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Words to Die For H ESTHER KAMKAR I read that the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was ordered killed because he’d likened Stalin’s mustache to a cockroach. And I heard that Moosa, my father’s cousin, was executed because he’d sworn loud enough for the guards to hear that His Holiness, the Imam was fathered by a dog and mothered by a whore. And I met a woman who was half crazy. She’d visited her two daughters in prison once a month for ten years and brought them care packages of birth control pills. She said: Their faces were yellow like turmeric. It was all in their eyes. In my mother-tongue we say that a desired woman’s body is like peeled peaches, that she walks like a drunk peacock WORDS TO DIE FOR 199 and sees with her deer eyes. We say that a child’s body is as pure as her mother’s milk. Where I come from these days they don’t execute the virgins. First they rape them and then they shoot them. 200 ESTHER KAMKAR ...

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