در هوایت dar havāyat, In Your Air
I am told to say it the way I might tell a beloved
I’ve got their back. dar havāyat. I don’t believe in equivalency
anymore. So I think I’d say it the way I might whisper my plea
in the ear of an infant before tossing them in a pool, in the air, in flight, before
the darkness swallows them up. dar havāyat. When I was born, I had
a thick head full of beautiful Iranian hair. I guess I was
screaming. How frustrating to have what you want inside
outside. To realize you’ve never really had
language. In 2020, in 1398, the Islamic Republic shoots
an airplane filled with its own citizens out of the sky. When I tell
a grad student at a party I feel unsafe going there
he tells me I look pretty damn Iranian so you know what
fuck it—go. Tells the guy by the fridge, King Dariush, here,
needs a drink. I can feel his breathing creep down my neck and into my shirt. How
can I explain this flightlessness? You’re in my air, I whisper back
too late, and turn away. I’ve never felt comfortable
in graveyards. Sitting at Bibi’s kitchen table
as she tells me my mind will soon close up, close out
as if a bird flown into a porch-screen or a balloon tied off
for a child, for me. And it’s true I was unbearably
happy at carnivals, thinking of nothing
at all. I ate too much and threw up behind Ferris wheels, felt
the sting of the air filling me up, dug my hands into my face, and tried to split myself
open. Worried after what she taught me. After ghosts and spirits
and if they really existed. The sheer
number, the magnitude of their unearthly forms, and how
we must walk through them, how they must take
residence in the mouth, the throat. Everywhere I went I opened
my mouth in apology, made space for my mother and brother and wondered
if they made space in me. I tasted
cigarette smoke and floating wisps
of cotton candy, spilled popcorn, my Bibi saying Why do you eat this, this
is junk, wait until we get home, I will fill your tummy with my beautiful
cooking. When my Bibi thinks I’ve done
something well, she says you’re doing amazingly good! In her English
she says dar havāyat, says the good I’ve done is staggering
as I am filled with her beautiful food. I say, Thank you very much. I am
trying, and wonder if I’ve spoken this simple
uncertainty correctly. I open my mouth to her. I am overflowing. I figure
that this goes well beyond choice, well beyond
my body. I think I am like a child complaining
about her sibling who has scooched too close—Mom, she cries out
from the cramped backseat, he won’t stop breathing
my air, making the air her beloved or beloveds, also. A child
thinking: how is it that I am without wings? Enfolding
and encircling, mothering me away
from my air as my beloved then leans in, leans closer
to breathe more of my beloveds in, breathe
my beloveds out
Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, and many others. He’s also been included in many anthologies, including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). In 2018, he was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet, and traveled the Midwest in this capacity to teach middle school and high school-aged students about the concurrence of grief and joy in literature. Atefat-Peckham is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press). He grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, and currently studies English and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard College.