ROGER SEDARAT

My Mother’s 20 Persian Gold Bracelets

        Marriage handcuffs say American wives.

        One for every year Dad’s family came,

        Aunt Hishmet pushing rings on Mom’s fingers.

        At four years old, my hands the size of those boys’ hands

        that Persian dance through carpet-weaving looms,

        I sit in her lap with my palm through her rings

        to know why she’s crying.

        The sight of her scrubbing the kitchen floor,

        stirring endless pots of stew each summer for Persians

        who’d criticize her home then give her finely twisted

        21-karat-gold jewelry. Her hand, like a dog trained to jump

        through burning hoops, collecting rings for keeping secrets,

        smiling when there’s company and she picks up the phone

        to hear an anonymous Texan tell her to leave the neighborhood.

        The bracelets in a sour cream and onion dip container,

        bits of grime floating in bleach, resin from planting onions

        in the garden, gutting eggplants for khoreshe bademjan

        after a full workday, so much digging for gold in her adopted country.

        My Dad warns that one of her students might cut off her arm

        for drug money. I watch her do dishes with a stump, a bloody

        right hand palm up, finally at rest in her high school parking lot.

        Coming home to my Father dead drunk in front of Ted Koppel

        reporting on the fall of Iran,

        she’d put him to bed only to lie beside nightmares,

        have him punch and kick her out in his sleep,

        music on her arm playing down the hall, dying on the couch.

        Each ring a year, skin on her wrist indented patterns,

        twenty lines of marriage in the morning deep enough to wonder

        how blood moves through her fingers when she sleeps.

        Like any son, growing up I take her for granted,

        the jangle on her arm nothing more than a warning to stop

        a dirty movie on the VCR, a tambourine announcing dinner,

        deep metallic laughter bringing brownies from the oven.

        Now that I am older and Dad’s been gone, rings hanging in time

        like petrified wood, she discusses the past, each bracelet

        a medal for her American service to Iran.

San Antonio, 1979

        Iranians never escape that year.

        My Father said, Tell people you’re from France.

        For an eternity I’m forced to hear

        This kid in third-grade science named Pierre

        Asking, Ça va? I didn’t have a chance.

        (Iranians never escape). That year

        They dragged me down the hallway by my hair

        Blindfolded, screaming in Texas accents

        For an eternity I’m forced to hear:

        Hey Ayatollah you’re not welcome here!

        The U.S. is for us! As immigrants,

        Iranians never escape that; year

        To year we relive it whenever we’re

        in an airport and get looked at askance

        For an eternity. I’m forced to hear

        Customs detaining my father declare,

        It’s just routine. Voices that turn a man’s

        Ear on eons never escape that year.

        For an eternity I’m forced to hear.

Khomeini’s Beard

        I.

        In twilight the carpet weavers’ threads change color;

        soon the boys’ fingers to reveal behind the red-blue forests

        of lions and lambs, deep indentions, stone calluses,

        as they wave east with their bodies in prayer,

        corn husks flapping in the wind that comes singing

        through the teeth of a pitchfork left stuck in the earth,

        the farmer building a fire dropping his wood, the cupped

        curl of his ear, pink as a newborn calf, hanging on each word

        coming in the microphone static, coming like streaks of lightening

        from Isfahan, white Arabic burning above a mosque’s

        gold belly, the echo of an Allah Akbar rolling like thunder,

        like clouds of sand on the village trail beneath the feet of oxen,

        stirring down from an olive tree, shooting an arrow into the stars,

        each pair of wings flapping white and electric.

Outing Iranians

        Andre Agassi.

        He likes to stand close

        to the line, pretending it’s one long grain of rice

        Christiane Amanpour.

        How come she never really talked back

        while interviewing Rafsanjani in a chador?

        The Soup Nazi in New York.

        A curiosity on Seinfeld, he’s any one of

        my uncles who take their cooking seriously.

        Henry Kissinger.

        (Just kidding).

        Bijan.

        Smell his cologne and you’ll see a well-dressed

        man with olive skin (he’s gay, but don’t tell my father

        who refuses to believe Iranians can be homosexual).

        Your daughter’s homeroom teacher.

        When you come to “Parent’s Night,”

        he insists that you eat the fruit he set out for you.

        The boy your daughter decides to marry.

        He’s devilishly handsome and when he tells you

        they’ll honeymoon in Iran, won’t say for how long.

        The owner of the “Middle Eastern Restaurant” in your neighborhood.

        If you ask him if he’s Iranian and he wants your business,

        he’ll just smile and give you a free doogh.