Arts and Literature

Tehran Nights

Ross opened a set of double-doors. The doors were arched. The arches hinted at a theme in the house. The design was replicated in the frame of the burgundy-velvet draped windows placed strategically around the home for auxiliary privacy. As we followed him through the luxueux abode, the music got louder and louder. A drum-like beat complimenting the song playing in the background, Sharam’s ‘Party all the Time’, led us to the crowd. Walking through the candle-lit passage and into the first of five bays, we were faced with the ecstasy-party bit in the opening scene of Syriana, but infinitely swankier. High quality, everything.>>>

دونده

دویدم و دویدم
اینجا عرق میشود ریخت
ولی از گریه باید گریخت
دویدم و دویدم
تا دردم و خاموش کنم
فکر کنم چاره کنم بی تو چکار کنم
>>>

Who do you hate the most?

I always knew so well how to hate. I hated being a child and being ignored. I hated being a teen and waiting, wondering, doubting. I hated Shah, I hated Khomeini, I hated Saddam the way their ideological differences changed all of us for the worse. The way the war locked me in my room, listening to the silence, listening to the noise, missing joy or temerity, missing the light seeping through sheer curtains. I hated missing one small volume of space in time when opening my window or listening to loud music, or painting red on my bloodless lips and nails wouldn’t have been called an act of bravery>>>

The Spider Killings (14)

When Roxanne finally got back to her hotel room, she realized something was amiss as soon as she entered. To a non-observant eye, the room looked just as she had left it: Her suitcase open in the corner with half the clothes still inside, unpacked; Her laptop open on her desk, with some papers and pens strewn around; and her handy coffee mug and ashtray full of cigarette butts still on the windowsill, her favorite spot in any room to have a quiet smoke. Roxanne looked around and she was sure that someone had been in her room. She could not put her finger on it but she just knew it was a fact. Had someone searched her room in her absence? Searched it looking for… what?>>>

Unentitled

I have not found the key to myself

the one that will get the high gates

to swing wide open and the lights

to come on all at once >>>

کاشکی...

نامه ای است تلخ و غم انگیز.......نمی توانم خودم را نگاه دارم.... یعنی کسی که این همه عاشق بهار و نوروز بود می بایستی در آن روز به خاک سپرده شود؟ نه ، بر عکِس برادرم من نمی خواهم که هر شب چهارشنبه سوری و هر روز نو روز باشد. اصلا می خواهم بهار را پاره کنم و بریزم دور... و باز فکر میکنم که آیا ثمین این را می خواهد؟ او که آرزویش زنده نگهداشتن چهارشنبه سوری و نوروز است این را از ما می خواهد؟>>>

The Spider Killings (13)

The phone rang and Peyman gestured to Roxanne to stay while he answered it. After a couple of minutes, with her friend still on the phone, engrossed in what seemed to be an important conversation, Roxanne got up again and waved. She mouthed the words “I’ll be okay!” on her way out, despite Peyman’s frantic hand gestures pleading her to wait for him. It was around ten o’ clock and the streets were deserted. The click-clack of Roxanne’s heels on the pavement sounded aggressively loud in the silence of the night. She had parked her car a couple of blocks away>>>

What do you think?

I think I am thirsty
before I start begging
give me a glass of kindness…
Do you think love is like thirst?
that if you fulfill me with your sips of affection
I will no longer drink your love?>>>

A Mother’s Story

Barbara Timm, or BT as she prefers, shook her head in disgust. “I didn’t like Jimmy Carter from the very beginning,” she said. “I didn’t vote for him. I voted for Ford. Jerry was a Michigan man and I lived then in Milwaukee. It seemed right to vote for a Midwesterner, one of our own.” President Gerald Ford, it should be noted, died on December 26, 2006 at the age of 93. Four months later, I interviewed Barbara Timm, along with her son Kevin Hermening. The interview took place at Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, Arizona, BT’s city of residence since the late 1980s. Timm, Hermening and I – and some fifty thousand baseball fans – attended Opening Day of the baseball season, the Milwaukee Brewers versus the Arizona Diamondbacks>>>

Sin

I have sinned a rapturous sin
in a warm enflamed embrace,
sinned in a pair of vindictive arms,
arms violent and ablaze.
In that quiet vacant dark
I looked into his mystic eyes,
found such longing that my heart
fluttered impatient in my breast>>>

Salt of the earth

In Shidmehr’s vastly imaginative novella, Shirin and Salt Man, a modern day Iranian woman named Shirin plans to elope with the mummy of an ancient salt miner preserved in brine and discovered in 1993 in Iran. She is not as fortunate as Nezami’s Farhad. Her insanity is not from love, but from neglect. She married the abusive Khosro, and now remorse has driven her to adultery with the pile of salted bones she imagines to be Farhad. Shidmehr’s Khosro is not a king like Nezami’s Khosro. Though the romantically obsessed heroine married him for his kingly name, he really just works at the ministry of Islamic Guidance >>>

The Presence

God has no desires. I do. I, who makes love with her flesh and writes by hand so that you read me and recount the neon lights alongside Vakil Bazaar: the courtyards, old shops, and late night summer breeze through the mosquito nets. After all what is life but a wretched mirror if I don't write for you and you don't read me? Beloved! Your presence may be a swelled pulse, a modern consumption, or a collectible antique to possessive souls but to me it is the manifestation and the revealing compassion>>>

Integration

This is a view of our building which is a small part of our social housing block. The apartment where my wife Michelle and I live, is situated on the ground floor in the middle, living on our right is Shaikh Ahmed and his wife Rahima from Somalia, their son Mokri and their daughter Shokri. To our left, until 11 o'clock Friday, was A.Gabrielle, indisputably Italian. On top of him, until last Wednesday, was Tara who is (was) a Finish-Hungarian lady. Next to her, above us, is Gallagher the Scott and next to him, right above Shaikh Ahmed’s family lives Morad, his wife Amina and their children, from the former Yugoslavia. Above Morad lives Jens (chairman of the board) with his twin children and on top of Tara lives 55 years old Mo’tamed and between him and Jens, in no. 8, lives Irene a lonely divorced woman>>>