Poetry from Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

Photo: Bruno

AZADI

tomorrow it is november & tell me when the october sun
sets one last time, you will open our windows. we will do
everything we were not once allowed to do: eat gheimeh
with bare hands, drowsily sing love poems we’d make up
on the spot. dance barefoot under the broken, flickering
lamp in the dusty study room, sweeping the last shards
of daylight beneath our calloused heels. & maybe we will
adopt a cat someday, a little calico kitten like the ones
we’d seen on all the old foreign shows & movies, sit in
the windowsill with a book & chai in hand, cat sunbathing
in the dying day. we will smile at passing strangers on
the street below, even on a moonless night, singing &
shouting & offering more of ourselves than we could
ever possibly give. tell me a miracle, not a story I’ve heard
only 1,001 times before. a bedtime tale I won’t cry
listening to—all beauty, no bloodshed. I want to press play
on the radio & dance, fall in love with what you have to say.
please, we’ve had enough sadness to last us a lifetime.
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Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian-American multimedia artist, writer, and journalist. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Passages North, The Cortland Review, Salamander, RHINO, Salt Hill, and The Journal, among others. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief at Mud Season Review and a contributing writer and critic at MovieWeb. She is a six-time Best of the Net nominee, two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and runner-up for the Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize. Her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com