in parentheses

Poet, theater critic and writer, Bita Malakuti born in Tehran, lived in Prague for two decades, and now lives in Washington DC. The mother of an eleven-year-old son, the author of 7 books and currently writing a novel with five female characters, in five periods of Iran’s history, all five women are named “Nina.”

Danial Haghighi is an Iranian writer exiled in France.

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Summertime Daydreaming of the Young Mother

In my dreams I am a singer, singing the beginning of your song
in an old rhythm and lyrics.
In my dream I am a dancer, dancing your remote sadeness,
And am a poplar at night, narrating the sharpness of your eyes.
And a woman of barbarian tribes’ youth,
with a pair of lips blowing off in madness.
A white chest am I full of jovial clouds,
and a gusto about frequent foreplays
far from news, revolution and bullets.

In the waking life, a waking dead mowing all the time–an exiled body, which is about to leave the exile, the shadow, the waiter status.
At the mercy of the scene’s gay noises all the suitcase are tyrant.
They make the memories bloody and you too–the rain as well took place in this suitcase, and also your absence that resembles all the soils of all the cities.
I don’t want La Defense, scriptures, written stuff, or ABCD. I don’t want cuddling either, and since a long time ago I haven’t visited any museum.
None of them smells like you in their essence.

In the Name of Rain and the Scar

Today is wednesday, and
my ivy has been taller than the Bhudha’s statue–to want is an infinitive stunned.
I passed this love through les champs de mines,
and through glissant crossing of the revolution
and of the bland touch of declaring alarm of red situations,
in maimed shelters.

I have hidden you in the trunk of a willow
in ponds of hopelessness
in blood rivers, which
goes and goes till Vltava
And I stashed you away in my prename useless,
that is the name of all the people lost
into these forlorn veins–these obsolete veils.
able to hear your name just to be pretty

Call me by my alley’s name
in the name of rain and the scar
summer and kiss’s
and also in the name of those curve lines
never surrender to these sharpened angles

Call me by the name of kohl and poplars
and local farms of your chest and shoulders, left in Renault 5.

Call me so that moon come up to the night’s murmuring
until my mouth gets full of olives.

Look! There is no land occupied in my hairs
and
my house
will never remember
the militia’s name, ever after.

The Shape of My Own Anna Karenina

She is like my college years version,
my elementary school years.
With the tears’ rhythm on the tidal wave rituals.
Akin to an exiled woman
with a bizarre diagonal accent onto the water.
On time like that sun, which
kisses the new wounds of the twigs
She is the divergence girl–sort of;
Pendulum on clouds.

She is as pretty as the salt
through that plateau
between two black long hairs;
she has the shape of my homeland.

Zartosht and temple, fire and the horse,
She has the shape of my own Anna Karenina–blockade facing the railway.

The trump card slamming on the death mouth;
She is the warfield by her corporel curves:
Between the lines are empty, rifles are empty too,
And peace is a singing by Eve’s throat.

Apples in her shirt, and we the sad stuff never-ending.

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