Ozone Park, the literary journal published by the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College in New York City, has published my poem “I Fell in Love With All That Struggled in You Not to Drown,” Here’s an excerpt:
In class, we talked fashion: piercings
and why men shouldn’t wear thongs
unless they’re strippers,
and not one of my students
thought pink on a man
could mean anything but gay,and I remembered—
no, it wasn’t memory;
you’ve never told me—I imagined
you getting dressed for school
on the first day of the public womanhood
the ayatollahs gave you no choice
but to learn to wear.The breeze has been my lover,
you recite in the mirror,
and the sun, and you
tuck under your chador
the last few strands of hair
you need to hide, check
the length of your sleeves
and that your ankles
if you have to run
won’t emerge into light.
And I have let the ocean pull me naked to its chest,
and with my fingers probed the earth’s flesh,
and filled my mouth with its fruit.
I do hope you’ll go check it out. Some of the other really wonderful work I am happy to see my work appearing next to:
- “Why We Cry So Much,” by Melina Kameric, translated from Bosnian by Jennifer H. Zoble
- “res domestica,” by Cynthia Dewi Oka (I reviewed her first book here.)
- “Resume of Faults,” by Anna Saini
