ALIA LOLA
PEH-RO
Spring to Mind by Saman Zabihzadeh-Shahabi
Maman, I’m writing to you from the end of the world. I know I should be studying and each letter I pedal into the keyboard feels naughty. Each syntax feels like a fingerprint at a crime scene. I’m writing to you at the end of it all and from a new beginning. I wrote to you before in Nowruz and told you of the honey bees in Brockwell park and their pilgrimage to the dogwood blossom. I assured you of their cacophonous symphony that spring waits for no catastrophe. But now the catastrophe is over, and the thrill is gone. And I’m no longer walking home at 6:30am. No longer watching the sunrise cast tower blocks and offices against the horizon like a thousand anemic fingers; Peckhams very own shadow show – with backstage access for businessmen in brogues as substitutes for broken backs, twisted arms, and pulled legs. I remember the start. The old man on my first shift who kept asking me to end his life. Get rid of me. GET RID OF ME. He insulted us. Called us savages. Why would we force him to play out the rest of his tried existence confined to a bed in a bay, in a hospital, in a country, in a world in which his body found no occupation and his crippled bones bound him back to that bed, in that bay, in that hospital, and so on. It made me think of Tehran and Mamani. After all, was it not yesterday I tantrumed and kicked at her shins and then 14 years later came back to move her from her bed; lifting her legs and feeling the paper thinness of her skin against my palms. When I wheeled her down the street, she spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand.
When I wheeled her down the street, she spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand. And when the nightingales rose above the metropolistic din, she turned her head up to catch them in her roosari and smuggle them back to her room. A place where they lost their authenticity amongst the timbre of grid-lock beyond the cinder walls. That hedonistic urban mixtape becoming un-mastered, relentlessly undone. I remember one afternoon in December although the sun had already begun to dive behind the mountains and the pavement had begun its habitual priming by the frost. It was barely 5 o’clock. Our tiresome trudging home from the bazaar was comedic. For we were deeply intoxicated with the heady fumes of toasting almonds or perhaps it was the petroleum, our eye lids heavy like the opium eaters hermitting in the underpass. And you, punctuating intermittent silences with the rhythm of pistachio shells effortlessly becoming undone in your fingers. Spoils of fresh baghali in paper bags, pickled cucumbers in jars only amu could open, and a trail of sabzi leaves like Hansel and Gretel. For you could easily be, with your golden hair and green eyes – that girl who entered an unknown forest for what - if not to find something sweeter? I’m writing to you in January with a candlestick burning at the edge of my desk, in my side-vision it’s a distant inferno. Watch faces warn me of my daily do’s not yet done. And I feel as though I am once again, the infamous, acclaimed 9-yearold ‘tahdig bandit’ who’s hands you said would turn to ash. I’m writing to you on what is nearly your birthday. And I’m covering the pages in jam in hope that wherever you are, it will attract some bees or at least something sweet. Sam
and forever for You,
Saman.
MS. GALAXY
SANA ZIA
FLOWER GIRL DEVI JABERI
NASIM ASGARI
heart is aching seeking any bit of motivation .just to get through these days popping vitamin d like bullets when i miss the suns rays .i’m turning blue these days .but i’ll get through this .strap my boots on like i own this .like i know this