Kaveh Bassiri

The answering machine wakes me with my father’s summon: “They have taken your sister. We don’t know where she is.” He is talking to God again. A snapshot of him in a medical uniform watches over my apartment in San Jose. Our conversations have turned into product placements for war and revolution. Reports of celestial bodies contaminate the silent sky bridging over us.

I suspect he is in the dining room in Tehran, confined by a circle of chairs under the unlit chandelier or sheltered in the garage while the sirens occupy his house. Banners and slogans scatter like seeds across the pavement. Neighbors go around offering complaints and prophesies as alms, while refugees from another war huddle around burning tires on the roadside. Somewhere across the desert, to the west, a wave of youths, like me, sweep through fields harvesting footprints of angels, hoping to find the garden door and let everyone out. The Azadi (“Freedom”) Towers between us.

Families gather at the foot of the airport's minaret, the security gate a mihrab, the incantation of departures and arrivals. I watch Nightline and hide my identity under covers from the inspection of morning that charges up my doorsteps. I can hear Father remind me, "Thank God you aren't here. You would have died in the streets or at the front." The radiator trembles in a corner, the roses in custody at my table, closed like fists. Under the dominion of clouds, cars snake around a Gulf station. Trees slough their shadows. My uncle's house, standing before a lawn stretched out like a prayer rug, is kept awake at night by the prognosis of another Christmas.

Father wants to enlist words, have them dispatch for an answer or this west wind raiding the air, ordering get out! But we're sidewalk pigeons searching for scraps off maps, doormats. We contain no message, are no messenger. Outside, a beggar, a bell, an army.