#farnaz fatemi

[noleavestoblow]

- Farnaz Fatemi (from poem "Farnaz")

[mykhnai]

I love my name, but my name has been a crucial part of how I learned to sit with discomfort. . . . even my name waited for me to love it.

Farnaz Fatemi (source)

[literaturha]

[missedstations]

“Farnaz” - Farnaz Fatemi

1. Our parents argued in a language we didn’t understand. We were born in Las Vegas or Teheran,

twin cities of fantasy and chance. My sister and I found our words in Long Beach, Big Wheels and Barbies,

Bluebird troops and kidnap breakfasts. A war forced our cousins to buy false passports, lose their savings.

We ate Chef Boyardee after school, hot spinach and meatball soup on the weekends. I yelled into a phone

so my Iranian family could hear me. I learned I was the silk carpet my mother didn’t own, the casino

payout my father kept chasing. I didn’t know until later the Persian Leopard was trapped

in the Zagros mountains after the Iran-Iraq war, in danger of tripping old mines.

2. I taught myself who I was by watching my sister carefully.   I worried when  

the day came and I wanted to say I’m not her. First out the womb,   she was named and I wasn’t.  

Her name is Iranian but sayable   by everyone. My name would wait. They waited until

they knew they had it right. Not Sheila, my mother’s veto. Farnaz, a name that made me lonely.  

We lived in between Iran and America, a customs declaration zone. By the time I was born

my mute parents wondered how to speak as Americans as they moved away

from the people who loved them. How could I know the dark inside their mouths hurt them, too.

3. My father studied numbers in the racing forms, and I bet following my gut. I influenced dice at the craps table

by spinning three times   in each direction while my father   placed his bets. Even now,

I’ll retell stories in my head one hundred times to end them right.   It’s a system.  

I came from the racetrack, ignoring   all the horses in the flesh. I sounded out   the names of long shots.  

The odds say Blinding Telegram will win, but I like the music of Queen the Fox.

I believed that how I got my name would mean something. I am still finding the names for some things: the youth my parents brought to parenting, the attention

I didn’t know I was waiting for, the word for wanting, feeling its deep hole. Such naming I have been slow to do. I am waiting until I have it right.

I know that once named there is a road down which that named thing runs, and I am not the one who built the road.