epitaph for parvin and the islamic republic of iran by Ava Dadvand

 my body wash smells of preemptive grief: cucumber and tea, just like my grandmother parvin’s coffee table, of course, the cucumbers would have to be persian and the tea sadaf

one of the only phrases i can confidently say in farsi is nah, chai nemikhom, no, i don’t want tea,  after how many times parvin has sung in harmony with the whistle-tone teapot, i hate tea

         she’s begun walking slower and slower 

from the kitchen stove to the family room over the last few years, her hip’s been  bad, and now her metal hip is even worse, and i know one day she’ll trip and fall and die so now i say areh, chai mikhom

i should call her after this show--i’m not even sure if i have her number.

i have not yet met death, but lately he’s been inching closer and closer. first my nameless relatives in iran, then parvin’s sisters i’ve never met, and now my brother’s best friend killed himself just last week, it’s the first funeral i’ve helped pay for. he was cool. his name is tej, “brown lightning”, and i would like for him to be remembered. the logical next step after reaping a close friend of a family member would be to pluck off an actual family member, not one so close that i would cry, but one just distant enough to make me regret not spending more time with them on earth, like parvin,

but death is never logical, is he?

i do not speak farsi, i will never learn it, i hate the sounds it makes in my mouth. there is no way to sound femme when you’re enunciating your kh’es like a hairy shia man reeling back to spit up cigar ash on the tehrani sidewalk

the only time i have ever felt iranian was at a family barbecue with my cousin’s husband kamran, watching him downing pilsners from his dancing post behind the grill, hey, i’m a good muslim, i only drink during ramadan

i can’t imagine how anyone could enjoy being iranian like kamran, it just boils down to being hairy and dirty and not poc enough to belong with other poc but certainly not white enough to be white anywhere beyond the census, 

iran is a stain upon my skin, a clogged drain, i want no association with that land

yet a quiet frustration bubbles up within me every time someone pronounces iran as “i ran” or refers to farsi with the exonym “persian”, i can hear parvin raving about the beautiful rolling hills of zanjan and the resounding architecture of shiraz and i realize the most personal moment i’ve had with her was when she picked me up from the school psychologist’s office in eighth grade because i was a little trans egg cutting myself in confusion and my parents were out of town

i am a bad iranian and a bad granddaughter. and yes, the former can be excused with some slew of iconoclastic “to be a good iranian is to kowtow to the theocratic regime” assertions, and that’s fine, i will never learn farsi, i will never truly love tea; i can live with being a bad iranian,

but there are only so many days left for me to be a good granddaughter.

so.

if one of us dies tomorrow

let it be known that at least i wrote an iran poem

so now i have to call her.

Ava Dadvand (she/her) is a transgender Iranian-American poet from Los Angeles, California currently studying classics at Yale University. She writes for trans women above all else. One day she will have written a modern-American trans epic with Homeric influences. In the meantime, her raunchy and contemplative poetry about the transsexual experience should suffice. She can be found @ava_dadvand. Cover art by Alice Mao, a Masthead member of CWC, can be found on THE VISUAL.