Where I watch you pull on and peel off my grandmother’s clothes
like earth layers. Where she works late into the night to mend these
fabrics for you. Where she asks after your weight, your
dimensions, leads you by the arm as if into the meadows of many closets
filled with all I’ve failed to inhabit—body-suits, evening
gowns, belts and buckles and shoulder pads. I only stop my Bibi at the casual
mention of the wedding dress, my mother’s, her wink like one of the many
pearls painstakingly inlaid by her own hand. I watch as you play
dress-up, become my mother, my grandmother—the stunning moments
you even become yourself. Now you laugh and twirl
on garden-stones in Tehran. Now you step across
the boardwalks of Geneva, smile back. Until, here and together
in the dark, I touch you, selfish, hungry, barely checking over
my shoulder the way I always do, your chilled palm
pressing my face into your shoulder, playing a bit
with the small hairs of my neck, shaping
my face. I’ve never known newness
this way, as if my mother and brother’s smiles could blend into
one. And I can tell that you, too, love
the way you look in this foreign mirror, these new clothes, the smoothness
and ripple of you as the material stretches over a new
body. In the village-town of Kalpurgan, they believe that earth is
medicinal. They paint clay into their bodies. It cures. They wash themselves
clean. Something stays as they watch bits of themselves become
the river. Something goes. As I pluck your chin
from the soil, I feel less alone. Something stays. The siren voice of my father,
gold-crested tables, a water-logged basement, my mother’s
paintings—everything framed.
And I think: what we make of our lives is just mud. What we lift and hold now
just the arm of a lover. How with our lover we return to dust.
Ode to the House Where I Was Born
~for Isabella
Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Florida Review and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press). In 2018, Atefat-Peckham was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet. His work has recently appeared in the anthology My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). Atefat-Peckham lives in Huntington, West Virginia and currently studies English and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard College.