Ode to My Friend’s Daughter
For Dorsa
My friend’s five-year-old hops onto the low ledge,
leaps with her chin stretched upward
only to land softly, disappointed on the playground padding,
gravity, it seems, is a force she’s determined to challenge,
so every second outdoors becomes a scheme to flutter
in the flight path of her big sister, little feet
always perched on any platform, her small body
ready to wing the treetops, no nest is big enough to stay
when you’re enthralled by the boundlessness of the aerial,
she jumps into brief glides and swoops over concrete,
on shores and in forests, every raised surface is a launchpad
into a dream that she is convinced will come true;
she reminds me to relish while it lasts
in the relentless belief of pursuing the impossible,
of embodying a spirit, tremendous and without limits
because who knows what restraints are actually self-imposed,
in fact, when bouncing on a trampoline one afternoon,
she announces, so THIS is a bird’s life, as if unsecured
by the ropes fastened to a belt around her torso
and her father’s arms adjacent and open, her glee bursts
as she soars, laughter chirping from her throat
into the smitten air, eager to embrace her song,
so this is a bird’s life, she says again—darling, it always was
Ode to Chromatic Coping
It’s not enough to count down
to those little minutes
that stack so slowly,
I’m donning an olive
coat with the fur-lined hood
over the popular obsidian,
midnight, charcoal,
and I’m eating
all the sunrise-tinted foods
that my people centered
to celebrate: watermelon,
pomegranate, sumac
on the meats,
but it’s early December
on the east coast
and my breath
hangs visibly in the air
like the string lights
that I don’t celebrate,
and I’m not a tourist
or a believer in anything
but the sun, a god
that presides part time,
so how do I cope
when a sweep of dark
escorts me
through the noise
and goose feathers
and the violet lit ribs
of the Oculus,
I got out of the office
before five the other night—
above me, navy, indigo, cold,
and then, along the arc,
down where the ombré lands
upon the horizon,
squeezed between steel,
an entire ribbon of cyan,
defiant, oceanic, light,
lighter than blues, lighter
than the bones
of the songbirds
that used to glitter the trees
Ode to the Speaker
Fine,
I am the speaker of my poems, mine
is the voice you are reading now, who else
could rhyme the barbed gloom
that obscures me, me
is the narrator, of course, controlling
the cadence of another dark ode, still,
speaker, you have earned my praise,
a pretend fiction I point to,
when I’m scolded for latching
my despair to record again,
it is your failure, you, willing scapegoat,
compliant casualty I hide behind,
carrier of every ugly word I sing,
no one doubts the veracity
of my lovely demeanor
because of you, I have room
to confess from the safety of verse,
to exact rhetorical revenge, you
armor every metrical
admission of shame,
gild my frailty with line breaks, no
other entity monologues my pain
undercover, you, guardian of truth,
artificial third person, you protect
my name, you tunnel without train,
tube without egg,
oblivious misnomer, speechless
unless I speak
Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad is a poet and attorney. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and New England Review among others. She won the 2019 LUMINA La Lengua contest and the 2016 Pinch Literary Prize, and is a Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets nominee. Her work can be found at www.mt-poet.com