by Mahta Riazi
there are the things we carried and the things we left behind. water bottles and neighbourhoods, photographs and kitchen tables, fresh pistachios and perfume bottles.
we now know better than to tow fragrances, remember how fragile we get come december.
we have to laugh because if we don’t laugh, we’ll cry, and there has been enough mourning.
we have to laugh, so we tell the same stories over and over again.
sometimes, with new details.
sometimes, weaving in fabricated fragments.
this is okay, for
sometimes, there is forgiveness where there is rupture.
everyone nods and remembers what wasn’t.
no one will admit it, but we are all fearful of running out of stories.
we stretch the ones we brought so thin sometimes, you can taste nothing but dry bread and the salty sprinkle of faint giggles from the quietest corners of the room.
but some days,
the shake of khale neda’s laugh from her kitchen window in tehran trails off the edges of her crystal blue shawl and floats across continents, connecting our bodies like never-ending rivers.
some days, we soar high above the promise of temporality,
lingering in the grooves of distance,
a soundless insistence, scratching at our throats.
some days, our eyes are fixed upwards, searching for footpaths in nomadic clouds,
fingers pointing and
dancing in pockets, suddenly heavy,
brimming with all we thought we’d surrendered.
Mahta Riazi is a poet, community worker, and educator living in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). She is a lover of the in-between places, narrow bodies of water, and pistachio ice cream. She is inspired by and indebted to the poetry of Kristin Chang, Forough Farokhzaad, Sayeh, Hieu Minh Nguyen, George Abraham, and Joshua Bennett, among others. You can find her poetry in inQluded magazine, Voicemail Poems, Yolk literary magazine, Bahr magazine, and Brickplight. Her chapbook Parastoo was published in June 2022 by Cactus Press.
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