IT HAS TO END

Hottest day of summer & we were sitting on the couch eating ice cubes
& salted pistachios, heels pushing against the Turkish prayer rug a relative
once brought & abandoned under the guise of a gift. Call this a still life,
whatever you want it to be, but whenever we were restless, we buried each
other under magnolia leaves, swore they smelled like vanilla. Sometimes,
if we were feeling sadistic, we kissed each leaf before burning them
with our father’s lighter we scavenged from the basement. Back then,
we didn’t know better & thought if this was our offering to the gods,
they would end the heat wave. How greedy we were then: when offered
fresh, swollen grapes, we took them by the handful, ate until it felt like
we were going to throw up. In this kingdom of boredom, no one else
could dare strip away what we saw as ours. There was a time as a child
when you climbed a chain link fence & found yourself the highest
you’d ever been—it felt like you could be anything as you looked down
on me. But you ended up bloody atop the neighbor’s growing sinkhole
our mother dubbed a swamp, head split open & tongue swollen, refusing
to scream. Now, as we watched New York City talk shows, feet propped
up on the coffee table just like our parents told us not to, you swore to me
there was a full moon above the sun that day & maybe it was the afterlife
for fireflies & magnolia trees. Summers got warmer; eventually we didn’t
see much of either anymore. We slowly began to forget. After all, we were
only human & couldn’t piece the ashes back together even if we wanted to.

POEM AS A METAPHOR FOR [REDACTED]

The other day we stole a part of the sun in case of emergency,
told ourselves we’d weave it into a tapestry. We didn’t think
of the consequences, only that this was a little way to salvage
one of the few constants in our lives. This year, all the
old television screens at the takeout halal joint down the road
echoed how much warmer our world is. We didn’t need to
be told this—we saw it in the price of persimmon boxes,
how the grass in our backyard withered and shrunk, the sweat
we wiped off our parents’ faces. Sometimes we learned we
needed each other, collected our fear from the river and let it pool
in our palms, only when things seemed dire. At church every
Sunday we called the divine devils, even when there was no
water left to baptize—nothing on this earth comes free anymore.
The other day, the newspapers spoke of a teenager burned alive
in a Walmart bakery oven. Once, we thought the worst pain
was stepping on a rusted nail, something that came from
our own carelessness. During anatomy lessons, there was no
story to explain how we knew blood’s boiling point.
Now we lay on our dead grass every day and when we open
our eyes, we think a piece of the sky is missing. These are
the things we find ourselves unable to speak about—what language
do we use to explain the absurd, the unthinkable? By winter,
there’s a new story, worthy of a Hollywood movie, everyone
obsesses about over a beer or two. We never forgot the last one,
or the one before that, reached for the stars and grabbed as much
light as we could, convinced ourselves this was the only thing left
we could do. Go ahead: call us sinners in how we worshiped this act.

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian American multimedia writer, artist, and journalist. Her creative writing has appeared in Passages North, The Cortland Review, Salamander, RHINO, Salt Hill, and The Journal, among others. Her work is the recipient of awards and support from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Fulbright Program, U.S. State Department, Brooklyn Poets, and the University of Arizona. She is an Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. Website: www.ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com | Instagram: @nassarine