Leila Farjami

 
At the Dinner Table

The upstairs window—He never jumped out of it.
Mother swore he never would. She said so inspecting
basmati rice for husk at the kitchen table. There were
antiseptics and gauze bandages
to dress his wound. The sutured gash from the neck
to the upper ear. When I found an antipsychotic pill
on the red Persian rug, mother tossed it back
in his bottle. She rinsed and unloaded the rice into
a boiling pot. Each elongated grain, a body stretched
too far. Flailing before the final swell.
We sat together for dinner of cooked rice, پلو ,
with tomatoes and chicken, taking spoonfuls.
I could hear the grinding of glass shards.
Teeth crumbling inside our mouths. Gums
scarring—blood on white napkin. No one saying
                                                                      a word.

Elegy Unfolding

Orange poppies ambush the garden like wild vigilantes.
Such sly brazenness. It is their so-called blooming season.
They compete with the sun in heat and perpetual drama, invade
the evening primroses, plunder the sagebrush colony, uproot the refuge
of the less-cherished yarrows and bluecurls. Oh! Their fiery chaos.
High-stemmed fetish. Seductive gaze, Are we not dazzling?
I am too repulsed to look them in the eye. Each petal, an elegy, unfolding.
Their surface, a creased mirror to honeybees and dragonflies.
Now, I must walk through their vicious pillar of flames that singe
the hems of my black dress. They pretend to be saints all their lives,
but I know what they are here for. So, I have got a rake and a trowel.
No time for mercy. I amputate their stems, weed them out. Rummage
for their tiniest survivors. Extract rootlets like decayed teeth, smooth
the earth over their dead—at the end, no trace left of their kingdoms.
                                                                                                            Or ours.