Leila Farjami
Leila Farjami is an Iranian American poet, translator, and psychotherapist. Winner of The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in poetry, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the Best of the Net, her poems appear in Diode, El Portal, Euphony, Grey Sparrow, Midwest Quarterly, Nimrod, Pennsylvania English, Silk Road Review, Subnivean, and elsewhere. Her work is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Mulberry Review, and an anthology by Guernica Editions in April 2025. She serves as a reader for The Harbor Review.
Bullet Hole
Father, remember how once you sat me
over your shoulders so I could see the revolution coming?
It was December, and words fell like six-armed eulogies
on the rooftop, stacked atop each other like shallow graves.
I was the chant stuck on rewind, not the future.
I was the world that did not happen, the girl,
unhoused, shipped to the land of dreams.
All I had from the East was a pink geranium
I guarded with tawny fingers, pinned it to the corner
of my mouth to remember my mother tongue,
treaded battlegrounds, sidestepped
the sprawl of body parts, still warm.
Today, I am the mother of bones
watering them like hummingbird sages
in my backyard.
I am the sister of flesh, growing moonlight
in an indigo vase.
Still, the revolution hovers above my head
like a soldier’s ghost, immovable—
With a rifle in hand, a bullet in skull.
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Image by Denny Müller from Unsplash
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