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“The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood

“Tehran Cuddled In My Arms
Tehran in my arms
At the agony of death
In my bosom
Is an aged bull
Which is mooing
Yet tamed and dull
Rubbing its figure on my hair.
But tomorrow,
It 'll be a dead body
And the dustman will collect it
I'm a refuge of this kicking bitch dog
And I'll leave it to God...


Rosa Jamali


(TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN TO ENGLISH BY ROSA JAMALI)”
― Rosa Jamali, Selected Poems of Rosa Jamali

“The Last Street of Tehean
Facing the airport, all that's now left in my grasp
is a crumpled land
that fits in the palm of my hand.

Facing wavering sunbeams�
a sun that is angry and mute.
All the way from the salt sands of Dasht-e Lut,
it came, the dream
that forced my fingers' shift,
that set my teeth on edge.
A muted breeze,
whirlwind spun from sand dunes
all the way, even through the back alley.

Are you pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh?

No longer than the palm of the hand, a short leap,
exactly the length you had predicted.

A huge grave in which to lay the longest night of the year to sleep.

Sleep has quit our eyelids for other pastures,
has dropped its anchor at the shores of garden ponds,
has lost the chapped flaking of its lips,
poor thing!

Are you pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh?

With scissors - snip, snip - they are severing something.
The alphabet shavings strewn on the ground,
are they the letters that spell our family name?

With every zig-zag,
you cage my mother's breath,
her footprints fading
in the shifting sands.

Are you pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh?
No.
A strange land-shape form.
I will not return.
I left behind a shoe, one of a pair,
for you to put on and follow after me.



Translated from Persian to English by Franklin Lewis”
― Rosa Jamali, Selected Poems of Rosa Jamali

“I Am the City

The spaces between streets,
The lights that bloom on corners,
The lines that hold us together.

I may be a name,
I may be a crossroad,
I may be a saint.

I am a city.
I am a name.
I am.”
― Laura Chouette, The Willow Song

“The City That Holds Me

The sidewalks I stumble on more than once
Make me feel like I am walking home.
The place cold enough to die for,

Yet I walk towards the next day without freezing.
The river that drowns my words,
As I wander its same stretch, up and down.

My chapels know my favourite corners,
Where I light my candles each good Sunday.”
― Laura Chouette, The Willow Song

“A Laptop in One Room

The corners I turned became a city,
While remembering the sidewalks.

Each street I crossed turned into art,
For poets past than turned lines upside down.

Horizons in blue and grey
Became a shallow water's sight.”
― Laura Chouette, The Willow Song