by Nanette Rayman-Rivera
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| Artwork by Sahar Goreshi |
to the women of Iran
The smell is sultry, veined with gristle like tempting meat, a steady
beefy purr, bloating, ballooning, bigger, ballooning again, a fragrance
of good womb and rose, the whole Iran pulsing like a furnace or a mammal.
No longer anesthetized Barbie dolls, but beautiful female creatures,
emerging and effervescent—feathered wings, a smell of trees and jasmine,
hair flailing and feathering, bobbed, their bodies as pearlescent shells,
mothers, daughters, tired of living low-down to the ground, dwarfed by
men with fritters for brains, perfectly gorgeous women wearing their souls
on their faces, littering on and consuming the tyrants. Never bashful,
sloughing off the stinking rotten meat that hangs off of the morality police.
When they came spewing jasmine and rose, showing off the charms
of WOMEN, sweet skin in the folds of their burka-jails, hair haloed by the
gods, voices firm and soldier, tough yet sweet as roses, shedding ugly
garments, their own woman-meaty smell wafting, they stomped the
sewer stink of the morality police and watched them grounded and dying.
What so chews at their hearts? These women, with their famous fertile
manes, will not lie down absolutely. Sky and flowers in darkness. Not
alone, they uplift their incarcerated world. They fluff up their hair ringing
out the toxins of a thousand years. They arouse each woman’s nature,
a thousand roses clutching tight to their gallantry.
Past the cities and out into the tulip fields, where flowers bloom without
fear. Listen to the birds and the women rutting the trees. This reaches me,
a woman, my wish for them, bountiful hair, scent and sense, combatants on the
roil, freedom kneeling at their feet. All through the streets, their fragrance—
acrobats of freedom roses, they spit at the men afraid of a woman’s beauty.
Their bracelets clanging, their hair free and waving at the world. Sweet foxes
biting morality, which is not morality, uncurled from caverns of sublimation,
unchained at the ankles, their voices not perjured, sweet trapeze artists of freedom.
Nanette Rayman-Rivera, author of the books Shana Linda, Pretty Pretty, and Project: Butterflies, is a two-time Pushcart nominee, winner of Best of the Net 2007, DZANC Best of the Web 2010, Glass Woman Prize. Sugar House Review, The Worcester Review, Wilderness House, Sundog, Up the Staircase, Berkeley Fiction Review, Pedestal, DMQ, Sundog, Seventh Wave, Stirring’s Steamiest Six, Green Silk, Collidescope Journal, Poetry SuperHighway. She lives with her puppy, Layla.