Sea Swallowers

Cold April day. Apple blossoms wither before coming into fruit.
Mother sits beside me with her pearl-lucent flesh, 

veins, celadon, some deepening into ash-purple.
Legs in tremor. Back slumped. On her way.

***

Once, mother and I were blue as a mouth that swallows the sea.
We survived the dearth of bread and light, the ghosts of fathers 

and brothers behind every wall panting—the half-dead centaurs.
		We bled at the altar of yes. Like prophets, years emerged 

		with their revelations a humming of the moon, 
		a throbbing of Gospel—
						carry on, 
								carry on, 
										carry on.

		We met God perching at the crown of the Persian cypress.
		We did not cast a pebble, nor sling a rock. We carried on. 

And last year, when mother was dying less and I, living 
more, we lost our feet to the Pacific Ocean. Hand in hand.

Thick stalks of seaweed branched toward us, looped
around our shins with their knobby arms, reeled away 

in the swish of the backwash. Our skin, forever salted.

Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist. Winner of The Cincinnati Review’s 2024 Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in poetry, a finalist of the Prufer Poetry Prize by Pleiades, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the Best of the Net, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Penn Review, The Cincinnati Review, West Trade Review, Diode, River Heron, a Guernica Editions anthology, and more. She serves as a reader for The Harbor Review journal.

Appears In

Cagibi Issue 25