As an educator, Yasmine Ameli is passionate about demystifying the writing process.
SINGLE WOMEN
By Yasmine Ameli
After the men left
And with them the pretension
Of our modesty,
We roamed the house with blouses
Buttoned up en route,
With or without bath towels
Or underwear, wet with premenstrual
Discharge, wiggled off
In the kitchen, fresh cotton
Shimmied up the hips mid –
Conversation, my mother noting
You got your hanging labia
From your grandmother,
Just as from her I got my eyes:
Two almonds: green and brown.
***
BEDTIME STORIES
Sheikh Baha’i’s full name is Baha al-Din Mohammad ibn Husayn al-Ameli.
Mama tells me he is the Persian advisor to a shah in another time.
He studies numbers like my big brother Ramine.
He studies letters like me.
Once, he advises Shah to consider how we turn for the sun.
Once, he writes love poems to God.
Once, he heats an entire public bath with a candle.
When Isfahan pulls the bath apart, no one can heat it again for centuries.
For centuries the family passes down one of Sheikh Baha’i’s hand-inked poetry books, but now it’s gone.
When I look him up on Wikipedia to see if he is really real, I find another version of the story.
I tell the family, Look, look we are Arab.
Our family name is an Arab family name.
Sheikh Baha’i was born in Syria, maybe Lebanon, where they speak Arabic until an aunt refutes my version of the past as tale.
The way her baba told it, Sheikh Baha’i spent his life in Iran, married a Persian woman, fathered Persian babies.
Besides, the remnants of his body lie in Mashhad.
His Arab blood is now generations thinned.
When the Rial crashes, the family sells Sheikh Baha’i’s hand-inked poems for nothing.
Bios
Yasmine Ameli is an Iranian American poet and essayist who holds a BA in English from Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from Virginia Tech.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ploughshares and the Ploughshares blog, Narrative, AGNI, the Rumpus, Shenandoah, Nimrod, and elsewhere.
As an educator, she is passionate about demystifying the writing process, providing writers with the craft tools they need to tell their stories, and democratizing access to writing and university publishing resources.
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Andry-Andreja Jakus, a Professor at Hacettepe University, Zagreb, Croatia, is Academic Writer, Bibliographer, Lexicographer, Translator, Language Tutor and Reviewer. In her columns, she writes on poetry, philosophy, cultural studies, history of religions etc.
Courtesy: Andry-Andreja Jakus/LinkedIn – Published with permission of the author
