God is a Catfish from the White River in Martin County, Indiana

and we would eat
Him on Summer Sundays
after Mass. Sometimes
we would eat Him
on the lawn of His own house
as the sun shone through
the sycamore leaves,
creating its own stained
glass on the grass
beneath our feet. We named our

biggest county festival after Him,
the CATFISH FESTIVAL.
And we would walk up
and down the main street to
look at the vendors selling knives,
quartz figurines, and paintings
of the American West, even
though we were smack dab
in the middle of it. Up the road

and around the corner
is the bridge where men
fished for Him, the biggest
of the summer meant
bragging rights for the
year. Some would be
mounted, others were soon
fried and fed to those
finishing games of softball
in the park. When night came,

we would sit in a truck
bed or on the hood of a
car, still warm from
the July sun. The grease
from the feast of Him
earlier in the day still
on our fingertips and
lips. Around us,
fireworks of all kinds,
but towards the heavens was
where our eyes would
always end up. We would inch
our hands closer to each
other, in hopes that they would
meet. If even briefly, we would
live off that touch for
weeks. We would make plans

or the next day. We would tell
ourselves that this was
the rest of our lives. In the
morning, we would know what
we were going to eat that day.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

FDA APPROVED OPERA SERIA

The distorted face has always been her forte. The distorted face is the contrabassoon. I’m grimacing. It always starts with the contrabassoon to tell you that something terrible may happen. Then the sobbing. That’s when the bandoneon starts to play. The weeping. That’s the two-string Chinese violin, the erhu. The wailing. That’s the clarinet. The striking whimpering, the shaking bawling, and the scraping blubbering are hitting my ears like percussion. I’m covering my ears but the bagpipes have already swallowed the ode to joy and left a suspended note instead. Every suspended note needs resolution.

My little sister is running her castanet feet through the black and white diamond-pattern carpet without respecting today’s odd day which is the fifteenth of the month, so it’s white diamonds only. The new conductor throws one of my maracas on a black zone of the diamond-pattern carpet. It breaks in half with a muffled sound. The maraca’s sandy vocal cords are lost in the caesura. I can’t touch the sand with the treble of my feet. The sand undergoes an involuntary register change. I have a gross shuddery out-of-tune feeling in my spine. Every suspended note needs resolution.

Sand is made of decomposed rocks like quartz (silica) and feldspar. There are roughly eight billion grains of sand per cubic meter of beach, and roughly seven hundred billion cubic meters of beach on Earth. That’s five sextillion grains of sand. That’s too much sand, even for sand-filled hammer shakers. It’s making my head spin like the egg beater spins when Mom mixes dead chicken fetuses to make pancakes that look like frisbees. Chickens like xylophones. My pyrophone is burning inside. The mobile musical safari reflects flickering lights. My insides are like burners in cylindrical glass tubes.

The Queen of the Night is about to throw the second maraca. My dad walks into the playroom with the risperidone and blows the French horn to call the hunting dog out of the woods. But it’s too late for severe sedation. The six-second rule does not apply to frenetic random activity periods. I already threw my sister out the window. Every suspended note needs resolution.

This piece was featured in Volume 4, Mighty Micros. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Invocation

Kingsessing in Southwest Philadelphia is a low country of porches and brick. A long green edge where Cobbs Creek keeps the seasons and the city sets its weight down. It is trolley bells and bus sighs, damp cellar air, snow that turns the street into a white ledger and summer that writes itself in hydrants. It is rowhouse cornices and hand-painted signs and the iron geometry of fire escapes. It is the smell of bread at dawn and hot brake pads at noon and rain lifting the dust off asphalt in the evening. Kingsessing is corner glass and barber mirrors, a library cool as a sanctuary, a ball thudding on varnished wood, a church basement that knows fifty recipes for mercy. It is stoops—the first step, the second step, the last—with chairs set out like commandments and gossip folded small as a prayer. It is aunties with sun hats and boys with scabbed knees and girls with jump ropes thwacking time. It is names printed on envelopes and on shirts and on the backs of jerseys, and it is the other names, the ones you earn: Ms., Coach, Cuz, Deacon, Nurse. It is the slow code of nods on a morning sidewalk. It is the place under the El where the pigeons keep their own parliament. It is a crossing guard’s raised palm and a bus kneeling and a driver who waits longer than he has to. Kingsessing is a rulebook and a rumor and a promise made on the corner; it is a notice taped to a door and a hand that takes the tape down. It is rent due, and it is someone sliding an envelope across a table, and it is thanks left like change on the table. It is the long light on Baltimore Avenue and the straight run of 52nd where commerce speaks in neon, with half the letters missing. And Kingsessing is its people, which is to say it is the sound they make together when a siren passes and no one you love is in it. It is the patience at a red light when the street is empty. It is the small work of keeping: a sweep, a saltshaker, a knock, a name. It is a neighborhood that outlasts its weather, and it is the weather that teaches the neighborhood how.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Morels

You can’t find morels without your father’s eye trawling the deadwood and bramble for you. Thrashers thrash in the canopy, busking their duplicitous song while chipmunk and squirrel weasel through foliage, striped firecrackers. A tree has fallen across the path you and your father carved out three years ago, back when he could lift the chainsaw without shaking. Today, he holds only a bucket and won’t let you carry it, though you know his left side is numb. The Laetiporus on the tree trunk is orange but unripe, and the puffballs you saw near the rusted, stripped Camry a hundred feet back are bloated with spores, too mature for the butter and garlic baptism you would have given them at supper. Summer and Fall battle over the maples’ chlorophyll, but the trees’ shadows do not change. Your father says this is the week for morels, so you must help him harvest before the mosquitoes die and the ticks vanish. Before the longlegs curl up dead and the hummingbirds depart and the wasps slumber in their paper nests and before he shakes too much to hold anything at all, even a bucket. He still hasn’t told you how to identify morels. You don’t know how you’ll find them when he’s gone.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

When the Veil is Open

Before the web, there was the web of connection, no endless moving trains of news, global distractions, or any sounds all day and night. I remember the silent wind with my mate at age nine on bicycles along Suffolk roads between house paths, on country tractor paths, mooing at dairy cows we passed. I looped a plastic sack around handlebars with two potato-crisp sandwiches, prawn cocktail flavour, crushed well between caked-bread slices, with a Cadbury Flake for afters. I didn’t know what a spirit was, a duppy, or any spirit at Salvation Army or Cub Scout meetings, as I do now. Wondering if King Solomon did enough to imprison the demons and gins. In a house, a darkened room packed with friends and family, dutty-wine-dancing, filled with gin and rum, while us kids were distant, checked in and out of the coat room. Did the lovers rock, heavy reggae bass-tones, the grown-folk groove, tear the veil as Gnawa Guembri to those beyond? If I discerned enough—could I see wandering duppies bring us closer, tighter as the drink-mix loosened bones within. Each soul here, hips and groin, gyrated with deep-dropping bass and drumbeats, dripping skin with sweat. Bodies open and release in the beguiled state, my breath empty. I wonder which crows or blackbirds were watching us back then, hidden in the darkness beyond our windows or in the morning blazing sun. Ancestors on power wires, brick pub corners, or the magpies in my yard, presently watching me as I see them. Ancestors appear more in the Spring, collecting souls, bargaining lost hope broken-glass with the gins, not during the stale-tree stick-life loneliness of Winter. Maybe that’s why there is so much silence in the palatinate forest, before buds open, sails of swishing leaves begin, before the woodpecker is pecking a new home, or releasing Morse code warning to those awakening in their seasonal rebirth. This woodland place where webs were frosted statues, thawing out their connection to each beech tree, oak tree, without the noise humans created, recalling the stillness where we once played, where we once began.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Woven

It was the weft and wop of the weave, pulled
over my knee, muscles and tendons that
repaired my split thigh, a pattern, the surgeon said,
a kind of living fabric that carries me forward,
the way that robin thatches its nest or the swallow
threads a home in the wall vines, even the spider
who deftly catches the sunlight in its dew,
which reminds me of the Cherokee legend of
Spider-Dwelling-in-The Water who wove
a basket to bring fire to the peoples, a pattern
still used today with river cane and white oak,
sometimes honeysuckle whose twines bend
and gather the way this poem gathers one thread
then another, trying to discover an end it hasn’t
predicted, like, say, an astronomer piecing together
dark and visible matter to discover our final
fate, or the explorer finding a lost Mayan city
amidst the jungle, the idea being we are all,
as physics tells us, entangled, like the way we
thread discrete stars to make one constellation,
or how trees help each other through their roots,
the whole cosmos gathering itself, headed, as
Teilhard de Chardin wrote, towards a mystical
convergence with whatever is beyond us—
something we need to believe in these chaotic
times where hate seems to prune all hope,
which is maybe what that French weaver knew,
what the music of Cherokee Hope is singing,
what the stars have always tried to tell us, and
yes, what that robin has been trying to say all morning.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

In Passing

We have alternative facts.
—Various administration spokespeople

On the surface an intelligible lie, underneath an unintelligible truth.
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The copperhead slithers along without bending
its spine. The ridges on its underside are like
boot treads.
          That was the example I was using
until he thought I was calling him a snake.

True or not.
          Which led me to believe each word's
a magnet for what you want to believe. Not for
what I meant. For what he thought I meant.

A slight breeze slips through the pines and disappears.

The cook puts his finger in the soup to test it, then
changes the recipe.
              Beneath Vermeer's “Girl
Reading a Letter at an Open Window” there is a hidden
naked angel still floating above the girl.
                       Yesterday
a meme led millions to believe a lie.
                     AI wants you
to believe what it wants to be.
                  It steals our electricity
the way it steals truth.
             Truth has become a casualty
of alternative facts and stories.
                 The good old days are
a metaphor for regression.
                War is a metaphor
for genocide, thus Gaza, thus Ukraine, thus Sudan,
thus whatever is next, or already happening.

The fog in the valley is getting denser each morning.

Someone quotes the bible to prove we shoudl cheat
the poor, or send them “back where they came from.”

Truth is in the heart is what I always believed.

It’s hard to get the news from poems like this,
but people die everyday for the truths we find there,
wrote the poet William Carlos Williams.
                       Dictators fear
poets and writers because they have opinions and truths.

You have to see what’s not supposed to be there,
not what is, like troops in the streets as practice
for what will come later,
              like the snake we see
only by the movement of the tall grass it has
tried to hide itself in.
            Each lie is a mask
for a larger, deadlier lie.
              How easy it is to create
your own dictionary, as Orwell knew, as we now
know.
   Our attention span diminishes each year.

In the end, the snake strikes regardless of your story.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

(Maternity) Leave

There is a stretch of the most precious time in the mornings after your husband has gone to work when the baby wakes up and you feed her and she falls asleep on your chest, her small arms holding your torso, their full length barely reaching the edges of your back. You can't move, of course, so you listen to an audiobook and lie there in the mostly-dark room and you are two places at once: this most precious place with your daughter sleeping on your chest (which she does not do throughout the day, high on milk scent too close to your boobs, demanding to be held but a safe enough distance away from the food of you) and the other place of deep deep sadness that in 35 days you have to return to work and these small morning hours will go away. Bad mother. She will sleep this last stretch of night sleep instead in a pack n play or not at all, having to be woken up more fully and moved around, crying while you get dressed and cannot hold her. She is so small. Impossibly small. Bad mother. This most precious time is a gift and you are squandering it thinking already of when it will be over. Your neck hurts because you spend so much time staring at her. You don't eat enough in the day and you've been crying more at night again and my God there are already so many things you are doing imperfectly (which is to say, wrong). Bad mother. She already grew out of her newborn clothes and you cried when you packed them into a little plastic bin for storage. The beginning especially was so hard and exhausting, and there was so much pain (the literal, physical kind) it was almost unbearable but now you worry you missed it and you're missing it and you aren't ready to leave her. It is perhaps technically far away but it feels far too close and you aren't ready for these small hours between night and day to disappear, packed in a small plastic bin. You aren’t ready.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Laws of Motion

We don’t talk the way we used to / but sometimes I still feel the pull / the air thick with what used to be gravity / your voice dimming / a hum caught between rooms / I think of you in motion / in fragments / your voice screaming against the faucet / steam ghosting your face / how even light, stretched too far, forgets its source / once, you said everything keeps moving until something stops it / so I wonder if it was time that slowed us / or the quiet between what we meant and what we said / distance growing like a crack beneath paint / invisible until it splits / last spring, I found your handwriting on a grocery list / cursive thinning at the edges / paper softening where your hand once pressed / now it’s just residue / Newton would call it equilibrium / I call it the stillness that comes after naming / each law another way to say silence collects / settles / fills the room like dust / when I pass your doorway / the air still shifts / slightly / measurable only in ache / someone told me sound never dies / it only travels / maybe that’s why, some mornings, I hear dishes clink / the soft drag of your slippers across tile / and pause / certain for a moment / that nothing has moved at all.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Sinkhole

A sinkhole appeared in the street over the summer. It hadn’t rained in months, and wildfires were burning across the state. Containment percentages, mass layoffs, budget shortfalls, 9-1-1 hold times: The sinkhole felt like another in a long list of calamities we’d learned to accept. My dog sniffed at the edges. The darkness went on forever, mute and terrible, sunlight unwilling or unable to find the bottom.

Walking her again in the evenings, I called out to neighbors, “Watch out for the sinkhole,” or sometimes, “Somebody ought to do something about that sinkhole.” I could swear it was growing. Eventually, the City came and set up two worn, wooden barricades and a pair of bright, orange cones ringed in reflective tape. 

I stopped seeing the sinkhole for a while after that, at least until the plastic tyrannosaurus appeared. Frozen in mid-roar, back leg emerging from the hole as if it was scrambling up to the surface, it carried all the fearsomeness of that immeasurable darkness with it. “Did you see the dinosaur?” we asked each other now. I told my neighbors not to get too close. They laughed like I was joking.

One afternoon, the dog and I passed the spot where the sinkhole had been and saw that the City had cut a large rectangle out of the street. The bottom was just two-and-a-half inches deep and covered in gravel and sand. Some of the neighbors expressed disappointment, as if the sinkhole had deceived them into believing it was more than it was. I knew better, though.

The sinkhole was still there, waiting to swallow up anyone who dared to step on it. The dinosaur was probably hiding nearby behind some compost bins, surviving on squirrels and blackberries. I had not forgotten. Not while there was still sunlight in the evenings. Not while the red sun chased the night sky away every morning.

At the end of the summer, the City paved over the hole. The rains came a few days later, steady and soft, clearing the haze from the skies. But underneath that benighted patch of gravel, sand, and tar, I hear the quiet contracting and swelling of the street, of all the other dinosaurs working at the seams. My neighbors have forgotten they are there, but I still whisper to the sinkhole as I pass, careful not to let the dog get too close.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Two Pieces

Once More

“Make me a promise,” she said to him when they were lying in bed, although it was not night, and he said, “What promise?” and she said, “You shouldn’t have to ask.”

She half lay back on the pillows, peeling an orange, one of those small ones that have their own name. She dropped the peels on the floor, which was meant to annoy him, but he hardly cared about things like that anymore. Once, the brightness of the day was nothing beside a look from her, and it still was, most of the time.

“I'll make you a promise if you make me one,” he said.

The orange peels were like little boats, curved and clever.

“Okay,” she said. “I promise whatever you ask for, even if it means my own death.”

“So dramatic,” he said.

“Always,” she said. “Now you.”

He looked out the window. The sun was halfway down the sky, moving toward night. “I promise, if you like,” he said, “a blank check.  So what have I promised?” But he was thinking that, after all, there was nothing that would hold him to it.

“Oh, no,” she said. “We’ll write them down and take them out at the right time.”

“Which is when?”

“We’ll know,” she said, “or one of us will.” Her hair was hanging down her back, snarled and lank. She never combed it anymore but it was still beautiful. “Give me a drink,” she said, “and some paper as well.” He gave her the half-drunk glass of almond-flavored water. When he gave her the paper, she tore it in half and wrote on both pieces. “There,” she said. “There’s yours and mine.”

“You don’t know what I asked for,” he said, and she said, “Oh, but I do.”

“Don’t look now,” she said, and lay back on the pillows, drawing the sheet up over her. When she was sleeping, he went out into the hall and looked at the two papers, each ragged down one edge. She had written “I Promise to Die” on the one meant for her. His was blank except for the sketch of a bird flying out the window.

The House Is Burning

Tom and Evie’s father came back for a while when Tom was five and Evie was three, but she didn’t really remember, except she thought a bear had come to visit because he was big and was wearing a brown robe. He said he was wearing a robe because he was living in an alternative community, which they pretended to understand. He stayed one day and when he left, their mother went into her room and didn’t come out for a long time.

Tom found Evie’s pajamas and arranged her animals around her and told her a story about a squirrel who couldn’t find a nut until a kitten helped him. He had read the story at school. He changed the ending because in the book it was a crow who helped with the nut, and he thought Evie would like a kitten better.

When she was settled, he went to his own room and thought about their father. He hadn’t liked the robe, which was rough and dusty. The hem was ragged, which his father explained was because the rules where he was living said that you couldn’t try to look nice, which was also why he had a beard and didn’t cut his hair. He told them this while their mother was making dinner. Tom sat on the floor under the dining room table, and his father sat on one of the chairs. He tried to put Evie on his lap but she ran away, which was probably because she thought he was a bear. Tom’s father said that Tom would understand when he was older, but he didn’t say what it was he’d understand.

He didn’t come again until Tom was fifteen and Evie was just starting high school. He was wearing a suit this time and a tie he took off and folded up into his pocket. His beard was gone. “You’ve got another brother and sister now,” he said. He told them he wanted them all to get together so they could be one big family, but that didn’t happen until many years later when he was dead.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

I Am in a Room Alone

with the only music of the morning traffic, those who must rise to drive to labor, and a window often curtained and closed, and in winter, the radiator hissing, the kind from another century, the kind you must be careful or it will burn you. And there is a bed in the corner, and a small kitchen with a pot of coffee, and the murmurous speech of neighbors waking, for they too must return to the world where we are owned by others, who take the hours of our lives in return for wage. I would bet no one in this building could tell you my name or that there is a man who lives here all alone, long after the ones he loved, if ever, have left him, in this room. But then what are the names of the Chechen family who lives upstairs, who speak their difficult tongues, and the daughter who is late for the school bus every morning and runs calling after it in sounds of words I cannot translate as I pray she doesn’t fall? For who would lift her and bandage her knees? I peek out from behind the curtain, but the bus has stopped, and there is her mother on the porch yelling at her, smiling though. And then she pauses to look at the sky, the sky I have not looked at in days. There is absence and wholeness here, departure and what remains. The mother, now, is upstairs getting ready for work. The father and mother walk out in blue uniforms to work on a factory line. I once read the name of the pie factory on their clothes. To spend all day in the smell of sugar and sweetness must be a form of hell. I would learn to hate what I once loved to eat. There is something too often beautiful and terrible at the same time in this world. And then, the quiet of absence returns and fools me into clarity. And then, I look up to see starlings flying over the tenement roofs. I see the pale daylight moon staring down over the boat works and the refinery. Dear Lord, if now is the moment for a full confession, then now is when I will offer it if only you will lesson me on what I have left to learn.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Lunar Logic

There is a prequel and a sequel, then the cataclysm returns to its chrysalis, an odorless and colorless but very viscous liquid. It's been nanoseconds since my last deathbed confession. Be my albatross or alibi or flying folding chair.

There is a shoe for every scorpion, and every scorpion is in its shoe. Causation is only a partial order. At one end of every spectrum is an oxymoron; at the other, a redundancy. The continents have shifted in submission.

I thought you were serious until you said, But seriously. Just give me a place to pirouette, and I'll say it's an honor to be othered. Do you take the absentee to be an absolute? Each ethical dilemma is a trolley problem and—

today's the day the great apes have their picnic. I pronounce them separate entities. They want to know when will the bliss kick in. If I'm no angel, you're no angel. Keep your hands and feet where I can see them.

Although Sisyphus goes bowling with Narcissus, Sisyphus is no Narcissus. Quadrupeds are penitent and up in arms. This segue takes place in the nth dimension, and the tango and the bossa nova take the credit and the blame.

The butterfly was in the Bible but was only joking. That catastrophe accompanies the rapture is a given. In a bubble, I'm as probable as not. The butterfly said rest in peace but didn't mean it. Breathe on this piano, and it will go out of tune.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Morning in the Burbs

Rain or shine, goldfinches light up my day with their bubbly chatter. Unless they perceive a threat then they turn stone quiet. Early this morning the threat was a fat black bear hunched over the torn-down suet feeder. I led the cat to the window to witness, but apparently her neurons couldn’t process bear. She only wanted to sniff my buttered bagel and be brushed. I’m writing this not because I have anything deep to say, but come on—a bear on my front lawn! Also, the truth is, for a moment in those tricky morning shadows, I thought the bear was my neighbor, who's a survivalist of some sort and rather hairy. Grizzly Adams, we call him, though not to his face. On weekends he disappears into the mountains of New Hampshire and eats only things he kills or finds dead, or else beef jerky. The goldfinches fall silent fast when he’s out and about in the neighborhood. They hole up in my forsythia. Perfect camouflage. Once I asked him why he scares the birds and he said, What birds? I wouldn’t want to survive without birdsong. I even love the sorrowful coos of mourning doves at 6:00 AM. In no time, the bear devoured the glob of grease and seeds and waddled off through the neighbor’s yard, leaving behind a pile of scat. By then the cat had licked my bagel clean, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I knew shortly the forsythia would rustle and, one by one, bright goldfinches would rise.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 3, “Might Micros”. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Spells

On Christmas Eve as teens, we amble Georgetown’s lamplit streets, fingers linked, kissing, your upper lip prickly with that faint mustache some girls get. Your dad is a basement shut-in, a bald guy with myalgia. I had been sipping pink sherry at a gift exchange at my grandpa’s house, my crystal glass prisming the festive fir’s icicle lights into rainbows. Recrossing the tall arch bridge, I scale the patina green parapet rail. The steel chills my fingers as I teeter above the tree crowns, the void of the wide black river. Through those balusters, I ask you if I should do it. Not missing a beat, you snuff your cigarette cherry on my half-numb knuckle and a moment later, faint. I scramble back over and kneel beside you, jostling your limp shoulder. An ambulance slows. Driver says someone phoned in about a jumper. I play dumb and say you fainted. The medic loads you on a stretcher and we pull away as a news van arrives. You come to in a panic, demanding they let us off at the Metro stop. After your dad sends you to an all-girls boarding school on a distant river, we pen each other letters. Yours land in my mailbox, a mauve wax seal on the back flap. God, our paths cross decades after, you having refound religion among snake handlers, spirit talkers.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Please, God, in the Event of Dictatorship

Allow me to run from America and, if it be Your will,
Have Germans roll out their welcome mats
As America opened her arms to my parents
When they escaped Berlin in the ’30s.
Or, if not, allow me to tend my garden,
And don’t forget to protect my stocks.
Or, if I end up in some relocation camp out in Utah,
At least let it be humane, or, if not,
May I thrive in suffering and hardship.
Didn’t Sartre say “We have never been so free
As under the German Occupation?”
Today on Morning Joe I heard terror in men’s voices
Even in those normally mechanical and robotic.
But Germany might be a better option anyway
For decrepit age, since they care for elders cheaper
And I’ve now got my German papers.
But maybe it’s too lonely there.
I know the language but don’t know a soul.
How does it work, to not know a soul?
I’ll just be in some affordable nursing home,
And everyone will be talking German
While I’m looking out at snow instead of palm trees.
Of course, if one listens to folks like Knut,
There never was a Holocaust.
What I don’t understand about antisemites is,
Shouldn’t they be cheering for the Shoah
Instead of denying it?
What would it take to convince him?
He also assures me the earth is flat
And schools everyone that BLM is a Jewish plot.
I wish, God, You could open his eyes at Auschwitz
But he’d claim that’s just an ingenious Hollywood set,
And Hollywood is Jewish-owned.
Maybe I should tell him about my grandmother
Who was deported from Germany,
Branded, starved, gassed and burned
Even though she’d converted to Christianity
The way I converted all these years later.
But he’ll assure me that’s all myth.
Knut once hoped to be a child support investigator.
And gave my name as reference.
When they phoned me, I told a bit of the truth
About his “issues” with black people and Jews
Though he has “mad respect” for one or two individuals.
They thanked me and never disturbed him again.
But You already know all this, dear Lord,
Because You know and direct everything.
Help heal Knut, lift him and others like him
Out of the cesspools of Reddit and 4chan
And into the yeshiva of Your grace. Amen.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Cairn

Don didn’t care if it would storm. They were here to fish, he and his son, and they needed a break in their luck. Yesterday was merciless, snags and empty stringers. The other fishermen, however, caught more walleye than they bothered to count. These were sportsmen, Don reminded himself, but the fish didn’t know that. Their bait looked same enough. This lake, a hundred miles north of Nowhere, Ontario, had no roads, service, or even plumbing—nothing but water, wood, and fish. If men weren’t equal here, equality anywhere was a joke.

They floated alone in a murky bay. Jigging, their lines were taut with sparkle beetles and curly tails. Nothing was biting. They were the first on the lake, and if need be, they’d be the last to come in, even under thunderheads. Don’s wife would not approve, but this wasn’t her world. This land was untouched, primordial. When Hannibal marched on Rome, this land looked no different. This was Nature as it should be—a newborn. The wind picked up, snapping at his hood.

The boat shifted. His son squirmed in his seat. Bo was an eighth grader already, scrawny and still afraid to unhook the fish he somehow caught. Don knew how important this week was. Bo needed something special, like a good look at something majestic or maybe a long crawl through adversity. He had bailed on his first campout—which was in the backyard—but Don had higher hopes for this trip. There was no easy way out here, only the floatplane, an aluminum tube tossing around in the clouds for hours. This was the real deal. A man had died here a month ago, slipped on some rocks, and hemorrhaged. It doesn’t get more real than that.

“Dad, I saw lightning.”

Don looked. Gray clouds rolled along. The wind, barely sharp, was hollow and silent. “It’s fine,” he said. It was a thirty-minute drive. They would stay and maybe catch a lunker to bring in for the others. Those fishermen, hard and wise, wouldn’t be going in yet. They’d sit through the rain no problem, but they’d hear Don and Bo driving in, privately judging them as they’d continue to catch and string their walleye.

“I didn’t bring my rain pants,” Bo whined.

“Whose fault is that?”

“I’m not sitting in the rain just to keep catching zero fish.”

“Shut up,” Don snapped. Bo turned to the water. The wind moved between them, rattling the trees. Don didn’t like shouting, but it had its place. It was certainly better than not caring at all or giving in to Bo’s every whim. No, his patience had its limits. But, he was still more patient than his father had been with him. Don’s old man was tough, raised in a different time. He belittled him for every small failure. Coward, prissy, nancy, runt, he had called Don everything. Just imagine what he’d call Bo, gripping the boy’s neck or wrist in rage whenever he was running behind. No, Don needed work, but he was doing well.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Bo said.

“Go off the side.”

Bo stood on the thwart, rocking with the waves. He tilted and swayed for several minutes before sitting back down. “I can’t, it’s rocking too much. I’m afraid I’ll fall in.”

“I guess it’s not that pertinent,” Don said.

“Just park it somewhere.”

Park it. Don scoffed and continued to jig. He thought more of his father as the silent gray churned above them. He remembered how his dad would drag him to the truck to get feed, his cheeks red and stinging. Or how he’d hate hearing the front door burst open, knowing he had come home. He remembered his father’s funeral, bright and cold in the heart of winter, his eyes stinging from the wind.

Bo was silent, fixed on some other place. Don reeled in and started the motor.

The boat glided on the water before scraping against the flat rock of a wooded island. Bo stumbled out and rushed to the trees as waves swept along the shore. On the other side of the boat, by a heap of moss, Don saw a small stack of stones. Gray and fixed, they looked like a child’s project. Bo returned from the trees and approached the pile, leaning down to pluck off the top.

“Don’t,” Don broke out. The rocks were neat, balanced, even reverent. “They might be for the man who died,” he said.

Bo backed away. A heaviness settled there.

Don looked around. The wind tumbled through the dark green tamaracks. They were sharp, pointing up to nothing and swaying like casual fanatics. Those thunderheads, heavy and creased, were above them now. Don felt a third one with them, a stranger he recognized but didn’t know. He stared at the wet rock beneath Bo’s feet, dark with mindless malice. It was time to go.

They left the island, cutting into the tattered lake. Darker, darker dawned the sky. Don thought of the men already inside the cabin, wondering where he and Bo were. He imagined rain filling their rundown Lund, shoring them somewhere remote and overgrown.

The wind and whirling chop thrashed against them. They braced and moved against it until they came across red cliff faces. Don sped back the way they came, passing through a narrow strait. The wind was somewhere above them, the waters calm. Bo deflated into his raincoat, covering his shivering legs.

The going was slow through tight corners and narrow gaps. Don’s mind wandered and he thought of the island. A video played in his head of a boot slipping up, followed by a thud and swift crack of bone. Another fisherman would’ve been there, twisting his head at the sound. After a single, hanging moment, he’d call and wait for some suggestion that the man was embarrassed and sore but fine. But he’d hear nothing. Maybe a soft, rattling whimper. He’d rush over, holler, pat his face, and jolt his coat, watching a world end. It could’ve been his friend, a brother, even his son leaking through his fingers.

Don thought of what his own father would have done if he had fallen. He remembered his sister spraining her ankle, flailing and crying as Dad tenderly opened the screen door to bring her inside. He remembered him old and gray, smiling in his La-Z-Boy as Bo rolled a Hot Wheels car up and down his shinbone. Or him teaching Don to fish at the lake with red buoys an hour out of town, fingertips slowly knotting the line. He wouldn’t have screamed or shaken Don’s body. He would have knelt in the wake, quietly panicking as he wrapped his old arms around the limp body of his boy, the terror of nature driving away his harshness. He would rock him, muttering for his only son to wake up. Please, please, son. Please wake up.

Don drove the boat out of the straits into a larger basin. The wind slammed against them, peeling away his hood. He saw a slight green in the clouds to the south, and a sober terror carved into his gut. It was the sick color that stalked cornfields on childhood evenings when the sirens would blare. They bounced on the waves, floating in the air for long seconds. Bo, light and high on the prow, pitched to the left and right by the boat’s edges. Don wanted to shout at him to hold on tighter but thought of him turning to listen at the wrong moment and going over. He only watched, as though by staring he could hold his son safely in place.

The lake took an age to cross, even as fast as he went. In Don’s mind, an image flickered of a covered figure resting between the seats. How fast that boat would’ve gone, he thought, as the body was returned to the cabin. They would have placed it somewhere while waiting for the plane. Not in the kitchen. Not outside either. In the bunkhouse, on a bed, and under a blanket. It would take the plane an hour to fly in. Then it would leave as those remaining cooked and prepared a quiet dinner. When the outside air was indigo, they’d lay in bed and drift to sleep.

No, not drift. Sink. Hours of a mind floating before a sudden plummet. One by one as night would rise, a darkness deep and ancient would sweep over the arctic waters, encroaching on the cabin, docks, and boats.

In town would be a phone. Calls would be made, names would be said, gasps and wails and huff-huff-huffs. Details would be discussed. Under the sterile lights of a hospital or the yellow glow of a fishing outpost, pens would be clicked and papers signed. What happened on the rocks would become legal and accounted for in the places where streetlamps, corner stores, and highways burned endlessly and night—true night—was not welcome.

But in the dark, that void pool surrounding the lake, there would be no thought or memory but the fading gray. On and on forever as the rolling stone of time continued its slow crush. The blood on the rocks seeping down, down into elder earth, thinning and dissolving and washing away in the black water. No identity but night, patient, hungry, and final, swallowing every last day and fleeting flash of brilliance. The lights of the fishermen would dim until sleep doused the last of their thinking wicks, leaving nothing but reality: raw oblivion, an abyss beyond sight and sound save the eternal lapping of water on rock.

Rain came at last, first as pellets, then as a sheet, smothering the man and his son. Don closed his eyes, swerving the boat. He blinked and covered his face. The lake was breaking apart. Water rushed over the side, seeping ice cold on his legs and hands. The cabin would come up on the left, or maybe it was on the right. It all looked the same. He couldn’t even squint. The puddle in the boat grew.

He had waited too long. His son would have been fine if Don had only left earlier, listened to him sooner. If only he could open his eyes and see. But he saw only the rush, the quick sweep of unthinkable violence destroying everything by simply passing. The boat crumpling on the rocks. A vaulting green flood. Bo’s shadow disappearing under the rabid wake. Don stopped and listened, thinking to receive some signal of instruction from a place outside of rain. In a blossom of thought before the end, all he saw was his father, holding him and kneeling in the wake.

Three shrouded figures stood at the dock as the boat came beside it. One hunched down and whisked away his son. Another took the boat’s ropes while the last held out his hand for Don, guiding him onto the dock. They shambled across the sopping grass, coming toward the cabin. He moved through the group to Bo. Don held the boy’s jacket, making sure his shoulder was underneath, that he was really with them moving to safety. He felt Bo’s small, cold fingers wrap around his own.

They swung the door open and the fishermen dragged them inside, cheering and handing them towels. The barber was frying fish, and a tin of coffee sat on a low flame. The men shed their dripping jackets, patting themselves dry as rain thumped on the roof. The men told of their journeys back, along with other stories as walleye sizzled in the frying oil, and the wind outside screamed.

Don poured himself some coffee. He stood at the window, watching the storm tear the ground and branches apart. Then, he heard his son speaking from the table. The other men fell quiet, listening as Bo retold the story of border agents stopping and searching them as they came into Canada. It was a favorite in their developing canon. The men had agreed it was the van driver’s fault, fumbling over his words, but here was Bo evoking the shifty eyes of the teacher who had been sitting shotgun, which no one else noticed. Now the men were drawn in as he mimicked their scared faces in the holding area, jutted eyebrows and trembling lips. He was pretty good, working the timing like a pro. The men laughed from the gut, raspy cackles like what Don would hear from his dad.

The rain never stopped. All through the night, it rapped on the roof and pelted the windows. Don lay in his sleeping bag. He saw the past, fishermen waking up the morning after the death, unhitching a boat to return to that silent island. Perhaps they’d think of nature as a murderer or as something cold without thought or feeling. Maybe they sat in silence thinking of nothing. All he knew was that they beached the boat as he had done, gathered some stones, and made themselves a cairn. It was a small effigy. To see it would be to know it wasn’t enough. But cairns aren’t meant to be enough. They are meant to be there and that is all.

Like fingers on a keyboard, the rain on the roof drew Don again to the image of his father in the wake. It wouldn’t leave him, sticking to his mind like a dart. It was more real than the ceiling. He saw a creased shirt and runny nose, shriveled hands holding his hair. He built the image piece by piece until he found he missed his father a great deal. Maybe forgiveness is wishing there was more time between us, he thought, and a stone inside him turned into a stream. He slipped under a blanket of sleep as raindrops pattered on the window, the small, powerful things trying desperately to get in.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Tide Pools

“Draw me a mermaid, Mommy.”

“Okay,” I answer my two-year old daughter. She watches me outline the figure in pencil on pink construction paper. The mermaid turns out to be feminine, unashamed of her bare breasts, and ready to swim in a dangerous ocean. I envy her.

My daughter pulls the bottle away from her mouth with a soft pop. “Draw a shark.” My shark is cartoonishly fierce. I am strict about media. No screens, no stories with villains or violence; my daughter has never seen anger depicted. 

“Now,” she says, “draw the shark eating a mermaid.”

My mouth opens to tell her that that would not be a nice picture, but I stop myself. On the one hand, telling her which drawings she should like doesn’t align with my feminist parenting agenda; on the other hand, neither does depicting violence against mermaids. While I'm working out this moral paradox, she’s staring at my hand holding the pencil, like a dog staring at a hand holding a tennis ball.     

Her brother snores gently against my breast in the green and white sling that has become a semi-permanent part of my body. Would I hesitate to draw a shark eating a pirate?

“Draw it, Mommy.”

I draw. The mermaid’s mouth is agape, and her hands flail like an old-fashioned damsel in distress. The shark’s teeth are clamped on her tail. Examining my drawing, I can hear the mermaid scream. Does she hear it too? Is she wondering if the shark is angry? Or simply hungry? She’s leaning over the table, her milk-smeared face inspecting my work, as if checking for typos. 

She sits back and says, “Draw another one.”  

“Another mermaid?”

“Another shark eating the mermaid.”

My heart sinking for the mermaid, I do as my daughter asks and create the same scene. She asks for another, and another. In all, I draw eight versions. And second guess myself with each one.

At last, she says, “Now draw the mermaid eating a shark.”

Barely hiding my relief, I produce a fanged and unapologetically vengeful mermaid. This mermaid is decidedly angry and takes no small joy in her revenge on the shark. Her hands claw around its body, and she grins above a semicircular chunk taken from behind the dorsal fin.

My daughter nods, says nothing, and wanders away. I am left with a pile of pink construction scraps, internal confusion, and a snoring baby.

She had refused to be born, preferring to swim inside me. After ten days, the doctor cut me open and reached in to fish her out of me. She bit him. She has her own names for things. That is a trink. This is my lega. Mommy, do you want a slusher-sludge? When I give her paints, her language transcends words. Pink washes to orange to yellow. Purple blends to blue to green. Bright reds strike against pale blues. She is Technicolor in my gray world. 

We drive over the ridge to the fogged-in beach and tote our picnic to the high tide line. She stamps across the sand, like she wants it to know she is there. Her brother’s eyes blink up at me from the shell of his sling. While he is focused on me, she is scanning the beach, the hills, and the horizon. 

We head to the tide pools. Mussels and barnacles are everywhere, impossible not to see. We’re looking for anemones and sea stars. I point out things to keep her close, while clutching my son against my body and trying to keep my own balance on the wet rocks. Checking every cranny for an interesting creature to peer at, I feel like I’m looking into other people’s apartments. At last, we find a purple sea star waiting for the tide. She looks at it, then shakes her head and I assume she’s frightened. I squat down awkwardly, take a breath and touch an animal I know nothing about. Running two fingers along the rough arm, I lie, "See, it’s not scary." 

At the touch of its prickled skin, I realize everything my daughter already seems to know. Its eyes may be at the ends of its arms, but the sea star looks right at me and my desperate-to-be-perfect parenting. These echinoderms creep on their hundreds of tiny tube feet across every inch of every ocean, from tide pools to twenty-thousand feet below, undisturbed by darkness, pressure, or the violence of predation. How many times has this creature lost an arm to a deceptively powerful mantis shrimp only to grow a new one? How often has it stretched its stomach out over a clam or a branch of coral, letting the enzymes slowly dissolve the prey before drawing the sated stomach back up into its body? I glance up at the seagulls circling; gulls who will eat anything with or without legs if they can catch it. I bristle at the meanness of nature. Then she is on the move again, and I have to blunder after her. I leave the sea star and the gulls to their conscience.

I roll up my jeans and push her leggings up over her knees and tell myself this means our clothes won’t get wet. One hand holding my daughter’s, the other resting on the bump that is her brother, we wade in. Splashing and laughing she pulls us farther in. The water rushes away from shore, pulling the sand out from under my feet, giving me the sensation that I’m moving. She wrenches free of me, throws her arms wide, and bursts into her siren song. A wild and joyful ululation.

I reach for her wrist, slippery now, and worry about those sneaker waves the news always warns about. My grip tightens but she gets away from me again, and again sings out, as if fetching her merfolk to come and take all three of us.

The fear seizes me. I see the three of us being sucked under the green water, past the tiny cove and the fishing boats, past the cargo ships. The waves tumble us past the twelve-mile territory sea, past the two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone, and at last we bob into the open ocean that is owned by no one. 

Here, where she is at home, she will reach out for my arm. She will want to point things out to her brother. Circling around the axis of our joined hands, she will gaze about with contentment, and I will be frantic, desperate for the safety of my own small pond. Calmly, she will show me the whales singing below us. 

A wave hits her at waist height. She is soaked, but still upright. I get a hold of her wrist and with the promise of a snack, lure her back to our heap of belongings. I hand her a peanut butter sandwich and tell her she's frightened me. “The ocean wants to take you from me. Don't let it.”

“Oh, Mommy,” she scrunches her nose at me, “it's okay if the ocean takes me.”

I swallow my terror and say, “How about swim lessons? You can learn to swim like a mermaid.”

She ignores me, drops the peanut butter sandwich into the sand, and wanders off to play with a rope of brown kelp.

Days later, she chatters through the house while I tend to a thousand tasks and accomplish nothing. Mermaids are still a favorite. She is wearing her swimsuit, scarves, and beads.

As I answer her—not really listening but wanting her to think I’m listening—I am thinking about dinner and dishes, and if I should buy that sweater or save money, or go back to work even though I hated the job I had before. Through all this noise, I hear a small thing. My daughter’s voice, not chattering, but speaking to me. She says, “Mommy, you are the mermaid that eats sharks.” 

“What did you say?”

She’s gone already, dancing down the hallway, with scarves and beads dangling, and dripping milk on the floor. I look down at her brother, whose brown eyes blink back at me. I will never know if I heard her correctly, but the further away I am from that moment, the more I realize it doesn’t matter.

A neglected part of my brain has begun to shift, like a waking sea star creeping from twenty-thousand feet below. For a moment, I don’t see myself as a tired and gray woman, still so much like a girl, trapped in a small, safe pond.

For a moment, I see myself in Technicolor, fanged, and eating a shark.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

My Therapist Shows Me How to Write in the Affirmative or An Alternative to Writing “Don’t Kill Yourself”

We're proud to feature this poem from Maya William’s chapbook Feminine Morbidity, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as the winner of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

stay kin       stay kin       stay kin       stay kin
stay kinder to myself stay kinder to myself stay kind stay alive
I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to
stay alive stay kind stay    be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself
be kind be alive     I want to be kind I want to be
alive I want to be kinder   I want to be alive   I want to be alive be kinder
be stay alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive
   be alive stay alive  be alive stay alive be    alive   stay
alive     be     alive stay  kind  be alive    be kind    stay alive
be kinder to my  self be kinder to my  self be kind be alive
I want to be kind I want to be kind I want to be kind I want be kind I
    want to be alive  be kind be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself
be kinder to my   self stay kinder to my   self be kinder to my   self stay
kinder    to my    self
be stay alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive
be alive stay alive be   alive stay  alive be   alive stay
alive be   alive    stay kind be a live   be kind    stay a live
stay a live   be a live   stay a live   be a live  stay a live  be a live   stay
a  live.   be  a     live   stay a     live be a  live   stay a live be
   a live     stay         a live be
a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Aab

Minoo hasn’t been inside many hotels in her life, so she isn’t sure what to expect from the Azadi Hotel. While her parents are checking in, she assesses the cavernous lobby. Its walls are covered in gold wallpaper with a floral print that clashes badly with the blue and white carpet. There are clusters of uncomfortable-looking chairs, all of which have a view of the three huge screens that are blaring the government television station. She looks up at the vaulted ceilings and notices that the chandeliers dangling from them are covered in a thick layer of dust. The hotel was built before the Islamic Revolution; she wonders if the chandeliers have been cleaned since then.

She glances over toward the reception desk, where her father is paying for the room. Her mother is standing behind him looking a bit awkward, as if she isn’t certain what she is supposed to do in a hotel lobby or whether she should be here at all. Seeing her parents in these surroundings, Minoo feels a rush of tenderness for them. It was a stretch for them to afford this trip, the first the family has taken in several years, and she knows they are doing it for her.

The man behind the reception desk accepts the payment, then gives her father an envelope with the keys inside and points down the hallway toward the elevator.

The décor in the bedroom is tawdry, but it is clean. There is a king-sized bed along one wall, covered in a bright bedspread topped with gleaming white pillows. Behind it, Minoo spots an alcove that holds a tidy single bed where she guesses she will sleep. There is only one window in the room, and its view is of an opulent but grimy building that Minoo’s father has told her used to be a gambling casino but is now a school. At the back of the room, a sliding glass door leads out to a balcony overlooking the Caspian Sea.

The six-hour drive along winding roads in her father’s cramped Citroen had not been easy on Minoo’s stomach, and after helping her parents unpack, she goes out onto the hotel balcony to watch the sun make its descent over the horizon. From the fourth floor, the water looks blue and serene. The truth, Minoo knows, is quite another thing. It is common knowledge now that the Caspian Sea has become dangerously toxic. Oil refineries, industrial waste, radioactive waste, and untreated human waste have all been dumped into the sea for decades. Minoo has heard that the water has a foul odor and that suspicious-looking bubbles can be seen on its surface. But right now, from up here on the balcony, she finds the seascape beautiful.

This is not Minoo’s first visit to the Caspian seashore. She has been here one other time, when she was a child of nine or ten. During that trip, she went with her mother to the women’s part of the beach, and they went into the sea together. The women’s beach was marked off from the rest of the shoreline by a tall metal fence draped in black mesh that extended into the water and was closed off at the end. This hid the women from view and prevented them from venturing out far enough to mingle with the men, who were swimming freely on either side of the enclosure. Even though the men could not see them, Minoo and her mother were required to swim in their full hijab, including pants, a roopoosh, and a headscarf. Despite the discomfort, Minoo remembers the day as exhilarating. She and her mother frolicked in the waves, made jokes about what might be visible beneath their wet hijab, and went back to their hotel room with their clothing drenched and covered in sand. She has not been in a body of water larger than a bathtub since that day.

Minoo and her parents do not intend to swim during this trip. They have come to the Caspian to get away from the noise and pollution of Tehran, to be together, and to relax. They plan to spend their days on the coast doing things they rarely have time to do: shopping together in the open markets, going to restaurants, and sightseeing in some of the small seaside towns. They will certainly stroll along the beach, perhaps gather some seashells and dip their toes in the water, but they have no intention of getting fully into the sea. It’s not just the toxicity; it’s the fact that the beaches—those designated for men as well as those marked off for women—are now patrolled by angry female lifeguards covered from head to toe in black hijabs. They do not relish the thought of being scrutinized and screeched at by such women.

Even though she hasn’t been in many bodies of water, water has always called to Minoo. The first word she learned to write as a child was aab—water. It is the word every child learning to read and write Farsi begins with, because it is made up of the first two letters of the alphabet: aleph and be. But to Minoo, learning to write this word had a special kind of significance. She remembers feeling entranced by the way the two letters on the page seemed to suggest the shape of a body of water with a tree beside it. She has always loved the sound of the word, the way it can be rolled around in the mouth and held in the throat for a long time. She loves looking at pictures of the world’s beaches on the internet and imagining herself there, standing on the shoreline. Whenever Youtube can be accessed, she watches videos of female swimmers. She is fascinated by their lithe, muscular bodies cutting gracefully through the water. At times, she almost feels she is inhabiting those bodies, inhaling and exhaling with the swimmers, gliding through the water herself.

~

On the wall in the apartment where Minoo lives with her parents in central Tehran hang two old photographs of her grandmother, Nasrin Hashemi. As a child, Minoo would stare at these photographs in awe and disbelief, trying to reconcile those images of her grandmother with the puffy-eyed, careworn woman she knows as Mamani. Whenever Mamani comes to visit, she sits on the balcony smoking cigarettes and drinking endless cups of tea. How could Nasrin, the woman in the photographs, possibly be Mamani?

The photographs are grainy enlargements that have yellowed slightly with age, but what they depict is unmistakable. One of them shows a young Nasrin, probably seventeen or eighteen, huddled together with four other women who are around same age. All of them are wearing green and white one-piece swimsuits and white swimming caps, and all of them are glistening with water droplets, obviously having just emerged from a pool. The other photograph is of Nasrin standing alone, her hands on her slender hips, wearing a tight floral one-piece swimsuit. In this photograph she has no swim cap, and her long, dark tresses spill around her shoulders. Both photographs are captioned: Iranian National Women’s Swim Team, Asian Games, 1974.

When she grew older, Minoo learned to read the captions and place the photographs in the timeline of Iran’s history. By then, of course, her mother had explained to her that Mamani had been a champion swimmer in the years before the Revolution. Women were still allowed to swim in 1974, and they were even allowed to wear bathing suits just as women did elsewhere in the world. It was not considered sinful at the time for women athletes to display their bodies in front of men. Men didn’t just watch female swimmers—they followed them, supported them, cheered them on, and coached them.

Even now, at age sixteen, this seems unfathomable to Minoo. She knows, of course, that everything was different before the Revolution, that women wore miniskirts, went to nightclubs, and danced and sang in public. In her classes at school, she learned that these behaviors were part of Iran’s “Westoxication”—its exposure to the decadence and corruption of Western countries, primarily the United States. What she has difficulty fathoming is that her grandmother had once been so physically fit, so thin and muscular, so full of energy and vigor. Throughout Minoo’s life, Mamani has always been wrapped in dark, loose-fitting clothing that hides the shape of her rotund body. In the photograph, Nasrin is proudly parading her body. If one looks closely, the contours of her breasts are visible in the picture, and there is even a suggestion of her nipples. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all is the brazen way Nasrin is looking at the camera, as if to challenge the photographer, who must surely have been a man. The Mamani Minoo knows often casts her eyes downward.

Just four years after these photographs were taken, when Nasrin was still in her heyday as a swimmer, Khomeini came to power. Almost overnight, women were forbidden to swim. Minoo’s mother has told her that when she was growing up, Mamani rarely mentioned her swimming career. The pictures were not displayed in their home, and it wasn’t until she was older that Minoo’s mother learned that Mamani had been a competitive swimmer. When she discovered this, she asked Mamani if she could take swimming lessons, which were allowed in some of the female-only gyms in Tehran. Mamani just laughed at her and said, “In a hijab? That’s not swimming, my dear daughter.”

Whenever Mamani visits the apartment now, she averts her eyes when she passes by the photographs. Minoo has never heard her comment on them at all, except to mutter something like “Yaad-e-oon-roozha bekheyr. Those were the good ol’ days.” Although she won’t say so directly, Minoo knows that it pains her grandmother to remember her years as a young woman who was free, not only to swim, but to go to discotheques and dance and laugh in the company of men.

Although she never talks about her years as a swimmer, Mamani follows the news about women’s sports in Iran with great interest. A few years ago, she was outraged when she heard a story on the news about a female swimmer who swam for eight hours along the Caspian seacoast, breaking a record. She broke the record while wearing six kilos of clothing, including a full wet suit, a swimming cap, a scarf, and a cape covering her whole body. Her swim took place in a secluded part of the Caspian where there were no men present. And still, the authorities refused to register her time because her attire did not conform to Islamic norms.

More recently, Mamani was visiting their home when another heartbreaking news story came on television: a woman who was jailed for dressing like a boy and attending a men’s soccer match set herself on fire in protest of her sentence, dying from the burns a few days later. Upon hearing the story, Mamani burst into tears, cursed at the television, and ran from the room. When she came out later to have her tea, her eyes were even puffier than usual, and her hands shook as she lit her cigarette. She took a deep drag, and as she exhaled, she mumbled, “Those bastards!” through a cloud of smoke.

Mamani had an even stronger reaction when she heard a Grand Ayatollah and Islamic scholar addressing the topic of female athletes during a television interview. The moment has lodged in Minoo’s memory because it was one of the first times she realized how much anger her grandmother was carrying around. The Ayatollah was insisting that women should not participate in sports such as weightlifting because it ruined their bodies and compromised their femininity. Minoo remembers his exact words. “A woman who lifts weights is no woman,” he said. “The integrity of a woman is defined by becoming a mother and nurturing her children.”

As she watched the interview, Mamani shook her head in disgust. “Madar-ghahbe! Motherfucker!” she shouted at the television screen. Minoo, who had never heard her grandmother use such shocking language before, turned and stared at her. Mamani made no apologies. She did not turn her eyes away from the screen but instead continued shouting at it. “You filthy dog! You call yourself a scholar? You call yourself a leader? Who are you to say what a woman should do with her body? Who are you to decide what is feminine and what is not?”

Some of the news about Iranian women athletes fills Mamani with glee. Whenever she hears about a female athlete defecting to another country, as many have done in recent years, she applauds them. “Aafarin! Barak’Allah!” she will say. “Good for you!” When she heard that a female alpine skier had been chosen to carry the flag at the Winter Olympics, she waved her arms through the air joyfully and said, “Hurrah! It’s about time we joined the rest of the human race!”

Minoo’s parents invited Mamani to accompany them to the seaside for this trip, but she declined. Minoo cannot help but think that the sight of water fills her grandmother with sorrow and longing. It is less painful for her to stay at home drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

~

On the last night they are in the hotel, Minoo and her parents turn in early so they can be rested for the long trip back to Tehran. Lying in her single bed in the alcove, Minoo cannot sleep. She does not toss and turn, but instead lies perfectly still for a long time, listening to the sound of the lapping waves mingled with the sound of her parents’ gentle snoring.

She does not know what compels her to get out of bed—it is not a rational or deliberate decision. Soundlessly, she pulls back the covers, swings her legs off the bed, finds her slippers with her feet, and slips them on. Using the light of the moon to guide her, she walks over to the place where her roopoosh and headscarf are hanging, lifts them from the hook, and puts them on over her pajamas. She opens the door gently, walks down the narrow hallway to the elevator, gets in it, and pushes the button for the lobby.

When she enters the lobby and sees a man behind the desk, she has a moment of panic, thinking she might be stopped and interrogated. She doesn’t believe it is against the hotel’s rules for a guest—even a young, unaccompanied woman—to leave the hotel room and go for a walk, but just in case, she quickly plans what she will say: she has a headache and needs to get some air. Men do not question women who say they are in any kind of pain, as this could be an indirect reference to their menstrual cycles. The man behind the desk looks up and sees her, but he makes no attempt to stop her.

Outside, the moon, which is almost full, shimmers on the surface of the sea. The air is brisk for May, and there is a gentle breeze. Minoo’s roopoosh and headscarf flap around her as she walks, but the sensation is pleasant. The moon’s reflection draws her forward, and she aims directly for it, then realizes that the light is everywhere at once, dancing all across the water. She sees no toxic bubbles and smells no foul odors.

Guided by the moon’s light, she moves down the shoreline until she comes to the men’s section of the beach, which is not enclosed by a fence. The hotel is some distance away, and there is no one else in sight. As soon as she realizes she is alone, she does not hesitate: she strips off her headscarf, her slippers, her roopoosh, and her pajamas, and deposits them on the shore. Then she walks, stark naked, into the water.

The water encircles her, caressing first her ankles, then her knees, then her inner thighs, her breasts, and her shoulders. Finally, she submerges her full head under the sea until she feels her hair floating on the surface. She has never learned to swim, but her arms know what to do. She moves them with the rhythm of the waves, buoying her body and propelling it forward. Every part of her body comes alive.

Unafraid, she plunges deep below the surface again and again, like a fish. Each time she rises for a breath, she whispers, “Aab, aab.”

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.