in his name? You knew us no more than he knew them,

his lowest subjects, his servants, and we were

silent before you like that, bowing

backwards, not speaking, not eating unless we were

told to eat, the glass jammed to our

teeth and tilted like a brass funnel in the

soundproof cells of Teheran. Did you forget

the blood, blinding lights, pounding on the door, as

he forgot the wire, the goad,

the stone table? Did you weep as you left

as Reza Pahlevi wept when he rose

over the gold plain of Iran, did you

suddenly want to hear our voices, did you

start to rethink the darkness of our hair,

did you wonder if perhaps we had deserved to live,

did you love us, then?

Burn Center

When my mother talks about the Burn Center

she’s given to the local hospital

my hair lifts and wavers like smoke

in the air around my head. She speaks of the

beds in her name, the suspension baths and

square miles of lint, and I think of the

years with her, as her child, as if

without skin, walking around scalded

raw, first degree burns over ninety

percent of my body. I would stick to doorways I

tried to walk through, stick to chairs as I

tried to rise, pieces of my flesh

tearing off easily as

well-done pork, and no one gave me

a strip of gauze, or a pat of butter to

melt on my crackling side, but when I would

cry out she would hold me to her

hot griddle, when my scorched head stank she would

draw me deeper into the burning

room of her life. So when she talks about her

Burn Center, I think of a child

who will come there, float in water

murky as tears, dangle suspended in a

tub of ointment, suck ice while they

put out all the tiny subsidiary

flames in her hair near the brain, and I say

Let her sleep as long as it takes, let her walk out

without a scar, without a single mark to

honor the power of fire.

The Ideal Father

When I dream you, Dad, you come into the dream

clean, farouche, gesundheit, feral

fresh face, physically exact—

the ideal, the schemata, the blueprint, no mark of

pain. You’re perfect as a textbook example:

your hair like a definition of hair,

the bulb with its pith which contains a little air,

the root, the spear of horny substance, the

mouth of the follicle, the filament which forms the

coat of the mammal, the way the sheath

glistens where the shaft opens its oil to the light;

and your skin, the layers of the epidermis like

clear water through which we see the

subcutaneous fat, its pearls

swimming in cross-section; and your teeth, their

pork-white ceilings, enamel crowns,

pulp hollows, necks and roots like

squids’ legs, deep in the gum—not a

cavity, no whiff of rot; and your