This is an actual transcript of my speech-to-text app trying to decipher my mother’s voicemail in Farsi.

You see, my mother is a Persian poet lost in translation.

She and I come from the nation of poets, Iran, where people recite poems not just at weddings, but to welcome sorrow, to answer a question, and even to resolve conflicts. You hear poetry weaved into conversations at schools, in remote villages, and at trendy modern boutiques.

But for my mother, poetry is more than a way to communicate—it’s an extension of her five senses. When I was little, I got separated from her in a bustling bazaar. Lost and scared, I walked on tiptoes, trying to spot her in a sea of giants. When my eyes filled with tears, it was her bright voice that drew me to the kiosk. She was reading a verse from an antique leatherbound Rumi:

Standing next to her, I realized she hadn’t noticed my absence.

A few years later, during the Iran-Iraq War, I began to understand her reliance on poetry. One afternoon, when the threat of Scud missiles filled the airways, we huddled around the radio in my parent’s bedroom as the presenter invited listeners to join a contest. Challenging us to compose the second part of a verse, he recited the first hemistich and, like a spell, his words banished all thoughts of war, food rations, and the dread of air raids. Every head in the room brimmed with blooming possibilities of a perfect second line. I glimpsed our fractured reflection in the large mirror on my mother’s vanity, crisscrossed by pieces of tape forming an X. This was to spare us the post-attack cleanup, as blast waves shattered glass and the sound barrier alike. In the mirror, I saw my sister, her hair covering her eyes, hunched over writing furiously, my mother sharing several second lines out loud, and my father’s furrowed brow as he turned his rosary beads. What but a poem could capture this moment that may have been our last?

As the war dragged on and the regime’s oppression of girls ignited my rage, I wrote anti-government graffiti on walls, a crime that could send me to prison or worse. In response, my mother wrote a poem about India’s Independence Day. She said a prayer and submitted it along with her visa application to India. The poem’s magic granted us a visa, leading to a fruitful meeting with the American embassy in Mumbai. The catch was I had to immigrate alone.

I landed in New Mexico where a kind American family hosted me. But being fourteen, without my motherland, my mother tongue, and my actual mother was like living in a Rumi poem. Like the cut reed, I was ripped from the beloved.

I stared out of the window into a suburban desert. I missed our lush garden, the scent of orange blossoms. I ate French fries alone at the school cafeteria. My mind drifted to lazy lunches under the willow tree. I yearned to express how I ached. I didn’t know English.

So I memorized 300 vocabulary words a day and watched Days of Our Lives religiously. I learned about the prevalence of death plots and evil twins in American life. It was the farthest I had been from home, from poetry.

By the second month, when someone asked an innocuous question, channeling a soap opera diva, I retorted back: “What’s that supposed to mean?”

As I adapted to American life, poetry became a blurry memory—a vestigial organ I had no use for. By the time my parents were able to move here, I had become a young woman. The new me in this new world couldn’t relate to them. My mother, who hadn’t seen me in years, couldn't understand this American version of me. It was as if I had turned into a foreign protein her body was unable to digest. We fought a lot. At the same time, she often needed my help—like the day she asked me to place an ad to sell her car.

We pulled into a strip mall parking lot that smelled of tacos and nail salon chemicals. We watched the buyer arrive, vaguely resembling Steve Buscemi. As he and I discussed the car, my mother, who had lost interest in the conversation, stared at our reflection in the dark window of an office space. Then she began a passionate recitation in Farsi.

“Maman, not now,” I grumbled.

“I recited poems when I was in labor with you and when bombs fell. Why can’t I when I’m selling a car?” Her impatient Farsi words fell like hail on the hot pavement. “He is a foreigner. He doesn’t understand what I’m saying.” She gestured wildly toward the man, who was getting more uncomfortable by the second.

“Here are the repair records,” I said to him, pointing to the folder in my hand.

By the time the man bought the car, I was utterly frustrated. Again, my mother had made a simple affair difficult with her eccentricities.

“Come on! Let’s go,” I blurted and took off ahead of her but her voice stopped me cold in my tracks:

I turned to see her pointing to a side alley.

“That’s a better way home,” she yelled.

And for the first time I understood why she refuses to let go of her poetry. 

Why would anyone forgo the ineffable sense that always guides them to where they need to be?

Now when a drunken word salad like this appears on my phone screen, I hear my mother’s resonant voice:

A modified version of this essay appeared on Lit Hub.

1. Choke

Over text, an old friend tells me he’s learned how to “choke a bitch” since we were last in bed. I was drinking bourbon and ginger, much like I am now, thinking about his particular phrasing, remembering how timid he’d seemed during our encounters. Of all the phrases he could’ve used, “choke a bitch” I didn’t expect. But maybe I should have.

Of all the kinks I’ve tried since my divorce, that’s one I don’t like. He texted back, “Why not?” I thought it was about control, but a sub is supposed to relinquish power, for her own pleasure.

2. Cry

As an infant, I had to learn how to breathe. Correction: I had to learn to cry and breathe at the same time. Whenever I took to wailing, the unformed epiglottis in my throat didn’t quite work. Somehow my breath caught and held fast. My face would turn purple and I’d pass out from lack of oxygen. The first time it happened, they thought I was dead. The third time, just a baby brat. At some point, I was taken to the doctor’s office and my unexpected condition soon diagnosed.

As I grew, my epiglottis grew too and corrected itself, but my reputation as a girl-child already spoiled remained.

3. Count

I remember very little of losing our son at birth after an emergency C-section. But just before the hot knife, I do remember I couldn’t breathe. The intubation tube invaded my throat, and my hand curled into a claw in self-defense. The anesthesiologist said, “Count back from ten,” and for two split seconds, I wanted to kill him for smothering me, even if it meant (maybe) saving my baby.

When I woke, I had to make a decision. Groggy, I agreed to let our son return to the earth’s ether. He, too, had been intubated; his chest shocked. His heart could not beat and his lungs could not respire without machines. The doctor said, “He’s been through enough,” and I knew it for truth.

After, and for years, my breath would stall. I’d be sitting on the sofa, standing in the kitchen—not thinking of anyone or anything—and I would have to force my lungs to inhale and exhale, because breathing meant living beyond the before and into the after, where my son did not live.

4. Climb

Every time I hike at elevation, I lose my breath. It’s the incline, the thin air, the baby weight I lost and gained, lost and gained, over the course of growing three children inside of my womb. Two survived, one before and one after the loss, our son an anchor of depression between them.

We never spoke of him. We always spoke of him.

We never thought of him. We always thought of him.

We never remembered him. We always remembered him.

Every year on his birthday, we went to the water—drying desert lakes, warm and cold oceans, mountain streams that only trickled in the shade of the lodgepole pine. I dreamed of drowning.

I still craved my own smothering. I still desired a bottomless depth, even as I continued to climb.

5. Clitoris

Until one day, a man who had never been my husband, and never would be, put his hand to my throat and squeezed, gently but firmly. Gently but firmly, I put his hand elsewhere. My breast. My ass. My clitoris. Anywhere but my epiglottis.

Because I realized—I still had to breathe for two. That my son had survived deep inside of me, feeding on my strong breath, my thick blood. No one should stop my breath, my heart, but him.

“How to Breathe” first appeared in New Orleans Review.

“Looks like a brain,” my daughter says, staring into the gash on her left forearm. Her skin is parted into two opposing curves forming the shape of a giant almond the width of her wrist. Mustard yellow mounds clump together like fish eggs, the subcutaneous fat layer unnaturally exposed. A familiar shade of red, the one we’ve all seen from scraped knees, pools over clots of darker raisin. 

“It does look like a brain.” What else could I say? My daughter just sliced into her arm with the blade of an eyebrow razor while I sat cross legged on her bed asking her to stop. Shallow marks already line her arms from shoulders to wrists but this cut, the one she made while staring into my eyes, needs more than I can give. We drive to Children’s Hospital for stitches. 

The motherhood I’ve been given is not typical, safe, or normal. I use the word normal because it is fitting. Fifteen years of psychiatrists, therapists, teachers, whole systems admitting they have never seen a more challenging case has at least justified my custom forged armor. It is a costume that allows my eyes to stare at my daughter’s wound without aching or wincing. It allows my mind to escape, drift to the ancient suture technique we learned about during a trip my husband and I took to Peru before we became parents.

The eco-lodge sits quiet among the trees. After an hour boat ride from Puerto Maldonado, a trek through knee-deep mud, passage in canoes, and 100 step-climb from the riverbed to the isolated world of the forest, the rhythm of nature begins to dictate our schedule. 

At night, a rote yet devoted eco-student points to a curve of tree trunk where two baby tarantulas cuddle near their mama, sheltered underneath the webbing she knit herself.

In the morning, the forest floor is busy with ants. They do go marching one by one. Tiny brown bodies in endless lines, each carrying a leaf section or flower petal on their back. Our guide plucks one of the ants from the ground. He holds out his sleeved arm and it bites down. He then rips the ant’s body from its head. The jaws stay latched. “Ancient stitches,” he says. The teeth stay clamped until they dry and fall off in around two weeks, the same time a wound is healed. I am both fascinated and disturbed by our guide’s unnecessary demonstration. Now, in the artificial hospital light, I wonder if the information would have stayed with me all these years without the image? 

I sit in a chair at the end of the gurney while one doctor holds together my daughter’s skin and the other holds blue polymer string at the end of tools from a suture kit. Punctured, pulled, cut nine times. I wonder why the process seems so awkward, manipulating thread from the ends of scissors and tweezers, fingers so far removed from the needle and thread? Aren’t humans made for close-up magic? There’s a reason we have long opposable thumbs and fingertips with 3,000 touch receptors. 

When we walk out of the hospital at 7:00 am, I don’t feel the new sunshine as much as I’m attuned to the movement around us, the business of a new day. The busy starts and ends. Staff enter and exit, child is wheeled to a minivan, a guard attaches a badge. 

We get better at things. Things we never knew we would need to get better at: How to clean up broken glass from shattered windows, how to ride in the hard plastic backseat of a police car so your daughter won’t have to transport alone, how to smile at night nurses when sleep hasn’t come in days. We get better at trying to refuse transfer to the only available behavioral health center because it’s the one that didn’t allow visits, that was so short staffed a teenage patient answered the phone. It’s the one where doctors left questions unanswered until insurance ran out. It’s the place your daughter learned how to cut into her own flesh. 

We get better at holding things together. We put on the armor but hope to never master any of them because if we did, these things could stay forever. 

In Peru, it is again approaching night. We have left the damp earth to drift in a small row boat hoping to spot caiman among the shimmers and shadows of sunset waters, as darkness reveals stars in the opposite configuration of our daily lives. 

Soon after our trip, I’ll become a mother. The shift will be palpable, of course. Parenting changes everyone. From the beginning and through the years, my child’s complex and dangerous mental health disabilities have both depleted and fortified me in ways I could never have imagined. My own exoskeleton hardening with each episode, though still fragile underneath, like the unsuspecting ant.