Garous Abdolmalekian
trans. by Ahmad Nadalizadeh & Idra Novey
Four POEMS
Border
I am in repose,
as my wife reads a poem about war,
the last thing I need is for the tanks
to advance into my bed.
Bullets have made numerous holes
in my dreams.
You put your eye up to one of them:
You see a street
its skin whitened with snow.
If only it did not snow
If the borders between the streets and the bedcovers were clear.
Now the tanks have crossed the trenches into our bedsheets
and one by one they enter my dream:
I was a kid
My mother washed the dishes
and my father returned home with his black mustache.
When the bombs poured forth
all three of us were children . . .
The following pictures of this dream will tighten your chest
Shut your eyes
Put your lips on this little vent
and just breathe
Just breathe
Breathe!
Breathe!
Damn it!
Just breathe!
Breathe!
The doctor shakes his head
The nurse shakes her head
The doctor wipes the sweat from his brow
And the green mountain chain
on the screen
turns to desert.
Pattern
Your dress waving in the wind.
This
is the only flag I love.
Poem for Stillness
He stirs his tea with a gun barrel
He solves the puzzle with a gun barrel
He scratches his thoughts with a gun barrel
And sometimes
he sits facing himself
and pulls bullet-memories
out of his brain
He’s fought in many wars
but is no match for his own despair
These white pills
have left him so colorless
his shadow must stand up
to fetch him water
We ought to accept
that no soldier
has ever returned
from war
alive
On Power Lines
So translucent are we today
that our inner murderers have turned obvious.
And the sea of our city is so sluggish
that spiders weave their cobwebs over its waves.
If only someone would turn these snakes into rods
If only the one who gnawed at my bones
did not know my poems by heart.
We have driven the bees
to make honey from poisonous flowers
And the sparrows that perched for years on the power lines
fear the branches of the trees.
Tell me how to manage my smile
when they have planted land mines all around my lips.
We are the discoverers of dead-end alleys
We have exhausted many a word
This time
send us a prophet who only listens.
Garous Abdolmalekian is the author of five books of poetry. He has won the Karnameh Poetry Book of the Year Award and the Iranian Youth Poetry Book Prize, and is the editor of the poetry section at Cheshmeh Publications in Tehran.
Ahmad Nadalizadeh is currently a PhD student of comparative literature at the University of Oregon. He received his MA in English literature from the University of Tehran.
Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novel Ways to Disappear. Her work has been translated into ten languages and she's translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.