3 poems
Here’s a Love Poem to the Baby Backpack
in which my brother spent the first two years of his life
screaming. So much so that my father was forced to trek
miles to the local zoo, listening to music so loud
he couldn’t hear his own child’s
misery. Musing, he remembers the same
baby backpack he himself had used was recalled years
later, after an infant had suffocated at its father’s back
long after my brother’s own death through the
windshield of a car that had nothing to do
with the model of baby backpack my father
was wearing or his fatigue or my brother’s breath
entering and leaving his body beneath the sound.
Thank God nothing happened, my father says, astonished.
And he is right. This would not have been the right moment
for my big brother to die. Before I was born, before
anything in my life could have ever
happened. And this is a love poem to the baby backpack,
anyway. To that tiny space between us
which kept us alive, for a time. The careless bound of the step
to music, the heat becoming on our soft
foreheads. Long enough at least to see the baby animals at the zoo
nestled against their mothers, to feel our fathers
sweating through their shirts onto our chests. To learn
our letters and attend to our mother’s breathing. This
is a love poem to the baby backpack, responsible for his dark
hair like mine. His slight figure. His absence beside me
which I’ll hear now and for the rest of my life. The shrieking
baby the throaty voice of brothers.
Once-Iranian Men
I can tell, as they tower over me, that these Teletubbies aren’t natural. Bibi smiles and heaves them
like convicts, dragging dust with limp ankles, colorful, beaming. I’ve asked for so much, but I
swear I never asked for this. So I close my eyes and imagine them aliens, maybe, or the once-
Iranian men who now wear flat-rimmed baseball caps and gold chains and watches. Who sit behind
us at a Mediterranean restaurant and spew racist jokes in Farsi about our waitress. My ears burn
for them. They must know how awfully they stand out. They must know that Papa and Bibi are
listening. Years later, I’ll attend a drag show at my arts school in Northern Michigan. I enjoy
myself, clapping my hands, awash in its sincerity. I wish I could sing and dance and become myself
this way. I wonder what Papa would say if he saw me enjoying this show unabashedly. If he’d
look at me the way he does when he finds me on the bathroom floor, still, breathing, or if he’d
stare as he does when he roams the halls, eyes open but markedly asleep, an alter ego we ascribe
to him only in the night, Bibi standing in the doorway.Bahram, come back to the house. To the
life-size animals, the monsters in the dark. I’ve never been one for the snapback of a newly minted
baseball cap, and this doesn’t mean I haven’t always wanted to be, just that my face is square
enough as it is. So maybe there is something I have in common with these Teletubbies, these once-
Iranian men, their heads that remind me of an astronaut’s, a body climbed inside a body or a corpse
torn apart. Assuming this is how the actors must enter their costumes, opening the spine, pushing
their heads through the naval, and, with their backs against my walls, forcing those darkened
eyelids wide open.
Here’s a love poem practicing yoga with my second mother
on the back deck of a house in a wood I once prayed for
and the stream dogging by and the dog streaming
in her own sun, my father maneuvering his hip bone like roots
the Yogi on-screen sings unfurling into the ground. I begin
to think of my great-grandfather, of my first mother,
a young girl watching him from beyond the door
pray his body in shapes and forms toward some kind
of God, his mustache flush to the ground, and wonder
whether or not my grandparents are real
Muslims, real Iranians. I suppose I could ask though
I’ve never entered a room and seen them bent to Mecca,
or to anything, my grandmother telling me she doesn’t need
some compass to show her which direction she should
face home, that my mother and brother are in every direction
and no direction at once, that she prays every second
of the day and whenever she needs to. She tells me
about birds and numbers and my great-grandmother
dying on her bed in Tehran, bringing my picture
to her coral lips. I feel warned. There will be many dark
and lovely ghosts because of my not going there. The way the earth
warns my Bibi of her body failing inside her a little more
each day, how close it is to rain, always holding an old
cigarette in her body’s mouth like an umbrella saying don’t you see,
Dada, we all go one way or another and I guess she is speaking
some sort of truth in that trail of smoke which shrouds
the dirge of her face, some sort of home. And I guess I should
be grateful. In my new home with my second mother
and back-deck and this woman commanding us to unfurl
with intensity, now, my father unfurling his entire being
as relaxed as he ever was. Soon, I’ll notice a tiny spider burrow into
the dark hair of my arm and I’ll leave it to its own, though
I hate the awful bulb of its body, so that I may watch as
the roots of its legs try and make a home there.
Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared in Texas Review, Zone 3, Nimrod, Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review and elsewhere. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). Atefat-Peckham lives in Huntington, West Virginia and studies Creative Writing at Harvard College.