Published works:
NJ Fan Club Book
A couple of my poems
1.
I wake up with my ancestors hands Pressing down on my shoulders
Heavy weight of twisted identities
Clawing me apart trying to
Parse out the parts of me
That don’t quite fit together
Iranian, Jew, American citizen,
Mother and warrior - or is it worrier
Knowing that no matter the label
They slap on my chest, I
Will never be safe
Because my grandparents weren’t
And my parents weren’t
And the sacrifices and choices they made
Weren’t
And here we are again but this time
It’s me with my toes dipped in
An ocean of uncertainty
Knowing that my heritage will
Always stain my hands
Whether with blood or oil
Or dough from baking warm bread
The kind the children beg for
On dirty street corners
These roots that tie me to my own
Forebears and offspring
Handing down blessings and curses
A world that will not hold my hand
And all of the things that I am
and so much
Still reminding me of what
cannot be
4.
Your laws are a gun in our mouths
The words a wire hanger, ripping us to shreds, stripping us from the inside out,
Until there is nothing left but an empty shell,
A husk
Ready to be filled with your unwanted seed
sure to sow nothing but subjugation
Our bodies shaped into a prison cell
A dressing down while you keep asking us to dress up
Reminding us that silence and smiling are the only
way to be palatable to a man
Demanding that we make ourselves more consumable, easier to digest,
So you can swallow us whole and spit out the
shattered bones of our broken spirits from between
your rotting teeth
This is not about dead babies
But about dead horses
And the one you won’t stop beating on
Because you can feel the power slipping from your arthritic grip,
as the world around you expands and evolves
But the closed mind only knows how to respond to an open world with a closed fist
And we feel it, that hand constricting around our throats, trying to squeeze
until there is no life left,
Because the sanctity of life never really mattered in the first place, if that life belonged to a woman.
So here we are again, the battleground our bodies, the sword is indeed a pen, and the battle cry is the guttural scream of every woman who refuses to be a vessel for a set of misguided morals touted by men who have none. Do not underestimate us. We have survival instincts tattooed across our bodies, we bleed every month and do not die, we will outlive you, and we will raise the next generation to erase you.
2.
Rolling tracks pass this rickety train through tall grass and gold sun kissed wetlands
Wishing we were headed for
Klamath Falls Oregon and that old Victorian house we saw on Zillow that
one time and joked we’d buy and restore
Revisiting ghosts with you is always an adventure as long as they aren’t our own
But here our knees touch and our minds pull slightly apart, focus shifting to our destination, New York where
Your ghosts and my ghosts both linger
Where they wandered the same streets at the same time but never met
Now we’ll wander hand in hand but determined to keep those memories separated
The realization of why
I always want to run away with you
Wanting to create our own history
Leave bits of US and nobody else
In all the new places we go
3.
I want your hunger
That insatiable craving
Roaring inside
Swallowed whole but
Still needing something to
Chew on
I want that red fire heat
The kind that leaves us
Dripping
Oceans raging in the
Slivers left between
Our meeting skin
Over and over again
We crash and kiss
The shore
Wave after wave
Grabbing and rising
Until we crest
Surging forward broken
Dam
Whole and fragmented
Falling apart into one
Puddle of where
Do you end and
I begin
Where can there ever
Be anything else
Other than this
