Instead of This

for another (or the same?) reader in Lebanon:

مَمْنونِة عَزْيارْتَك

I am my manager's official proofreader, and I really couldn't be happier.

A reminder while scrolling through Twitter this morning: the sad fact that I know people--friends, loved ones, acquaintances--who were once imprisoned, either in Iran or in Israel, for one political absurdity or another; that there are countless friends of friends who either served or are currently serving equally ludicrous sentences, who've been killed over some Kafkaesque abstraction or other; that nobody should know this, in this day and age, and yet we do.

Why isn't this over yet

it was something like a food court, and everything felt tense; edgy; like the shooting crack before an avalanche. i notice three young men--orange shirts, red, yellow, with checkered bandanas covering all except their eyes. i pull my friend away, worried about a fight, about what these men might do.

a few minutes later, we're outside. a quick glance down a dark alley, and my stomach flops: two rows of people on either side, their backs against the wall. my first and only thought is, they've already started separating people. my friend is gone. as i turn to run, i realize that i didn't even notice the galloping horse between the hostages, its masked rider swinging an axe.

i'm caught on a steep set of stairs between two buildings--more horses, militia, again an axe. i duck into a hole in the wall, find myself surrounded by darkness, cement. a faint light in the middle of the room. a young girl on an operating table who calls the surgeon father, who thinks his experiments are routine, ordinary expressions of love. she's been here since childhood, i think. he pauses his incision to walk toward me, huddled behind a barrier. a cold, gentle smile, pleased with his new subject, the scalpel already touching my arm. during our struggle i manage to point it into his stomach, which takes the blade in a thick, bloodless fold, like the bending of a rolled-up carpet...

word of the day: panicle

f's courtroom win of the new year:

me: Are you sleeping with your necklace on?
f: Yes, why?
me: Well, it looks like a choking hazard.....
f: Have you ever heard of anyone choking on their own necklace in their sleep?
me: Well...... no.
f: I rest my case!

In honour of all who lost their lives, all who mourn, all who fume and suffer and despair
Yesterday and every day of the past 70 years

Ligamentum

I pray for boredom.

You bored people: You don't know how lucky you are.

Let this year be remembered as the year of cancer, I once wrote.

This year, then, is the year of broken lives... the year of the survivors--

Behrang, a patchwork image of calamity pieced together through friends, loved ones, through the empty corners of that slowly emptying apartment, through the practical trivialities we waded through together following the sudden death of his wife...

Tahmaseb, who escaped the executions of post-Revolution Iran only to lose his wife to cancer, a lifetime, a grandchild later, in their beloved Berlin; who wrote of nothing but his Iran and his Farzaneh; whose short stay with us left a long mark on my life and my memory... whose kind, smiling eyes are unimaginable in grief...
.
.
.
Raheleh, for whom I have no words--none--to express how sorry, how heartbroken, how hurt for you... how vividly I can imagine... how I can't bring myself to... how every letter trips over itself, sinks, implodes before it gets to the page
.
.
.
Lost to us, now, but at peace

Shadi
Farzaneh
Gino

May you rest in the warmest, most golden calm

May your memory be blessed

i'll miss you(r laugh)
it won't be the same
don't be a stranger

all that.

If, by chance, I've missed somebody... if a reader here is not connected to me on one of the many channels I've now shared this, please visit our GoFundMe campaign for family friends who have suffered a terrible loss.

Please donate
Please share

...and to those who already have: Beyond words, thank you.

What do I need to write right now
How should I write it

... earlier this week, i awoke in an actual sweat from (what felt like) one million dreams:

we spent a long time searching for the cottage we rented--and, when we finally found it, it was a mess. the owners were still around, still tidying up, and one was not in a hurry to leave.

i was a professional football/soccer player in a team of 4. although i was as good as the others, my teammates didn't take me seriously. i never got the ball during practice; nobody even looked at me. the frustration was unbearable...

in the end, after i'd thrown a fit, we all lay down in the grass to watch the clear, blue sky and the passing day

... the moment a literary journal replies to your submission, and your heart stops, and you can't open it right away because at that moment everything is a real-life Schrödinger's cat, and when you finally gather the courage and find yet another rejection

... and you manage, somehow, a weak it's ok, there will be others

The Russian in me trembles when I hear it... this cadence.. this tone.. each word like fallen raindrops..

Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Vysotsky, unlikely twin spirits, were born on the same day, 56 years apart

the length of a life between them
and the simmering fury of one
and the quiet grief of the other

Of all the bus rides

A screaming homeless woman; a screaming child; a woman next to the woman with the screaming child muttering (fairly audible) profanities; a man playing unusual music (Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers) aloud for his quiet toddler--a toddler who, occasionally, reaches across the aisle with outstretched hands to scream in unison with his compatriot; a terrible bus driver; an impatient, pushy crowd.

The end.

But the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
On the works 
of last year's 
man

for the first time it wasn't a wolf or a bear. it was a lion, and my heart was a tight ball in my throat. but as it came toward me it bowed its head and circled gently around my legs and accepted my outstretched hand in friendship.

we walked together a long time in the dark and darkening forest.

as we approached the cement, the streetlights, the curious onlookers, i panicked. you can't come with me here, i thought, it's not safe. and as it turned back, slowly, reluctantly, my heart was a million fragments of relief and loneliness and terror.