'Listening' to Michael Jackson in Tehran

[melodily.livejournal.com]

after Azar Nafisi

Smuggled across the fierce chasm
between us and the US

and then snuggled, in fact stuffed
between Writing and Science

books in my taut school bag
the illegal and sacrilegious

cassette-tape of Thriller, for
exhibition to the ignorant and envious

on the bus to my primary
school in war-stricken Tehran. My plan:

to expose the enchanting thing and
parade my worth, appeal

trendiness, affluence, knowledge,
etc. The autumn of '83

and desperate for approval
from the other kids. This copy

of the phenomenon to elevate
my chubby, unpopular ego

in the eyes of others; to testify
( to my courage and rebelliousness )

(no subject)

[pyreneeees.livejournal.com]

Heaven to Be
by Sharon Olds

When I’d picture my death, I would be lying on my back,
and my spirit would rise to my belly-skin and out
like a sheet of wax paper the shape of a girl, furl
over from supine to prone and like the djinn’s
carpet begin to fly, low,
over our planet—heaven to be
unhurtable, and able to see without
cease or stint or stopperage,
to lie on the air, and look, and look,
not so different from my life, I would be
sheer with an almost not sore loneness,
looking at the earth as if seeing the earth
were my version of having a soul. But then
I could see my beloved, sort of standing
beside a kind of door in the sky—
not the door to the constellations,
to the pentangles, and borealis,
but a tidy flap at the bottom of the door in the
sky, like a little cat-door in the door,
through which is nothing. And he is saying to me that he must
go, now, it is time. And he does not
ask me, to go with him, but I feel
he would like me with him. And I do not think
it is a living nothing, where nonbeings
can make a kind of unearthly love, I
think it’s the nothing kind of nothing, I think
we go through the door and vanish together.
What depth of joy to take his arm,
pressing it against my breast
as lovers do in a formal walk,
and take that step.

Death comes to me again, a girl

[peccare.livejournal.com]

Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It’s not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness
and silence. There are windchimes
and the smell of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.

Dorianne Laux