Green Linden Press

Elementary English: Basic Sentences

700 million people want to migrate permanently.

As a child, I watched the American Forces Network and dreamt
of going to America.

272 million people are international migrants.

An estimated 1 million Iranians live in the US. 

Immigrants usually assimilate within 20 years.

None of my US-born cousins are Muslim or speak Persian.

In the late 1970s, Iran sent more students to American universities
than any other foreign country.

I came alone to the United States in 1976 to go to high school.

The population of Iranian Americans quadrupled in the 1980s.

I wasn’t there when my sister was taken from her 11th grade
chemistry class and sentenced to ten years in Evin prison.

The United States aided Iraq in “The Longest War” with Iran.

My three brothers came to the US to escape the war.

No American embassy is in Iran.

In 2002, I found my childhood home was a Quran academy.

No Iranian embassy is in America.

Grandmother became my first relative buried in the USA.

Elementary English: Reading Exercise

I’m sorry. Farsi seems so far away, Grandma. Do they speak
English where you are? Remember when I crashed open
the red remote control car you bought me, looking for its soul.
You always reproached with poetry: “All the world’s advice is
but wind in a cage.” At Santa Clara, I professed the coming
of existential Nausea, until I figured it was hunger and too much
General Foods’ Café Vienna.

I wanted to go to Walt Whitman and take classes in Room 222
with Peter Dixon. Instead, I dropped out and worked under
the table at a café on Haight. I was too late for the Summer
of Love, ended up spending the Day on the Green with Foreigner,
Loverboy, and Scorpions.

Have you heard from my classmates at Alborz? Did they go
to the front? I decided to get away from Iran. The other side
of the planet isn’t far enough. I’m caught between a and the
in the headwind of a language with no articles. I envy my cousin
Hossein, raised Catholic, with no connection to his father’s past.
When I answer I’m Asian, they say but you don’t look it.
I tried to be Italian. People noticed I don’t speak it. When you’re
a resident alien, you can never make an intentional mistake.
It will not be seen as intentional.

The other day, I thought I saw a note from you on the station
platform. Under an old streetlamp marking a question, a hooded
crow poised like a semicolon on a line of blank benches.
You probably think I’m being poetic again to get your attention.

Grandma, how can absence be “away from to be”? Isn’t it about
presence? Sometimes, she grows so large, you have to move
overseas to give her enough room. I still miss hiding in our parents’
bedroom we called the cold room, the messages mulberries left
on the cracked sidewalks, the whisper, like children refusing
to sleep, of leaves gathered around the plane trees. But when I turn
on the TV, I hope there are no images of Tehran. I’m afraid
of the youth on Azadi Square shouting “Death to America.”
Listen. The news anchor confirms, waterboarding isn’t about
the absence of air but too much water.

Last week, a student threw an egg at me, yelling, “Go home, Arab.”
I quickly washed the stain. No one noticed. Do you still pray?
They say the American who carved “Freedom” and “Hezbollah”
on his rifles and killed the Asian refugee kids at the nearby
elementary school wasn’t a Muslim. Don’t worry.

Can you see the elm outside waving helloes and goodbyes?
He can’t make up his mind. Grandma, when can I stop speaking
for Iran? I don’t want to write about pomegranates and Rumi.
What can I write? Poems are want ads for the lost, billboards
for the empires of the past, blocking the view. Grandma, I trust
you’re here, because I can still hear your silence. How can I not
write about Iran?

Kaveh Bassiri is the author of two chapbooks: 99 Names of Exile (2019), the winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and Elementary English (2020), the winner of the Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. His poems have been published in Best American Poetry 2020, Best New Poets 2020, Verse Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, and Shenandoah. He is also the recipient of a 2019 translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2020