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Sholeh Wolpé
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Niece, I remember when they cut your mother and pulled your sister out, then you, and how you cried and cried. You never wanted to be here. Right from the start. I open Mama’s old prayer book but the words billow like rain. I wish you had loved one thing enough to make you want to stay; the orange sunsets, your drooling dog, the fig tree in the backyard, your twin sister’s mole, Cheerios in cold milk. Washing your body now, twenty-four years of bones and flesh laid out tall and stiff on this hard table, is the cruelest task. I stand here full of heartbeat. Touching you is like dipping hands in a cold sea. I soak a porous sponge in water scented with rose, brush it against your neck, along your arms, those long, thin legs. There is a tampon still inside, the string hanging out like the detonator of a bomb. Darkness bends over itself to devour what it will not hold-- the boy you loved watched you cry, take a handful of pills, and said nothing. |
Sholeh Wolpé was born in Iran and lived in Trinidad and the UK before settling in the US. She is a poet, playwright and librettist. Her most recent book, Abacus of Loss: A Memoir in Verse (March 2022) is hailed by Ilya Kaminsky as a book “that created its own genre—a thrill of lyric combined with the narrative spell.” Her literary work numbers over more than a dozen books, several plays, an oratorio/opera, and several multi-genre performance pieces. Sholeh’s translations of Attar and Forugh Farrokhzad have garnered awards and established her as a celebrated re-creator of Persian poetry into English. Sholeh is the poetry editor of The Markaz Review and a writer-in-residence at University of California, Irvine. She divides her time between Los Angeles and Barcelona. For more information about her work visit her website: www.sholehwolpe.com |
