Solmaz Sharif

your face turning from mine to keep from cumming 8 strawberries in a wet blue bowl baba holding his pants up at the checkpoint a newlywed securing her updo with grenade pins a wall cleared of nails for the ghosts to walk through

Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive. —Susan Sontag I place a photograph of my uncle on my computer desktop, which means I learn to ignore it. He stands by a tank, helmet tilting to his right, bootlaces tightened as if stitching together a wound. Alive the hand brings up a cigarette we won't see him taste. Last night I smoked one on the steps outside my barn apartment. A promise I broke myself. He promised himself he wouldn't and did. I smell my fingers and I am smelling his. Hands of smoke and gunpowder. Hands that promised they wouldn't, but did. This album is a stop-loss . By a dim lantern or in the latrine he flips through it. He looks at himself looking nearly as he does— closest to himself then as he could be, just learning how to lean into his new body. He suspends there by standing order, a spreading fire in his chest, his groin. He is on stage for us to see him, see him? He stands in the noontime sun. A young soldier (pictured above) the son of an imam, brother to six, is among the latest casualties in the military campaign of Susangerd. your whole body in a photo your whole body sitting on a crate pressing your eyesocket to the viewfinder of a bazooka crouched as you balance the metal tube on your shoulder in one you guide a belt of ammo into the untiring weapon proud your elbow out as if mid-waltz your frame strong and lightly supporting the gun a kind of smile ruining the picture You’re posing. You’re scared. A body falls and you learn to step over a loosened head. You begin to appreciate the heft of your boot soles, how they propel you, how they can kick in a face– the collapse of a canopy bed in an aerial bombardment, mosquito netting doused in napalm–cheekbones fragile as moth wings beneath the heel. You tighten your laces until they hold together a capable man. Whatever rains, the weight of your feet swings you forward, goose-stepping pendulums a body less and less yours– a body, God knows, is not what makes you anyway. So the hands that said they never would begin finding grenade pins around their fingers, begin flipping through this album with soot under their nails you were not ready But they issued the shovel and the rifle and you dug But to watch you sitting there between the sandbags But to watch the sand spilling out the bullet holes But what did they expect But what did they really think a sheet of metal could prevent But I sat rolling little ears of pasta off my thumb like helmets But it was not a table of fallen men But my hand registered fatigue But the men in fatigues were tired of sleeping in shifts But you snuck into town and dialed home until you wrote your fingers were tired But the code for Shiraz was down But all of Shiraz was down But the sheet lightning above the Ferris wheel of rusted bolts But I am sure they are alright you wrote Well to reassure yourself But the wind like an old mouth shaking the unnamed evergreen outside my window But what I mean is I'd like very much to talk a bit Hello Operation Ramadan was an offensive in the Iran-Iraq War . It was launched by Iran in July 1982 near Basra and featured the use of human wave attacks in one of the largest land battles since World War II . Aftermath :The operation was the first of many disastrous offensives which cost thousands of lives on both sides. This one in general boosted the casualty limit up to 80,000 killed, 200,000 wounded, and 45,000 captured. In retrospect, the Iranians lacked effective command and control, air support, and logistics to sustain an attack in the first place. Saddam Hussein offered several ceasefire attempts in the following year, none of which were accepted by the Revolutionary regime. [6] [dead link] Congratulations and condolences They would say That's the house of a martyr pointing with their nose That's the mother of a martyr They are building a museum for the martyrs. Some metal shelf a white archival box with his personal effects . I am attempting my own myth-making. He didn’t want to have anything

In the rearview, fog extinguishes the hills of new money—mansions on acres away from road or sight. Their architected privacy, windows to look out at a land that won't look back. The fog's secure drapery. It's space to dance through they buy and what one might call "dappled light" moving across their acres, light through their oaks moving over their mares, brushed to a sheen. • Palms of sugar cubes. Soft snorting, I bet. Here, Muybridge proved their horses fly a moment. In their homes, they can't hear each other call from foyer to pool house. I am jealous of this loneliness most of all—loneliness delimited by colonnade and cold pressed juices. They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers.... I imagine hills and hills dappled like this.

Dear Aleph, Like Ovid:I’ll have no last words. This is what it means to die among barbarians.Bar bar bar was how the Greeks heard our speech — sheep, beasts — and so we became barbarians. We make them reveal the brutes they are, Aleph, by the things we make them name. David, they tell me, is the one one should aspire to, but ever since I first heard them say Philistine I’ve known I am Goliath if I am anything.

To wave from the porch To let go of the grudge To disrobe To recall Ethel Rosenberg’s green polka-dotted dress To call your father and say I’d forgotten how nice everyone in these red states can be To hear him say Yes, long as you don’t move in next door To recall every drawn curtain in the apartments you have lived To find yourself at 33 at a vast expanse with nary a papyrus of 
guidance, with nary a voice, a muse, a model To finally admit out loud then I want to go home To have a dinner party of intellectuals with a bell, long-armed, lightly-tongued, at each setting To sport your dun gown To revel in face serums To be a well-calibrated burn victim to fight the signs of aging To assure financial health To be lavender sachets and cedar lining and all the ways the rich might hide their rot To eye the master’s bone china To pour diuretic in his coffee and think this erosive to the state To disrobe when the agent asks you to To find a spot on any wall to stare into To develop the ability to leave an entire nation thusly, just by staring at a spot on the wall, as the lead-vested agent names article by article what to remove To do this in order to do the other thing, the wild thing To say this is my filmdom, The Master’s House, and I gaze upon it and it is good To discuss desalinization plants and de terroir To date briefly a banker, a lapsed Marxist, and hear him on the phone speaking in billions of dollars, its residue over the clear bulbs of his eyes, as he turns to look upon your nudity To fantasize publishing a poem in the New Yorker eviscerating his little need To set a bell at each intellectual’s table setting ringing idea after idea, and be the simple-footed help, rushing to say Yes? To disrobe when the agent asks you to To find a spot on any wall to stare into To develop the ability to leave an entire nation thusly, just by staring at a spot on the wall To say this is my filmdom, The Master’s House To recall the Settler who from behind his mobile phone said I’m filming you for God To recall this sad God, God of the mobile phone camera, God of the small black globe and pixelated eye above the blackjack table at Harrah’s and the metal, toothed pit of Qalandia checkpoint the same To recall the Texan that held the shotgun to your father’s chest, sending him falling backward, pleading, and the words came to him in Farsi To be jealous of this, his most desperate language To lament the fact of your lamentations in English, English being your first defeat To finally admit out loud then I want to go home To stand outside your grandmother’s house To know, for example, that in Farsi the present perfect is called the 
relational past, and is used at times to describe a historic event whose effect is still relevant today, transcending the past To say, for example,Shah dictator bude-ast translates to The Shah was a dictator, but more literally to The Shah is was a dictator To have a tense of is-was, the residue of it over the clear bulb of your eyes To walk cemetery after cemetery in these States and nary a gravestone reading Solmaz To know no nation will be home until one does To do this in order to do the other thing, the wild thing, though you’ve forgotten what it was

this mangy plot where by now only mothers still come, only mothers guard the nameless plots • and then sparingly • Peepholes burnt through the metal doors of their solitary cells, • just large enough for three fingers to curl out for a lemon to pass through for an ear to be held against for one eye then the other to regard the hallway to regard the cell and inmate • peepholes without a lens so when the guard comes to inspect me, I inspect him. Touch me, he said. • And through that opening I did.

As the dead, so I come to the city I am of. Am without. To watch play out around me as theater — audience as the dead are audience to the life that is not mine. Is as not as never. Turning down Shiraz’s streets it turns out to be such a faraway thing. A without which I have learned to be. From bed, I hear a man in the alley selling something, no longer by mule and holler but by bullhorn and jalopy. How to say what he is selling — it is no thing this language thought worth naming. No thing I have used before. It is his life I don’t see daily. Not theater. Not play. Though I remain only audience. It is a thing he must sell daily and every day he peddles this thing: a without which I cannot name. Without which is my life.