Here’s a Love Poem Sleeping
together in bed, thinking about how much I
love your tired voice, tired you,
I call it, love
the tired
curve of your back, your tired
breathing, love it when you roll your r’s and scrunch
your nose, speak the ghost of your Spanish
better than the Farsi I’m trying to learn
now. How sometimes, all these years
later, you ask if I’m mad that you’re sleeping. You’re doing it
again now, faced toward me, worried
and awake: are you mad at me for sleeping? I am
remembering my family
in Iran, how they call you my fiancé. Do you remember
the smirk in their voices as I searched
my Google Translate app for
something they might understand: khoshgelam, zendegiam,
moosham, ham-dam—
my beautiful, my life, my mouse, my same
breath. My Bibi telling me
which photos of you I could send
to my ammeh on her Whatsapp—do you have any
without her shoulders? Without her stomach? Without her
legs? How I searched for
a picture of you without
your body, of just
your face, and sent it away as they waxed and waned
with approval. She looks even a bit
Iranian in her face. Do you remember laughing when
I told you? You asking, then, if you had a face
like the moon. My Bibi laughing
at wedding bells, exclaiming
Another donkey joins the show! Do you remember
my night terrors? Or when I was even younger, before we ever
met, the smell of that principal’s office
as it got darker, how I’d pinch my eyes shut
for five seconds, ten, twenty and then open
thinking, like a magic trick,
of you, that you
might walk through those elementary school doors
to pick me up, spin me round, set me down
again. Do you
remember
my single father, limping in, alone
and just like a donkey, jaw clenched
forever, how I felt he must have been angry
with me as he explained how
the cop stopped him for swerving, asked him
to walk in a straight line. How, frustrated
by his once-shattered hip, he couldn’t—the lights
of oncoming traffic crashing
into his faltering back, the cop holding his flashlight
like a shotgun on his shoulder, saying
sir, we can do this all day. Remember how he measured
the distance of longing
the way ancient Persian astronomers measured the stars
with a device called the star-taker. Remember bodies
bent to their
instruments. My father’s
first bad marriage. What I came from. Remember
the woman behind the desk, looking at us with a little pity, with less
understanding, how we both walked away
from the school
in the dark. Remember hands. Remember the stars
all around you. Remember you, face toward
me, bodiless and shining in the dark, saying,
I don’t want
to sleep
if you’re not sleeping, too. How I close
my eyes to you like a man splashing
bits of the river against
his face.
DARIUS ATEFAT-PECKHAM’s work has appeared in Poem-a-Day, Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021) and his work has recently appeared in the anthology My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press, 2020). Atefat-Peckham grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, and currently studies English and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard College.