Before bed, I count teeth slipping out,
calculate bodies in the high-rise above
As a child, who comforted you
when you woke from sleep?
Did you stand in the doorway,
watching softly snoring faces
too terrified to step inside a room?
Crying a little or a lot,
you run for me the white hot
You were flying home from Tehran
I was bleeding in the bathtub
at the start of the next decade
A toast to this and all other
odds and eclogues
Was it maggot or magnets?
Static or stagnant? No matter—
we cherished each fragment
clasped tight to our clavicles
You visited the Tower of Silence
and returned with copper bracelets
I wore clinking down the aedicula,
songbird ghoori glazed ash-white
*A Tower of Silence or dakhmeh refers to a circular burial tower in Iran where Zoroastrians would leave bodies of their deceased.
