by Leila Farjami

The good old days were when I wore
too much makeup—triple-coated mascara,

cat-eye clawing my temples black,
lipstick layered like mortar. Too slutty, you said.

Since then, my thighs have thickened on butter
and canola, piglets grazing, fattened for slaughter.

You taught me to boil, drain, brew rice
with a شِک مَد—a cotton-puffed lid to trap steam,

swelling like your belly after three births.
Oh, that flat tummy, you said.

In Tehran, at the bathhouse,
you filled my mouth with pomegranate seeds—

garnets spilling down my chin.
The white tiles of نمره حمام blotched

in fake blood. You worked cedar balm
into my limbs, swore it’d cool my جون.

You lined a coarse کیسه with سفیدآب,
scrubbed me like worn hide.

چرک rolled off in green-grey sloughs.
So filthy, you said. I wasn’t ashamed then—

my young hips, wide like yours, tilted
sideways, claiming I’ve got it.

Breasts? The right size, you said.
Shins rotund, toes too meaty, bunions raw—

no سیندرلا. In time, my thigh gap vanished like yours.
My شکم distended. Saddlebags settled over femurs—

my twin jugs of tallow. Watch your weight, you said.


***

These days in Los Angeles, my ankles carry me
across sidewalks. Unshackled—an immigrant going places.

Unspeakable is the hole in my chest— how it sheds
dead light, like a fizzled star, scabbed-over, ash-heavy.

My mid-age self jams three fingers down her coarse throat—
a trinity: thirst, hunger, Holy Spirit.

I binge on a feast of promises—words.
Then more. Flesh, once given, is never owned.

The end so near,
no bone goes to waste.

____________________________________________________________

Leila Farjami, an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist, is the recipient of The Iowa Review Award in Poetry (2025), The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award in Poetry (2024), and PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship (2025). Her work has been recognized as a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize from Pleiades, the Perugia Press Prize, the Trio House Press Award, and the SIR’s Michael Waters Poetry Prize for her book-length poetry collections. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, The Mississippi Review, Southern Indiana Review, CALYX, The Penn Review, and in anthologies from Sundress and Guernica Editions, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.