Green Linden Press

The Two Maryams

January, 2021

Sometimes we talk. Mostly we don’t.
The weight of our different lives
wears like a shadow over us.
The sanctions are killing us
she wrote once last year.
We send messages over WhatsApp
that say something more. A photograph
of a bird or the pomegranate I cut in half,
her cat Mishoo, or my dog Maya.

These days we speak about rulers and regimes
without saying the words. She knows
I understand this too. Or at least that I get it.
When the pandemic erupted, we spoke
more often. We stay inside. I only see my
husband and mother she writes when Iran
is second or third in the world in cases and deaths.
Last week, she sent a message in lower
case letters: i am sorry for your country.

We met once in Paris when she tried to get a visa
to visit our sick and elderly Uncle Masude
in California. I jumped on a plane to France
and spent a week roaming the city with her
before the appointment at the embassy.
She loved the cellist in the subway
and the women smoking in cafes.
Iran is full of darkness she said.
I did not know if she meant her country or the prison
cell where she spent her youth after the
Revolution. I was too afraid to ask.
We drank wine and coffee and found
our fathers’ childhood home where
they lived during the First World War
and hid in the basement from the bombs.
Our Baba-Bozorg had set up a Persian
textile business in the 16th arrondissement
before the war forced them to return to Iran.

She never got the visa. Even with her American-born
cousin standing beside her at the counter.
They didn’t deny her, exactly. They didn’t
even look at her papers. The woman
behind the glass separation said you people
when I asked for an explanation.
That was 1993. Before 9/11, before “the Axis of Evil,”
before the Iran Nuclear Deal. Before the Muslim Ban.
Before our fathers died.

We are both named after our grandmother, Maryam,
whom I never had the chance to meet. We are close
but far away. Cousins in two continents, dancing
on the tightrope of a history that pushes
forever at the seams of our lives.

Belonging

Baba loved the California landscape—
its hills and valleys, the hot
wind in summer and how easily
he could grow olives, pomegranates
cucumbers and eggplants
in summer (never mind that it was my
mother who watered the garden), and he loved
eating outside under the oak tree and sycamore
telling us his thin stories about a distant time
hiking the mountains outside Tehran and how
clean the air smelled at that height.
He would preside at the table like a true
patriarch, sending us to fetch the fat Webster’s
or a volume of his Encyclopedia Britannica when
we had a question about a word or history he didn’t know
or couldn’t explain—even though we thought
he knew everything.

My mother prepared the lamb they bought each spring
from the Italian immigrant family in the foothills. 
The Celentis—Maria, Tony and Tony Junior—
came the same year as my parents and found a way
to live as their ancestors did on the hard-red soil
of Railroad Flat with the dry air curling about them.
They raised sheep and had enough customers who knew
what it meant to eat lamb in a beef-eating world.
My parents would call or write weeks before
and ask them to butcher it, and we’d drive
two and a half hours—all six kids in the station
wagon. We’d spend the day scouring the creek for gold
and rocks while Tony Senior artfully held a knife
to the upside-down animal and made cuts
of shoulder and ribs, roasts, carefully
wrapping everything—tongue, heart,
liver, hooves—even the brains—in brown paper marked
by Mrs. Celenti with a black felt tip to help Mother
decide where she would lay the pieces
in the freezer once she unpacked them
from the Coleman ice chest after the ride home.

Our French mother learned to make the rice
just so, crunchy on the bottom, golden tadigh—
a word we loved to say, as we fought
over how much of it would fall on our plate.
We never knew how to ask, but we knew
there were secrets contained in the food
we ate: kabab, kuku and khoresh
and the saffron Baba would bring
for Mother after visiting some friend
who’d returned from Iran over Norooz.
We thought of our meals like the pages
of the encyclopedia, a quest to learn
a history that connected us.

Even though we could not speak
Persian or French, and sometimes
felt the sharp edges that kept us out,
we held the hope that one day,
far in the future, we too would
break bread over proverbs and sayings
and understand the banter that broke out
over Baba and Amoo’s backgammon game
and we’d know the taste and color of everything
so that we could find our way back
into belonging.

(These poems are from the anthology Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora from Green Linden Press.)

Persis Karim is a poet, editor and Professor of Comparative & World Literature at San Francisco State University, where she also serves as the Director for the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including Callaloo, The New York Times, and Caesura. She is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian Diaspora Literature: Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers, Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora, and A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays By Iranian Americans. You can learn more at: persiskarim.com.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2021