passion that I didn't know I could write and I will not categorize it or my dancer's legs will draw me aware. I can't afford to not let this love not flow, not move, not let its joyful tears fall on my skin, inside the heart. I drop at your feet holding my arms around you. Let this love live with all its possibilities.

But For Now

There are few things that are truly my essence. One is when writing. Two is in love making and third when I am loving. All three have one thing in common: Love. Love in the form of fire shapes and burns throughout my body, throughout my words. I become whole. I burn and the burning lights and guides me to seek you, magnifies so that I can find and follow your tracks to finally be born of your left eye, to maybe an Amaterasu in Shinto without fleeing. What is to shame from loving you? Why should loving you have reason beside the reason: You. Am I in a female Sannyasa stance even when there is no word to describe a woman in such a stage in Hinduism? Wandering after you? Wondering where the road will lead me? But then again I am not detached; my passion is not experiencing a vairāgya. In fact I am carrying out the symbolic act of loving you. When I perform Puja in these words; it is because I am purifying my center, to have you as my Sri Yantra for my meditation. Va Man Adhlamo Mem-man Mana’a (and who is more unjust than he who forbids -- Surah: Al-Baqara, Verse 2:114,) and who is the unjust, my beloved? Aren’t you when you question my devotion, when I am already suffering, when my suffering has a name, the four noble truths? Am I not a woman who tries and tries to approach you without you returning her love, who herself questions all her values, her belief system yet she manages to have the Kiswah all around her naked figure to walk round and around you? I am devoted to you. I am devoted beyond the pillars, beyond scripts, beyond Hagar’s feet ranging back and forth for the water to spout out through the rock, beyond Sarah’s birth to Isaac past her fertility. I love you beyond the communal prayers. I love you beyond creeds, beyond codes, communities and cults. I am incarnated and reincarnated as this woman who loves you. Of all the ways, of all the faiths I chose you. Being loved by you will be my Rosh Hashanah but for now this is my Wu Wei, I let go to find you, whichever the forces are, whoever you are because I live the most when you draw in a fistful grain of rice the symbol, the wheel of law. I hum mantras; I hum your name in my writings. I hum when making love to you. I hum when you enter me, when I hold my hands on the pillow or the wall, the bed frame, or whatever I get my hands on, you enter me and I arrive wave after wave, a pleasure that is my worth life time, to be in your hands, my beloved.

Outside the Days

Let me be granted the beauty of your voice, to watch the movement of your unseen apple on your throat. What time will my ears translate the moment into the language of my silent love for you, the man I live everyday to spread my arms to his earthen body, bright mind, heavenly soul. I wait for you to tell me I can stand between my silence and you to uncover and retell you everyday of my longing for you. I long for you. I long for you. I long for you. I long for you. I long for you. My voice isn't still, my hands aren't. I want to tremble when you look at me even if you never love me as I love you. I don't question the love I feel for you, and when I question, I can't find the smallest doubt, a reason not to love you. There is no reason to love you. You are the reason. I envision you talk about god, about man, and I will think of the spring, the right left, the left foot, the dust on my skin that needs your touch. You'll talk about politics and I'll hear a river, a flame, the wisdom, the laughter. You'll talk about something that I don't know. I'll listen to my heart, its madness, its secret, its blossoming with each word, when it reads your words. Who are you in whom I open my chest to hand the walnuts I collected as a little girl in Shomal (north) by the Caspian Sea. Who are you? In whom I show the most inner side, the vegetable garden in my home. Who are you with whom I break into waves when touching me as a grown woman? Who are you for whom I drop these notes, in white, in red, in green, in blue, in familiar-unfamiliar senses and smells, in love and little flowers. I am not writing to you unknowingly. I am not calling you unknowingly. I am not naked with you unknowingly. I don't love you unknowing the fact that you are the fact. That you are love. That you are a man I won't spend my days with in the known way. A man who will never love me as I love him, a man who writes beyond my years, a man who may only be a gift at this point in my life. Ah, how I want this point to never sleep. Gather me. Pull me. Comb me. Turn your face. Here I am. See me. Here I am round the corner from your eyes. See me. Falling on the earth. Here I am with hands cupped in your words, in love with the writer, the man who walks all too fast, all too soon, all too far. Here is this woman who wakens to you: I love you little boy, grown man, wild soul, you, always a beloved.

Now you know it. You know these and you should know that I love you in long, tall, short, fast, slow, happy, sad, sick, healthy, sleep, awake, busy, easy, day, night. I love you a second or hours away. I love you in the water, when taking a shower. I love you tired, cold, warm, and hot. I love you now. Now. Now. I love you now and beyond the sky that will hold me forever. The shallow grave, the deep earth, the threes, the leaves that will fall over me or maybe it is the water that will hold me forevermore. I love you in life and death. I love you borderless, orderless, and timeless even though my time has limitations, even though I don't live forever, even though all there is may be these words that I write this second to you. I love you pageless, wordless, weightless, ageless, bodiless, bootless, and shirtless. I love you deep, heavy, holding my body or not. Deep in my soul I love you for no reason I know. I love you for one reason only: you.

We are not lovers yet, yet I walk with you while I gather me on your ground, off your ground. I isolate myself. I expose myself. I collect and expand. I am small as your palm or as big as your heart. I love you inside the life I live, outside the days I don't. Whose life am I living? Am I leaving and therefore I ask? I sit next to you on the bus, in the car, at home. I walk next to you in the street. I feel your hands on my henna dyed hair so when I wash it, it runs on my skin, the skin on my body, the body that holds my heart, the heart that loves you. The desires that wave through my body, little by little, trail on my skin. The skin that holds me, embraces my senses, my emotions, my nerves, my ferns. What should I call you? A lake? The song? The single syllable? I read you again and again and over. I gather my fingers one by one. Put my faith and fate in them and write to you. They never leave me. You never leave me even the day you leave or the day I don't write again. I am the water sign. I pour on you as the rain. I clean you when you take a shower. I wash your dishes in me. I spring back and forth in your hands. I arrive always on your skin, between your eyelids. In your mouth, when you drink, when you spill me. When your foam recovers and forms and shapes to reshape. I love you, like no poet has ever loved a poet, like no writer has loved another. Like no artist has desired the muse. Like you never can imagine how I want you to fill me more, to braid-unbraid my hair. Let your fingers run through my lips. On the face. And down my belly.

One Day or Not

You know I see you as all the writers I have loved century after century, all the poets I have wanted to write to, to be written by, to write for years after years. All the poems, the books that have moved me, all the lovers I have loved life after life you are the man I have fallen for, a man I want to write to forever, to make love to whenever, to drink his pure spring water anywhere, everywhere, to be touched by all over, to be made love to by you over and over, whenever, wherever. Who are you? Who are you who makes me touch myself and my ears ring, jealous of my own touch that is not the touch directed by your fingers. You are my resting place, the place of love, my love, a love that is not selfish, a love that doesn't care to hold forever, doesn't question, a desire that doesn't want ownership, a love that is in full colors, in full blossom thinking of you, and half when it recalls of the touch that may happen one day or not. You know, I have walked in many streets, have lived in too many rooms, apartments, homes. I have eaten too many different cuisines, have traveled, and dressed in too many ethnic clothing. I speak languages and understand, read and write in several. I know too many words but your words are the ones that I want to sleep on. Your voice is the voice I want to echo in my street, your skin is what I want to taste; your mind is what I desire to learn its language. I want to make you see me as I see me in love-loving you without a standard, a limit, principles, borders, or an expiration date but I can't reach you alone. How am I to reach you?

A Day After

I hardly can keep my eyes open. The dining table is full of what I like or have liked at one point in my time. My dad's handmade ceramic pots with flowers, a few crystals I bought in Czech Republic in 1995, and baskets. The heater is on, and it makes funny noise. I am almost done with the boxes in the kitchen. My fingers are dry. I am going to have to put almond oil on them before I collapse to sleep. It has been snowing and there will be more snow, heavy snow, over here near D.C., the state I have moved to from Connecticut. I had planned to go shopping for the day after, for my first reading in English, from my new book. There will be another poet reading, an American. I wonder how you would sound reading to me. I want to hear you read me your writings. I wonder if your voice changes when you read, if it sings, if it echoes, if it's cruel, if it worships, and makes love to the words. I imagine you reading to me. Do you know what you will do to me when you read? Do you know that I will fly eagle like over the mountain tops? Do you know that the thought of your voice, you, mesmerises me? Do you know you are an absolute, an absolute man, an absolute human, an absolute beauty, an absolute poem? I like you more than I can write. I love you more than the words can ever express the feelings. I wonder why you don't want to touch me. Is it because I am fragile? I say break me. Break me to as many pieces as you can but touch me. Don't hesitate thinking about the pieces, about the breaking, about my fragility. So what if I break. So what if I am fragile. I would rather break in your hands, by your hands, at your feet, as you watch me break, my breaking. I want you to break me into as many pieces as you can and a thousand pieces more, a thousand times more, a thousand lives over and again. It will be breaking free from what I am in whole without you, for what i want: to be in pieces yet be reflected in your eyes for thirty-four seconds, to break into my freedom from a whole that isn't a whole without your touch.

Each Month

When it is a woman's red narcissus time of the month, when the body falls in love with the physical self and bleeds in the heart center of a womb to purify it, the tangible distress sometimes doesn't let me feel the fresh spring air in Ovid's writings. I can't even recall at which feminine point I have to turn the page to read, and write down the notes. One, two, three, four, five. These are the encompassing numbers. Managing, changing, sitting, rearranging, receiving, concluding, and ambassadoring my life. Sometimes super refining, sometimes thoughtlessly, sometimes in the form of conversations, ideas, instinct, imagination, or touch. Nevertheless fearless, intangible, always with a sense of leaving an impression.

I cherish my emotions. The world has its corners attract opposite parallels of my life. The best way to survive the irrevocable is contemplation. Maybe I want you to be my male echo. To love me and to renew my faith in the rules of modern woman's better living.

Each month there is this week that the mysterious Venus is jealous of the days that the bleeding doesn't envelop the body into cliffs of insanity, doesn't elbow my surrealism into realism; leaving me anxious but I can't passioncase these words. My breasts are sensitive, my multitple writings aren't glorified, my voice is in low key, and my back hurts. On the surface I am fine, underneath the layers my heart beats fast, there is no silk wearing, blood trails the letters, and the body is in suspense. It can only serve but not be served. The headache doesn't go away, and the eyes burn and creating a great conflict between judgment and flight, answering or questioning, resisting and restricting or expressing.

Miraculously you are now a significant presence who knows the surface and bottom ocean of my soul. It is true that we will never observe and experience one another physically but I accompany you, and you will accompany me as one person who didn't dissolve in you, in me, with whom I have carved beyond ordinary phrases to speak of my love, in which I have chosen to trust without fear, without worry, without sorrow, without doubt, without any symbolic value. To me your love is like hearing the sound of children playing in the streets: free, gentle, loud, without the need to escape or look upon as an accidental shelter. I don't want to examine how I formed us, how I write our story, how I make you arrive when I visit you under your closed lashes, when you lean against my body, when I plea you to drink me when I am purified. Don't answer me if you don't want to but do know that I want to know if you miss me before my next return.

The Birth

I don't think I am a woman who is defeating the taboos of her time or maybe I am. This however has not been intentional or planed. It just happens that I have come close to death on several occasions and the experiences have left me with little to worry about what others may think of me. After all I woke up the day I was given a time by birth, the birth I remember as the present, and then like all else there will be a time for dying. Just like that. So if one place has too many chains, too many neurotic people who make the air suffocating and impossible for the soul, the mind, and the body, I find another place. Simple!

Right now I look at you as someone who brings me joy. That is why I enjoy writing to you, for you, and at times about you. You bring me peace, eternal peace. Though there isn't much I believe in I don't think my cycle of life will finish by this journal, you will continue. I protect you with my pen. You are the witness to my greatest love affair, the affair of my heart with you. I have given birth to your presence after thirty four years of loving you in pain and passion. I love you without aging, and without memory. You know how to love even if it is not I whom you love, have loved, or will love.

To me you are a large window, overlooking the mountains, the lakes, the snow, and the rain. Since you have arrived, everything is in harmony. Words and more words will describe you. Books and more books will be written for you, and about you. Women and more women will love you. Seasons and more seasons will change for you and life and more life will continue in my images, your images, in love, but I don't think there has been or will be another who loves you as I love you now. My now is not to rescue me from you, or to rescue you from you. You are not just a literary invention. You are real as the day is to night, as seeds are to the threes, as the "L", "F", and "E" are essential to the "I" for me to breathe.

When Time Has Another Meaning

I see myself as the novel and the author. I see you as the mountain and the volcano. You forgive and forget, I forgive but never forget. I love your originality. I love your choices. I love how you have made a promise to yourself to not spring over your dreams. You keep walking on the trails; back packing, idealistically living my life. My heart is ravenous for your human eye and your experiences although I have lived a life that has been a festival of colors, coats, realism, and sometimes disappointments in the half sculpted days. You create on your terms, write by hand, remember the title of the books, and spread yourself like The Razor's Edge main character at times. I on the other hand am half taken, half censored by the society's collective approval and theatric ratings. Sometimes it is overwhelming to recognize the idea of saintliness is to have one secret key to every door, to fear judgment. Then when someone like you, like me comes along, one is the forgiver, the overall agreed on reforming man, and one is the one who doesn't forget, then written words turn into frightening images to the nonbelievers, and the writers, resemble a craw wurm card.

Maybe when I meet you I can slip my arms around you. Maybe we can find a place to draw close. Maybe I can drink your portion of love, and maybe I can just love you as I have always ever since I have come to know you. I may be quiet in terms of conversations but I am not reserved in the matter of lovemaking. The truth is it is not so much the physical presence but the subtlety of your mind, your visions, your soul, your logic, the heart you have been gifted, and your sexual perspective that makes me want this continuous intimacy. You represent what time had intended to bring my way, another meaning to the biblical verses, breaking free of the feminism preaching in the Quran, and to finally be able to kiss by the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Your presence is not a sketch of wishful thinking. You are not a windmill in a country where the unfair rulers are well aware of the benefits a solar system may bring to the people. You are not a weary suit and you don't dress to examine yourself only to feel strangely further away from you. You beat and breathe free. I love you for everything you are and everything you are not.

The Other Night

The other night you woke up crying in your dream. I told you these hands are taking away your pain. Look, and shadowed my fingers over your face and threw the night out of your sky. I swirled the sadness out of you. I asked you to feel the warmth, the friendship, the love. Now your lips are mist from my blaze of tongue. Your soul is no longer embroidered. The grapes are artistically and authentically stomped to originate a life long taste of my supply of a non alcoholic drink, my love. Even the sea has its deforming waves, waves that fall together but then release to learn, to examine, to cherish, to drunken the hearts, to show courage to ride, to write, to change, to absorb and give birth. I offer you a taste of creation minus the soaring poetry. I rise and rinse but before that I wrap my legs around you, not suggestively but pure earthly. The earth that embraces the soil. The air that holds them both, the fire that murmurs the touch before returning to the foundation, to the sea, to the earth, to be the fire, to be the breathing air coming out of your lungs. I know you don't need me to invent a new way to grasp your breathing with my mouth. I know you don't need me to brush your cheeks with my lashes. I know you don't need me to circulate my fingers on your chest. I know you don't need me sweep you off your feet. I know you don't need me to invade your softness into potent movements. You know, I do know I don't have to offer you my mouth to direct you into ecstasy, to want to fill me. You already have filled me, made me accustomed to your presence. You haven't asked for it but unknowingly, you have guided me into writing down words that perhaps have been faithful secrets until I decided to journal them. I do believe in god. I don't believe in religions. I do believe in man, I don't believe in the middlemen. I do want peace but not before there is a democracy. I love life but not if it is a life in threads. I prefer exile if that is what brings me sanity. I like the sun but only if I can share the light, and its warmth. I like to drink water but only when I know everyone has enough supply of clean water. I like to sleep but only if it is next to you.

I Wake Up Early

I wake up early in the hope of grasping my dreams. I wake up so that I can share my secret with you before you deprive me of your care, before my conscious preoccupies me with everything that doesn't dignify you. Let me touch you before the pianist finishes playing his last note, before fireflies wonder back to their hiding places, and day emerges to erase your seconds' away image from the room. These are desires that aren't poisonous. Do I write what every woman thinks? Every exile asks for? Every human wants? I don't know. I am not a messenger. I am not a savior. I am not an impulsive writer either. I don't listen to a particular music. I don't have poetry on my side anymore. I know I don't like liars. I don't like opportunists. I don't like inconsistency in accepting human rights as facts and not as what is in fashion today. I don't see romance in lighting candles, and having roast beef on the table when children die of hunger, and when candles were the means for me to study at a time when there was no electricity because of the bombings. When regardless of the air raids, I had to prepare for the next day's exam only to fail. I don't see any reasoning to try and explain I am not enthusiastic about what is thought of my prose. That I am married and what I write for you is what I want to, what I love to do, that I make love to you over and over, and loving you doesn't make me less of a wife, a mother, a woman, a human in love. I love you. Your truthful writings are what have brought me faith in humanity. You don't try to possess me even if I want you. You let me own my own mind, my own deed, my own body. You let me stitch and sew as it is said in Persian on my terms. I love you for the butterfly you have emerged in my body. I love you for letting my fingers touch your lips, your neck, your shoulders, your arms, and take your hands to my lips. You arouse me without asking me to dissolve in you. You recognize my senses, my sensuality, and my instinctive devotion to your complete balance of mind, body, and soul.

Count the Moments

What is there to confess? That I love you like my land? That you are my land? That I want to take you in, to take me in? That I love you and I see the right from the wrong? That I am a misplaced name in your notebook? That I am afraid of feeling this dependency, that I miss you because I do miss you. I am afraid of finishing my journal and leaving you in between my letters, and my words. I ask myself what is this joy, this suffering, this longing for you. A person who will not come to pick me up from the station, who has no idea who I am even if he came, how I don't dress up, how I don't sit in an armchair, how I express myself, how I never remember birthdays, and anniversaries, how I find valentine's day a money wasting celebration, how I drive in a highway, how I clean the kitchen, and the bathrooms in my home every day, how is the taste of my cooking, how my fingers peel in spring sometimes, and how easy it is for me to arrive.

I don't want to return to poetry. I love these writings and I love you because you awoke and reassure my prose. Will you let me hold you close to my heart, to read to you? With my eyes, will you let me look into yours? Will you let me count the moments I have missed on you? Don't ask me to undress. You won't find me under the clothing. I will only be another native, another woman whose image will then fade away.

Thousand and One

I don't think in the terms of absolute and excitement. Perhaps the truth coordinates my feelings, the senses, finding relief in my own words. To those who have not passed their mismanaged minds I should seek solitude in their ways, their perceptions, and their control of logic as they understand it. They want me to repent because I am unlike them because their norms are not sufficient for me to regulate myself according to what satisfies them. You know beloved, reputation doesn't cramp my body; I don't cross dress to survive them. I have survived their gender discrimination. I don't fear. I know what is real from fiction. I know what is wrong from right. I know they are the type who clap and dance in the streets of Tehran for lifeless bodies hanging from the ropes. If they have left the country they haven't left their discriminatory brain employments by traditions, and religious misrepresentations. Marriage life provides them an evidence to account themselves for being normal. I am not them. To me normal is tragic. I am not naive, ignorant, or cruel. I don't convict people because of their religion, their faith, their gender, their sexual orientation, their social status, and their political views. Perhaps to them I am a witch they should burn. I question their morals. I exceed them and that is why they don't see you through my eyes. Beloved, you are beyond. In you I have found someone who doesn't insist, doesn't banish, doesn't hate, and doesn't forbid. Your words brought me a world that I had not read before. Nothing until you, confirmed I am not alone. I don't look at you as a reference. I don't base my prose on yours. I don't follow others. I follow me but you are my inspiration. I identify myself with you. I recognize you. Your words are not abstract to me. You are a thousand and one other things. I love you naked from voice, from want, from sooner, from later, from anguish, and from waiting.

The Timetable

The timetable shows infinity now. The power of words perhaps lay in the truth they carry otherwise you have read and felt similar writings over the years, you know, I do want. I do like to see the sun’s reflection on your face, to know how you close your eyes and open them into your dreams. Dreams that will never happen in reality and the strangers may never stretch their arms to hold and retain one another with passion but dreams are welcome. Dreams that erase the heartaches, don’t need to be formulated, and don’t have to be some stolen contacts in order to attain sanity of the mind and the body. One character loves another, the other doesn’t suspend, just takes it without a need for evidence. You take me in without suggestions. You don’t need details. You accept. There is no resentment. No narrowing the eyes. You are willing to adapt because you don’t need enrichment. You don’t need my justification. You are grand in accepting what life offers you now. Even if it arrives in the form of my words written from over here and clearly not following an institutional order, enjoying a freedom only obtainable in these words and within these borders. Words that may never end or may disappear the same way they arrived knocking at your window. I have discovered you. I don’t follow rules. I follow my moral code. My feelings are what they are. I will not deprive me of you. I can’t just innovate a new order for my day. You do know the world I was brought up in, the world of love, the world of senses.

Days Are Uneven

Days are uneven. I don’t complain. They have their routines, senses, overheads, presentations, differences, fusions-diffusion, realities, delusions, emancipation, and conclusions. Sometimes I take it emotionally, sometimes rationally, and at other times as especial occasions. I have a commitment to these days, to satisfy them, never to let them be forgotten. To move to their rhythm in a Kathak dance with my Persian hand gestures, to give birth to Mujra and make it seductive, and erotic. The truth is there is nothing exotic about the land I come from. I grow up hearing about the massacre of Kurds, the executions of Bahaies and the political prisoners, the honor killings, stoning. My soul clenched. It mattered then, it matters now. I scattered like a mirror. I ached for you to hold me in your tender words. I called out for you but my voice didn’t reach you. Now, you have arrived and everyday I wake up believing you are Apsû, the mythological fresh water. I wait to hear you, to read you not in a social event, not as a dressed up philosopher, not as a writer but as mine, your words, doves that will not migrate from my eyes.
This morning I was thinking how your presence has brought so many images back to me. Images of places that I had not thought about for many years, the flowers, the sweets, tombs, shoulders, cupboards, arms, ghazals, aluminum pots, rounded cheeks, Mahanadi, roofs, climbing, Ramadan, Shahi Mohalla - Lahor’s red zone, cities, homes, UK, Poland, India, France, and so many more countries. Maybe I see you as magic. You are just about everything, every one. I love it. Last night I recalled one of your writings and it made me sad, almost like crying but then I remembered how happy I am to enjoy this very time that I have, to write down what I write, as if I needed a new pair of shoes to help me suddenly walk again. You know during the last year of Iran-Iraq war, the sounds of 14 rockets at a time had affected my nervous system. I needed help to stand up, to sit down, and to walk. Now I see you as my supply of shoes to amble through my own memories.

I collect me in you. You, a man I haven't met, haven't touched, haven't kissed, haven't made love to, and haven’t walked next to. You, a man I don't know, yet I like his smell, his presence, his touch, his lips, and his hands, a park in the middle of desert, water. You do it without populating or crowding my mind, you sit on the floor, fresh like ancestry yet not. Yes, As if nothing existed before knowing you and nothing will come after. A common attraction, ah, so uncommon. I am not your costumer. You are not mine. No background noise. No lightning to burn the eyes, no watchfulness, no edge. You don't know how many freckles I have on my face, not black, not brown. Even if there is a mixture of ridicule when you read these constant writings of mine, I still write these for you. This is me now. I am traditional in the act of faithfulness, yet I struggle every day. Across the room you sit, face too, and want to. I do want you to comb my hair. I like the Chinese wooden comb. You know, there is no poetic meaning in these writings, no idealistic reasoning. If we get, we lose, if we lose we gain, there is a place of honor and a place of lies. We either hear or not but what is the truth? What is a lie? The mind? The heart? The soul, the spirit, the body? The memories? The procedure to recognition, none, one or all?

Nothing Existed Before You

I want to forget about the heartaches in the world. I want to think of you, just now, just this minute of writing to you, for you. Let me. As if nothing existed before knowing you and nothing will come after. Between my hands and my heart is a drop of dew. Hold it. Don't spill it. Take it into your mouth. Drink it. It's my longing for you. Now I feel fortunate. You haven’t let the distance of coasts twist my devotion to your presence. I want to believe it is a fruitful season. A season when I can sleep next to you and dismiss all rationalizations, the insanity, and displaced relationships. I love your insights, your outlook, your not restricting yourself to places, to people, to earth, to life. I am unlike you. I restrict my self to places and that makes me journey beyond time. I restrict myself to people and that makes me leave or want to break free. I restrict myself to earth, that is why I don’t drink wine. I restrict myself to life and that alone makes me want to understand my other dimensions. To me you are my other dimension, a pure soul, an absolute commitment to the act of confidence in the matter of truth. You submerge in the most unexpected places. You don’t suffer from mortality or from what is moral to the suffering. Ah, I love you and keep you in me like the memory of the church bells that signified the hour in Switzerland. I love you like that sunny afternoon in Mashhad when I was 5 and heard adhan’s Hayya 'alā khayril-'amal, make haste towards the best deed. I cherish you like Shabbat before the sundown on every Friday. I love you like my memories of childhood and growing up in Tehran. Days when I wasn’t taken for granted.

Sometimes

I have always pursued the men I have wanted. Sometimes they turned into an enduring pain, and sometimes to a lover but never in them had I found you, the beloved. The amusing part is, you don't even know me, and I don't know you in the constant terms. Thus, I want you to write to me, to take me in your arms, to whisper me your solemn words. I want to feel your divine approach. There is no plan, not an inch thick crowd of the grownies, who judge, and not thin lipped ties and shiny shoes in you. There isn't any chocolate blood cake on my plate or yours. I am not an empty jar; you are not an empty glass.

There is this river that I swim in and there you are; the water that holds me clear. You don't walk backward, and I don't trip over earthen dissipates. I can see eyeful. I can smell you warm in my baked bread. I eat you like butter and honey. I drink you in each letter, each word, sentence, and on each page. You are generous. You let me make you into my notes, love you as I please, wide and close, tempt you, tingle, lick you, hold you, and run my fingers through your heat, yet you don't burn me.
Each morning you may ride on a bus, may drive a car that doesn't start easy, fly as the birds, or swim like the fish. Each noon you may avoid the salt; have a sandwich, or a big bowl of soup, and a salad. Each night you may peel an orange, bite an apple, eat a silver wrapped sweet bought from a south Asian shop, a bruschetta, or go out, to shake hands with friends, meet your lovers, or sit alert, or sleep in your bed. Each day I pursue you. Each night I choose to walk in and out of you, and every time the air gets balanced- imbalanced with your words.

With you, I have no pride, no modesty, and no bruises to hide. With you I have no sheep to take up the mountains before the sunrise, or bring down before the night arrives. With you I have no wolf wounds on my soul, and on my body to lick, or rinse, to stitch, and cover. With you I have no questionable satisfaction to feed. With you there is no dawn, no darkness, no black and no white, no inquiry as to where to start or finish, no claiming or rejecting, and no grabbing to hold. With you there is no lightness and no darkness my beloved.

Even as of Today

I can't forget. I can't let go. Working doesn't comfort me; reading doesn't comfort me, jogging, and taekwondo don't release the energy. Characteristically you are, I am, turning into an idea, and a drowsy hope. Maybe I am premenstrual. Maybe I am just fading. Maybe I have too many responsibilities or maybe losing mother to breast cancer has left me a lot more sensitive to the matter of loss. I don't know the answer. I don't even know why I write to you: "I have no expectations," yet, I want you to write to me, and to know me. Maybe it is because I love you. I love you even as of today, even after all these years. I love you because there is a need in me to love you, to write to you that I love you, to say to you that I love you. I perceive this. I want to take away the cruelty, the crimes, the brutality, and the bitterness out of life. I want to hold you forever, to ease you, the enigma.

I remember it like it was yesterday. The day when you sat on a chair in the room with a view to the little nature trail swaddling itself around the lake near the house, and told me your story. You talked about Bang Kwang prison where you had the terrifying experience of being an inmate on charges of not having legal documents, a passport. Even as I write your story a chill moves up my spine. Seldom had you wanted to remember and it was the first time you spoke of it to me. The place with its poor health circumstances, the everyday nutrient-low calorie-dense diet, non-existing intellectual stimulation, drug offenders, armed guards, and electrified fences were a frightening reminiscence.Your imprisonment by the Thai police was particularly ironic considering the circumstances you had fled Iran in the first place. After months of sharing one cell with hundreds of men from different nationalities, you no longer were the same person. Hearing a man fornicating another inmate in the corner of the cell, drinking unsanitary water, toilets that piled up with shit when water went out, infections, illnesses and risk factors among prisoners and knowing that the people working in the United Nations could take up to three years before browsing through your case, had made you understand the true meaning of struggle. Once the inmates learned your status as a political refugee, there was an explosion of respect for you. Unlike the Cambodian and Burmese ethnic and economical refugees, you were an intellectual. You even had got the permission to sleep by the wall without having to claim seniority or fight for the spot. Your popularity had grown overnight. Needless to say, you no longer were an easy target for the incensed men who were arrested on drug smuggling charges. It had taken you a year before the night of the national holiday arrived and you walked out to fly to Malaysia and from there to the West, to freedom.

You told me your story and we became the green gate to the inner self. Time passed and eventually dreaming next to you turned into an episode for me. Every now and then you would wake up screaming in your sleep. Your nightmares turned into mine. I did want to hold you, to put you together regardless of the broken or the lost pieces. It was just that you needed to form your own surrounding. Ultimately you brought me nothing but down. My wings were clipped off. I needed to fly, to keep me alive, to breathe. I wasn't perfect. The flight, I was forgetting the flight. I couldn't remain a dry sticker on your fingers. We couldn't find pleasure in the moments. You had turned into a far off dream. I had to seek out a new you. It didn't matter then, it doesn't matter now. Render me. I searched for you, a different you to secure my moments of longing. Now I trust in all of you and you, come to me in all shapes, come to me in all men, come to me in all humanity, come to me in all lands, and come to me in all feelings, belongings, possessions and positions of soul, body, and mind. Come to me before the spirit leaves the body, before the mind dies away. Beloved, let me be your lover for now and forever, regally.

The Burning Bush

I want to wear you like a pair of earrings so that your touch leaves me short breathed, so that when I brush my hair aside and look at myself in the mirror, you smile back at me with your lips upon my ears. I am not your jealous lover. I am not your keeper. I am not your fragments, fractions, your feelings; I am not your relentless answer to be alive. I am not your other half. You are complete without me. Your hands are kind without holding mine. Your eyes are bright without the need to absorb the light in mine. You don't need to read my letters to see my reflection. You make my blood simmer without undressing me.

Hundreds of thousands of people have crossed my path, hundreds of thousands of texts have been read by my eyes, hundreds of thousands of times, rain has washed my body, yet I want your smell to drop me on my feet. I want you to read me, your words, to pick me up Christ like, or be my Jabal al- Nour, and to remain my burning bush. I don't apologize for loving you. You are not just a life time search to have me pour you the wine. You are not a casual affair. You are not just me catering you, my tongue slaving its way down your body, and you awaiting the strokes, preparing for an eruption. I am not your courtesan like the time I felt when walking in Anarkali (pomegranate blossom) market in Lahore, Pakistan. The eyes of men were making out with my body that was transparent to them from underneath the salwar kameez and dupatta. You are more than a convulsion to me.

We don't say hello. We don't say goodbye. We are. We don't kiss, don't struggle, don't hate, don't pain the other, don't revenge, and don't bring despair. We don't question. We don't answer. We don't meet. We don't bring expectations. You are not opium. I am not in need of a narcotic property. I don't smoke. I don't drink alcohol. I don't need substances to enjoy me, to enjoy you. I drink you. You don't consume me. You come natural, and I want to reclaim you on top. You run through my veins. You are profound.

The Blue Apple at Five

Do you read my story, the story of my love, a love so deep that it is needless of your physical presence? Has there ever been a lover who has traced your essence in the air and kissed your lettering at every chance she gets. Have you ever had a lover who sits patiently for you to take her in your dreams if not in reality, who wears you like a bangle, and to whom she is like a devotee to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar?

Today is not as quiet as yesterday. It is five in the morning. The lights reflect the loss of energy. The city has written its dreams, wake up and reveal to me what items form your place of peace but before that, do know I don't tremble from the pain of not having you. I tremble from the thought of having you and losing. I don't want to be just another woman you direct your days next to. No, I don't want to add Sheema to your days. I need this constant presence, your presence, learning you. I have always been curious to know what the happening was; now I realize I am the happening, and you are the inspiration. Come to me. Play your Persian Tar; go from sorrow to joy, from low notes to high, and from one end to another. I want you as self persuades my days, days that life to them is a journey not a destination. A destination as I now know poetry was to me, a companion. It held me by my wrists so that I wouldn't arch or drift.

You know being Najib is essential to a woman's survival in the recent history of Middle East. Perhaps that is why I have taken up this journey into a writing exercise of my rights to express myself. I am a Najib. Married, a mother, a respectful figure, if I am talked to I sound like I have left Iran yesterday and not nineteen years ago. I am familiar with all the principles expected of a Najib woman. I had great training in my first fifteen years of living in a totalitarian state. To hold back, not to answer, to act proper and in a certain way, to walk so that the movements of my breasts wouldn't break the bricks on the walls. Thus I was a bad apple. They planted me, watered me, and yet I came out to be blue. I felt the pain, heard the screams that couldn't leave the walls of Evin prison when I passed them to go climbing the mountains in northern Tehran. I knew the walls real color isn't gray, isn't made of cements but blood, torture, and I learned heaven is reserved for the raped virgins. I wanted you to hold me, to sooth me, to love me in the mornings and afternoons but you weren't. The poetry became my refuge. I was unsure if it was part of my fortune or doomsday. I was in a warlike state of mind, trying to survive a contagious ailment, to survive my fate, find the right path, the right taste. I couldn't attain peace in the practice of eating in a plate set of leftovers in my life time, on a dinning table, because it was modern poetry, post modern poetry, because it had names like Wad, Nasr, Yauuq and Swaa. I started experimenting. I started to amaze myself, amuse myself, and humble myself but then you came along and I knew it wasn't working for me at all. Poetry is the truth, not a process to heal, not a laughter, not lemon and lime, and not fellowships. Now I want you to be happy. I want you to find your way to the ark, to rediscover a land with me. I am not your advisor or the guide. I am not a database or an illusion or replicating books to a better self. What I write is invaluable because it comes from the depth of my soul, the oneness with the universe of my body and mind, and exercising to accept the humiliating truth that I was unaware of the truth, your existence.

Not every one is destined to discover, and revive. They can try as I am trying but then not everyone is lucky to have you, like I want to have you, when we find the land. A land as majestic as Carmel by the sea where we can walk bare feet, where the sky is one with the sea, and the sea dances next to the beach where the rocks like mediators stand between the light and the rest, where the recital of convention comes to the realization of the fact that a wave has the sound, the color, and the movement, trinity like.

Do you read my story? The story of my love. A love so deep that it is needless of your physical presence. Has there ever been a lover who has traced your essence in the air and kissed your lettering at every chance she gets? Have you ever had a lover who sits patiently for you to take her in your dreams if not in reality, who wears you like a bangle, to whom she is like a devotee to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar?

The Dawn

I am truthful to you, to my pen, to my readers. You can call these pieces part of my autobiography, a fiction, horridly remembering the past for the future, or study of self. I don't think I am leaving a scent out of my memory. You are more than an invented literary character to me. You mysterious in your soft blue are leaving an impression hard to not notice. You know, I think I have daily rendezvous with you. One that you never arrive at, one where I find my reflection winging away in the wind, one that I try to let its aromatic fragrance flow through my body when I write to you. Maybe I write not to lose my memory or when I am older and losing the memories, to look at these writings and wonder who was this great presence whose name hasn’t promised of love, and my pictures, frames, home made videos, and journals don’t show his face, don’t reveal his name. Who are you? What is the purpose to these writings when I can’t educate myself in your ways of lovemaking? I wonder how it will be to run my tongue over your words, to take me to the height of a summer day. Summer days have their own essence. Some are honey caressed and some are the days when like every female I had to cover myself head to toe to go for a swim in the Caspian sea, to be ashamed of my feminity in an Islamic republic, to perhaps not have a peak by the silver foams at four in the morning. I want you to narrow me into your letters like the waves that looked into my truth, and words, sentences, to embrace my dance like the night we came home late. You asked me to dance for you before naming me your reason to write. My body dominated yours, inseparable literature in joy before walking through the door and disappearing into the dawn.

Feel my pages. They smell of you.

An Evoking Time

Pans and pots, I am fine. I am working on my next book. In the morning, I reveal secrets to my readers, study politics of peace, and at night I read bedtime stories, kiss goodnight in one room and make love in another before solving mysteries in my dreams. My life is simply simple. The conventional role for me is to be quiet before the sand dunes of traditionalists and finery characters but I follow my mother's footsteps. Possessions throw me off balance, expressionless days break my heart. I nurse people until their flesh is no longer truthful to my writings and my undeniable call to satisfy my habit of fear, and abundance. I want to reinvent this instinctive confidence in hearts but I don't want to steer you. I need guidance. How little I know you, thus you manage to change me from one day to another. I have your constant companionship and don't know how to word it. It is not a spiritual quest, aching for a physical pairing, or a listless emotional generosity, yet there is persistence and inexplicability in this intimacy.

There is this you who I want, who doesn't question me, who doesn't doubt me, who isn't a dissenter, who kisses my flesh on and past the skin, who I want, physical and non physical, who I don't know how to understand beyond the senses I am proverbial.

You are a mixture of my own glance, an extension beyond my lips, the rediscovering of what is most important to me, and to my fertility without culturing the milk. I acknowledge traditions but don't necessarily find them a necessity to follow in order to survive. It doesn't suit me. It would be the wrong color for my hair, my complexion, and the erroneous couplets in my ghazals.

Now that I don't write poetry, how do you want me to write you? How do you want me to please you with my gender, and in joy? Now that I am deprived of you and my liking, how do you want me to awaken you into my world, for you to become a native of my land? Tell me how am I to love you in an evoking time.

When Night Was More than Spider Webs of Politics

The elevator door opens. I walk in and the smell of cigarettes and Zino Davidoff cologne awakens memories of the night that life was more than just spider webs of politics. It was a night of a real story, your story. It was your definite hands that had confidently made me behave selfish and selfless. I was so sure of my love that I felt fatigue. I held you and you told me of the time when your life was brought down to basic necessities. You were fleeting Iran. Minutes had passed and the condition had become more frustrating. Feelings of fear and anxiety had grown in you. Your guide was running up and down the rocky mountains in Baluchistan. The group was made of two Jewish families, a Baha'i man, his niece, and several young men. All had difficulty breathing the cold air filled with dust. You were not teleported but had climbed on foot. Your guide had cursed at one of the Jewish families for expecting him to carry their television set as well as their daughter's dowry to the hilltop. You told me there were not rest stops along the way. Thirsty, hungry and exhausted like a pilgrimage to freedom, you had made it up the mountains to the two waiting pickup trucks. The toughness and uncertainty of the journey and its outcome was beyond your wildest imaginations. You were seated in the back and the pickup trucks had driven away in the dark, unpredictable, and haunting road. Then two fast approaching cars suddenly made the dangerous driving scene into an outrageous one. Shots were fired and blood started pouring on the silver metal. The bullet pierced the Baha'i man sitting next to you. The head pendulous with blood and flesh made the man's niece to start shouting in horror and the children to cry with fear. It took thirty minutes before the driver could stop. You and the other men had drug the body out and dug a hole. The burial place of the Baha'i man was in the middle of nowhere. No family member or friends but his sixteen year old niece were present at his grave.

The elevator door opens again. I walk out wondering on which floor you were about to enter, to fill the air with your smell of cigarettes and your cologne. The cologne I had bought you and you had bought me my silky blue pajamas, the woolen sweater I like so much, the jewelry I never wear, and the desire to count to ten before I hear you call me to take shower with you. Water has a special meaning to me. I am superstitious. I like water on a picnic table, in a bowl like the one from which we drank water in Jordan, the water to spill for both transparency and Bon voyage like in the Iranian custom, and the numbers one, two, sometimes three, nine, and eleven. One body, three men I passionately have loved, nine projects, eleven engaging memories, and piles of papers, and you and I to make the final two to wake up next to one another.

When will you break your fast? It is time for my face to caress yours, for my ears to brush against your chest, and for me to breath in your cologne.