October 28, 2022 - Rahil Najafabadi’s “Seasonal Change”
SEASONAL CHANGE
There’s a moment between winter and fall,
the seconds when time stands still and branches
become bare. In those minutes of drinking cider,
slipping on icy pavement, and falling for him,
I realize the seasons have changed from cool
to the coldest I can be in the street––smiling
without my teeth drilling into each other.
I wish I could tape the sunlight to the horizon.
The scent of apple picking makes me drunk,
but awaken me when it’s time to cut the tree
and I’ll awaken you when there’s nothing left
of the forests, the entire earth, because we took
it all. Perhaps my favorite pastime is being,
and watching the colors get warmer until all
becomes black, in the face of white snow.
October 27, 2022 - Iggy Shuler’s “Hospital”
Strapped by the clasp of the IV cord,
Gentle as asparagus,
I watched
The monitor animate mountains
Like ribbons,
It tore me to ribbons,
That bloomed red
As flowers,
It bloomed like flowers,
That fell far
As canyons,
It fell far as canyons,
From the top of the trees.
And isn’t it clear? This isn’t my first
Life. This isn’t my first life. In my first
Life I never died, I was a rock, and I never
Died.
October 25, 2022 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “I’ve been out here too long”
The moon is so bright here, you might mistake deep night for dawn. The sky is the same stubborn blue and when the sun sets, it turns to stars. I slip my legs between the railing and watch ash fall from my mouth, watch the soft sands of light dancing down onto the grass and that’s when I start to stare hard, squinting into the night, which doesn’t feel so bright anymore, searching for any sign of spreading flames. My eyes move without asking. I look for a very long time. I mistake lighting bugs for lit embers. I stand and think about the wood warming, cracking beneath my feet and me, falling like the fire did. I want to go inside now, I've been out here too long. Nothing is burning, but still I get into bed and spread the blaze in my mind. I will get up several times before I sleep, look out the window and check the lawn, then I will lie back down, hold myself the way I do, and hope the house is still standing in the morning.
October 22, 2022 - “The October Sun” by Jordan Myers
I kept losing the little yellow ball in the sun then trying to track it into my racquet. The idea was to keep the rally going and the sun was everywhere. For hours we hit tennis balls back and forth above a mini-net, and a few feet over, twenty to twenty-five men were skating onto and off of, then onto, then off of, then onto, a street hockey court: small goals and blades. They weren’t playing music, but their fans showed up en masse, creating a jubilance that felt like a compressed version of what you might witness at Madison Square Garden when the Rangers are skating around the ice, and up by two in the third. Were they keeping score? I couldn’t tell. I was hitting tennis balls and wasn’t watching the hockey on the other side of the gate, but more so feeling its rhythm and tuning into my own goal: to hit every shot just right ––– okay, not quite that one, but the next one: just right. Maybe you’ve been there before: moments where the noise and atmosphere around you actually make it easier to concentrate. That was what west 49th Street felt like: the October sun, and autumn in a city that’s finally starting to feel like its old self, all over again.
October 21, 2022 - Rahil Najafabadi’s “My Lace Curtains”
MY LACE CURTAINS
Every morning, I push the curtains and let in the light.
The little yellows of the day try to sneak in through,
my lace curtains aren’t so secure. The flowers, inside
and outside, turn to the sun just like I do––it feeds us.
From my window, I see nothing new. Nothing at all,
only the brick wall of my Manhattan apartment.
But that is all I want to see with the morning light
and the indication of another day through mesh roses.
October 20, 2022 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “Where the Moon Makes a Path”
On one Saturday in particular, a heavy fog of manure moves through the morning — stretches itself out over the dew drenched grass and catches in the thick fur of far reaching ferns. I sit, cross-legged, on her wooden deck and look out at the lawn. I bury myself in blades of grass and breathe in deep. It smells like the summer I grew up, like the farm upstate and the women who woke at dawn to summon the start of the day. They turned us loose in fields like this one, let us go wild when the sun went down, and I want to run, like I did then, so fast that I could not feel my feet, could not fathom the way I was flying, and it gets dark in the same sort of way here, a slow burning flame that flickers for a long time before blowing itself out into night, where the moon makes a path and pulls you towards it.
October 18, 2022 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “The Strongest Wind There’s Ever Been”
On the days I don’t feel real, I float instead of walk. It is not a flying sort of float but one that drags me along slowly, like we are going against the strongest wind there’s ever been, and it feels the same when I sleep, so on days that move like they are not meant to be moving, I have to find the things that don’t exist in my dreams, have to look around and see the city standing still, not swaying like it does sometimes, some nights, and even then, when nothing is crumbling beneath my feet, when the world is not falling flat around me, I need to look down, to see myself standing on a sidewalk that is not sucking me in like quicksand and I do this often but quietly, so that no one else will notice me wondering if I am awake.
October 15, 2022 - “A euphoric nostalgia ––– a knowing” by Jordan Myers
Living in the city for too long can press down on you. You forget what wide open spaces look like, and feel like, you forget that the sun can shine across an entire mass of land without casting shadows across buildings, and you forget that you can look out and off into the distance and see for miles, and miles. It’s not so much a sadness that happens by staying here for too long without getting out into the wider world, but more like a euphoric nostalgia ––– a knowing that whatever you saw before you were only seeing New York again and again and again, is still out there, and that you can go back and see it again, whenever you want or need, probably soon, definitely not too many more days from now.
October 14, 2022 - “My Eyebrows” by Rahil Najafabadi
I was drinking tea with my mother on a school day and winter was dying out. It was cold; it felt colder because I was afraid. She placed a sugar cube in my mouth and urged me to drink the tea.
“Drink it, I want to get us ice cream in a bit. I don’t want you to crack your teeth” she said.
Two weeks ago, I threaded my delicate eyebrows and finally got rid of my unibrow. I always hated looking like I have one, long eyebrow. I hated how long the Taj/تاج (crown/top) of my eyebrow was. The hairs at the top of it were so long, and it always made me look like I’m raising my eyebrows even when I wasn’t. I trimmed it to ground my gaze. But then I got carried away. I cleaned up and shaped my brows. I wanted to look like my mom. She has clean, chic, pointy eyebrows. Powerful.
The day I showed up to school with my new eyebrows, everyone noticed. My friends, my teachers, and the faculty. The two-faced girls said I’d get in trouble, but I didn’t believe them. My friends told me to cut my bangs, as to cover it. My teachers asked me why I thinned my eyebrows. “They’re so out of style!”
My mom was going through a lot and my father was working overseas. I was scared of telling her. I wondered how she did not notice. Finally, on the fifth day of school, the vice-principal found out. “Ahmadi, Office.” We were never called by our first names in my girls-only middle school in Tehran, Iran. Only by our last names, and my Iranian last name is my middle name in America. She pointed to her eyebrows while summoning me and gave me a dirty look. I gulped.
I had never gotten into trouble except for selling Hollywood movies to kids who didn’t know how to download them. That was truly the only way one could watch foreign films in Iran; illegally. I was caught by my cool English teacher who knew I grew up in Connecticut. She let it slide, but I promised her I’d stop pirating movies and music and would focus on reading books. I’m still grateful for her and that promise.
“Who told you to touch your eyebrows?” the vice-principal asked.
The question was very strange to me. I was never told I couldn’t touch my eyebrows. The vice-principal suddenly began brushing up my eyebrow hairs with her fingers. I flinched.
“There’s nothing left of it! You could have done it discreetly, but no, you had to go all the way…Tell your mother to call me as soon as possible.”
I felt the worst anxiety whenever I heard the telephone ring in our home. I still had not told my mother I was in trouble for shaping my eyebrows. The next week, I saw the vice-principal again. This time, she told me something I couldn’t hold in anymore.
“That’s it, Ahmadi. If I don’t hear from your mother by tomorrow afternoon, I’m holding you accountable for this mess.”
I couldn’t come up with a way to tell my mom. I still couldn’t believe she didn’t notice my eyebrows. But then again, they were never really that thick. I just told her to call the vice-principal. I was so sick the next day I didn’t go to school. I sat beside her as she called. She kept asking me why and what this concerned. I just told her “She will let you know.” My stomach felt like a giant knot as she was greeting the vice-principal on the phone. It took them a few Persian minutes to finally get to my eyebrows. I knew she became aware when she put her glasses on and glared at my face. Her eyes were wide. Her expression was confusing.
“No, I wasn’t aware she plucked her eyebrows.” My mom grew silent. Then she frowned and got up from her chair.
“What do you mean? A week?! She’ll fall behind from all her classes, please. It won’t happen again…She’s a young girl. They touch their hair and eyebrows more than us. You know that, right?”
The vice-principal couldn’t be convinced. Never. They were an unbreakable species. I was suspended from school for a week, and I told everyone I went up North/شمال. It was so obvious I lied. Once my cousins saw me, they laughed and told me their own eyebrow stories. One of them told me she told her principal she had a band aid on her upper lip, and it snatched her mustache when she pulled it off. I laughed and these stories made the days go by faster, but I still felt ashamed.
My mom was really understanding but she was frustrated because she didn’t know about this “rule.” She lived outside of Iran for over fifteen years and forgot about these weird restrictions. She was angry at herself. Angry at the school for suspending me because of my eyebrows. She looked at me silently the first few days. “Sit under the light” she’d say. My mom put her glasses on and looked at my eyebrows carefully, trying to see what I’ve done to them. She hoped I didn’t overpluck them. She kept telling me how beautiful my natural eyebrows were and that I should learn to love them even when I’m older. I wouldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand. My eyebrows became a revolutionary part of me. They had to be thin.
“When I was in middle school, the principal called Madarjooni/مادرجونی (my grandmother) and told her I had a picture of an unruly male.”
“Who was it?” I asked my mom.
“Bruce Lee.” She finally smiled.
“Was he nude?!”
“He was shirtless. Portrait length. I found the picture in a magazine and put it in my pencil case. The vice-principal and their radars looked for such things in our bags while we were on recess.”
She looked away and smiled a bitter, sad smile. I could tell she had forgotten those moments. When you leave your homeland and become an immigrant, all you take with you is the love and poetry. You forget about the things that made you leave. When you’re an immigrant, you’re pushed away by people who take your place in your own home. And they tell you you’re not allowed to touch your eyebrows.
“They would always think I thinned my eyebrows. Our vice-principal lined us up and touched our eyebrows with their fingers and long nails. I hated it.” I knew exactly how disgusting that felt.
One long week of staying home and reading poetry with my mom passed quicker than I thought. I was told to come back to school when my eyebrows grew out, so we applied castor oil twice a day. Luckily, I was an Iranian girl. My black eyebrows grew back and framed my eyes boldly once again. It was time to go to school, but I felt sick. I couldn’t finish my breakfast. My mom made me tea with fried eggs and fresh Barbari bread/نون بربری. She was taking me to school that day instead of the school bus service to speak to the vice-principal. She did her makeup and wore her prettiest coat.
“Eat up! You have math first period.” She was wearing pink lipstick.
“I can’t. I feel sick. I feel…
“Like your heart has emptied?”
“Yes…yes exactly.”
My mom placed her hand on my head, touching my Maqnae/مقنعه (forced head covering).
“Your eyebrows looked like mine. But yours will always be prettier.” She winked and her smile loosened up the knot in my stomach.
“Always.”
October 13, 2022 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “Cat, call”
If I have it in me, I like to stare back and laugh. Smile, maybe, until they think something is very, very wrong, and I look at them long like that because I need them to know I could snap at any second, because I could snap at any second, and what did they say? It matters less now and sometimes, when my eyes erupt and I start to see stars, I think they could say next to nothing, could say the word nothing and still, I would be on them, scratching and screaming, they way I do in my dreams, limbs loose and lucid. I would become a creature with claws and the dark would look like day and after a while I would be dragged away, the way women who scratch and scream usually are, when animals of all kinds wake up inside them.
October 12, 2022 - Rahil Najafabadi’s “Ode”
Ode
The passage feels different with my uneven steps––
Blue steps, light steps. The light, I try to capture it.
I think we live in color and the streets stay the same.
But we change colors and move under the pale light.
Wishing for the day I watched slip away to come back
as the motion of a wave, goodbye, tomorrow comes––
Yesterday always remains as an ode to a time
I’ve never even known.
October 11, 2022 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “For some reason, the crickets are louder”
I dream because it is so easy to. It comes naturally to me, like getting up and living might to others. I am not afraid of much, when my eyes are closed. Things sound different there and for some reason, the crickets are louder. Here, it has been quiet for a long time and I wonder how I am still breathing. Not because I am in any imminent danger but because I can’t imagine that I’m not. My mind is full of basements I am too scared to search. There are so many sets of stairs I won’t go down, almost certain I will not come back up, and I swear it is getting darker down there, but then, I might say to myself, it is getting darker everywhere, that’s just what days look like when they end.
October 10, 2022 - “Hanging in between the abyss of summer and fall” by Jordan Myers
Outside there’s sun and inside the building is shaking as a semi-truck rumbles by, its driver laying on the horn. I’m sitting inside a coffee shop and everything is heavy right now: the way the barista calls out drink orders, her voice like nails on a chalkboard; the hiss of the espresso machine; the whirring of a blender; the phone ringing and ringing; the thud and slam of the refrigerator door: closing and closing and closing. Some machine back there is still singing and the sound of coffee beans being poured into a grinder feels like ten thousand pokes into my side. Is it this place or is it me. I’ve been here before but never like this: lost in a blended nightmare-dream / hanging between the abyss of summer and fall.
