Solmaz Sharif: Deception Story
Friends describe my DISPOSITION
as stoic. Like a dead fish, a lover said. DISTANCE
is a funny drug and used to make me a DISTRESSED PERSON,
one who cried in bedrooms and airports. Once I bawled so hard at the
border, even the man with the stamps and holster said Don’t cry. You’ll be
home soon. My DISTRIBUTION
over the globe debated and set to quota. A nation can only handle so many
of me. DITCHING
class, I broke into my friend’s dad’s mansion and swam in the Beverly Hills
pool in a borrowed t-shirt. A brief DIVERSION.
My body breaking the chlorinated surface made it, momentarily, my house,
my DIVISION
of driveway gate and alarm codes, my dress-rehearsed DOCTRINE
of pool boys and ping pong and water delivered on the backs of sequined
Sparkletts trucks. Over here, DOLLY,
an agent will call out, then pat the hair at your hot black DOME.
After explaining what she will touch, backs of the hands at the breasts and
buttocks, the hand goes inside my waistband and my heart goes DORMANT.
Like a dead fish. The last Female Assist I decided to hit on. My life in the
American Dream is a DOWNGRADE
a mere DRAFT
of home. Correction: it satisfies as DRAG.
It is, snarling, what I carve of it alone.
SOLMAZ SHARIF is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, where she is working on a poetic rewrite of the U.S. Department of Defense’s dictionary. A 2011 winner of the Boston Review “Discovery” Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in jubilat, Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, and others. Photograph by Arash Saedinia.
More from this
issue >