The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles

The State of Red

7 The State of Red Mandana Zandian The stairway of our house was narrow the stairway of our house was supposed to be a place for hide-and-seek, for running up and down. It was supposed to be white, gleaming like the Milky Way. The stairway of our house was supposed to always laugh. The air raid siren was red. The siren cursed our stairway, sullied it with darkness, dirt, and stench. The siren smelled of hate. The stairway of our house, in its fear of the siren, collapsed into itself and became a deep well, dark, empty, and dry, and inside it my dreams birthed headless nightmares wrapped in layers of sounds—howls of jets and wolves. My mother would press her head against the stairway roof, her pulse pounding in her eyes, terrified lest she fall and be trampled under our neighbor’s pious feet— the same neighbor who praised God incessantly for the war’s boundless bounties. And my father would shoot my hands with his eyes’ bullets all the way from the war at the border 8 so that he would not forget how young I was, dying beside my dolls. And Tehran . . . never imagined it would become this red. Its red sky and red earth rumbled and quaked like thunder, attacked our stairway with fury. But tomorrow was always a new day! A day where the earth became pregnant with new parts of my classmates’ dismembered arms. A day of twenty new lies I could slurp up in our history class— and our school believed it could look for shelter during the geography lesson. And God . . . God always yawned. Translated by Sholeh Wolpé ...