Baba Bozorg once wrapped / his fingers around the narrow part / Sunspotted skin around this art carried and kept / Lifted out of a chest / full of seven decades of / morning prayers. I unpack the vase, heirloom / of another day. We hand down / a lineage of relocations. Another Iran. The vessel is a container / for cut roses. Happy birthday. I love you. Sorry for / your loss. But here, place the long night, immerse a cut life / long stems on a diagonal / to stay alive. Create a bouquet of what we long to / behold, how we long to be / held, long / to be un-severed. I imagine his palm against the silver repoussé he thought was worth / saving / across an ocean, as he escaped / from revolution in the name of a god / no God would / recognize. He brought the hammered flowers, from 1979 Day Avenue, Tehran / when a girl could sing / in public, when yellow bikinis in the Caspian Sea, when red sand on / bear arms off the coast of Bandar Abbas, when long hair in wind / when dancing in Shiraz, sour cherries on their lips, pomegranate arils bleeding on their tongues, when poetry sung / on the winter solstice / to the house on a California cul-de-sac. Where he'd pour / water out of the garden hose behind our goodbyes / for good fortune, where I pretended to sleep / dream while he prostrated on the green shag rug, where his cigarette smoke and dice rolled over the backgammon board. Joft sheesh! (double sixes). He used to play with Maman Bozorg . So many mouths to feed. I never met her but I wear her turquoise and pearl ring as / I unpack. My watercolors / my paintbrush, our double luck. I unfold the easel to ask cyan if it can chant, my breath / if it will draw into my chest grains of / sand then exhale them like the pearls in her ring around my finger. I saw a piece like it in the Louvre: “cloisonné beads, from Susa, 350 BC, inlaid with lapis lazuli, turquoise, and carnelian” derived from / the Latin carno: / flesh, derived from the city of Sardis / derived from / the Persian sered: yellowish red. Stains on the Straight of / Hormuz named for a God of Light or a gate of / peace undone by a fetish for our treasures / I wrap my fingers around the brush, paint the sered sun onto the canvas / across the liquid cyan. Hold its narrow passage / in my hand, the untaken motion / of light we unwrap from between the fibers of water / to fly.
Contributor Notes
Diana Farid is an award-winning author and poet. Her debut novel, Wave (Abrams, 2022), described as “rich, layered, and heart-rending” by Kirkus, was a Cybils Award winner for Novel in Verse, School Library Journal Best Book, Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, and Golden Poppy Award Finalist, among others. Her picture book, When You Breathe (Abrams, 2020), was a National Council of Teachers of English Notable Poetry Book and a Eureka! Gold Award winner for nonfiction. Her latest picture book, The Light of Home (Scholastic 2024), illuminates the displacement experience and ways we find home. Her debut board book, Already All the Love (Little Bee Books, 2024), honors the here and now for a new baby and mother. Her feature-length documentary film coproduction, American Rhythms, showcases the positive impact of music on elementary school student health. She is an Editorial Board Member for poetry for the medical humanities journal, The Pharos, and was a 2025 inaugural artsCatalyst Fellow of the Stanford Arts Institute. She is also a practicing physician and Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, where she teaches at the intersection of story, art, medicine, and health. You can learn more at dianafarid.com.
