In Which You Take the F Train from Brooklyn to the Last Stop
From Park Slope to Jamaica, it takes about an hour & a half.
The objective: meet a friend who is no longer a friend, see a
Shah Rukh Khan movie at a theater that doesn’t exist anymore,
wash our hands & eat Bangladeshi food at a new place in town.
You pack like it’s a road trip, & not a journey from one side
of the city to the other, act as if you’re reading a book & not
people watching. A couple indulges, whispers to each other
about homesickness & little things that takes their breath away,
like tattooing each other’s poetry on their rib cages. For some time,
you want ask what kind of prayers they’ve manifested, whisper
each night like a bedtime story, but like everyone else, they leave
at Bryant Park. The last moment you went this far was the first time
back in the city, a pandemic ago, & a man spat on your shoes
while declaring this a holy land. Stop the vax, he said,
or get outta here. But you stayed, even though now you buy
records to fill the silence; you no longer believed in it
nor how an entire city could become still. These days the news
is filled with New Jersey, then Los Angeles, in flames instead.
You don’t want to think of these things, like how or why the fire
started, as a hazy Manhattan stretches itself thin outside the window.
Instead you close your eyes, dream of Shah Rukh Khan
& Deepika Padukone dancing across the screen, beef kala bhuna
with a side of rice, oily rotis & rich goat curry in brown bags from
the Guyanese shops. All of this is to say is that maybe
you are pretending to be good, smiling to strangers who don’t
smile back, offering a piece of poetry, in the wrong language,
to the former friend. But on the subway, there are no rules—
you see everything you wanted & so much more.
So You Want to Be a Poet
because one day you looked at the crescent moon & realized
you couldn’t find beauty in life anymore. Even then you wanted
to be a poet & didn’t even know it yet—aren’t writers smitten
with the divine? When you were a child, you heard about a movie
where the world was ending in a year, then begged your mother
to let you share a bed with her. You thought there would be a night
where we all went to sleep & never woke up. It wasn’t until later
you learned the language for death, how the end of the world
might actually be the end of memory, a decayed history, a body,
deemed no longer useful. There was a time where you thought
you would never forget anything. Each Barbie’s favorite outfit,
scientific names of Maryland’s native plants, cigarette boxes
your father accidentally kept in his dirty clothes’ pockets—
back then, these were aspects of life that were just there.
They coexisted in this space with us; there was no reason
to hide poems about them in old vases & meenakari jewelry boxes.
But first you began forgetting your nouns, then names. The details
of a beloved childhood story, told again & again, shifted.
A poem could become a body, a legacy, something that still
kept going when words sewed themselves against the back
of your throat, memories tricking you into choking. All of this
is to say that maybe you wanted to find a reason to survive,
even when it felt like everything & everyone was lost,
their stories buried underneath the moon’s craters & out of reach.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is an Iranian American multimedia artist, journalist, and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. She is the recipient of awards and support from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Fulbright Program, U.S. State Department, University of Arizona, and Brooklyn Poets. Her creative poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in Passages North, Salt Hill, Salamander, and The Journal, among others. She is the author of the chapbooks cartography of trauma (dancing girl press) and cinephile (Ghost City Press). Previously, she was a film & television critic at MovieWeb. Find her at www.ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com / Instagram: @nassarine