There’s a need for a blade
Hedayat, and guidance
some cigarettes, and a few refined
but diluted smiles
for a suicide in a civil society
so that first-class citizens with pallmalls
across their lips can shake their head
over your carcass

Salam third-world beloved
love me
so I can break your sunflower seeds at the cinema
where you can make out with me and my mom
can find time to search my room
for cigarette buds

Allahu-akbar
god is thirty-four times greater than an idol
with glued-on pupils on a Russian doll
and the female Opius that lay eggs in my mind
and prophets are gulped down books
who dress in colorful tops and anarchistic trousers
who firmly and then provocatively stimulate your feet toward themselves
to make you commit

Third-world beloved
love me with your beautifully accused eyes
because the person beneath you
moos dangerously and is the remaining muscles of a half-chewed fetus
the person beneath you
adores the cologne scent
and in the association of pro-gay feminists she has torn herself in two
though without being civil
she has made love to the half-globes
however much she could
but let the left side of the globe be theirs
because they have left their undergarments
in our Frankish toilets
love me
because my lips are deceivingly swollen
and the one jerking off a few kilometers away
arrives at a philosophical despair

Allahu-akbar
god is thirty-four times greater than an idol
and sanctity, like a vomit basin, is set aside from our carnal gums
only a black chador with dark, orderly, hysterical smiles
and raised buttocks appearing from behind the stands
could make me a good citizen; also, March 8th
and the replications of Shirin Ebadi
backward women have learned prostitution from civic discourse
Bill Clinton’s capital is within the black brassiere of Afghan women

Love me third-world beloved
at this public square right here
make out with me
I love those collective and humanitarian suicides
you can have the half-globe on the right
with a diazepamic nerve, from home to psychiatric hospitals
from the psychiatric hospital to sex in the weekend
burping at four o’clock
reading Lorca at five
bus refuge and jacuzzi ejaculations
blades, and Hedayat and advice at the night’s end

Love me third-world beloved
keep me in these eastern astral filth
in my diazepamic nerves
god is thirty-four times more useless than an idol
god is thirty-four times more self-possessed than an idol





Translator’s Note

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Maral Taheri is a remarkable poet, and though she hasn't published a book due to her refusal to abide by the censorship laws in Iran and Afghanistan, her journal and social media publications are widely read and celebrated. Taheri’s poems are uncanny in their narration of femininity in a time when political violence and misogyny have destroyed all that there’s to home. Taheri’s verse connects memories of love, sex, and war with intertextual references to Islamic theological texts. Some of her juxtapositions emerge from her personal experiences, while others are informed by her readings of Western literature and philosophy. She writes dystopian poems by thematizing self-destruction and suggesting that suicide in the poem is the only way through which she can arrive at self-autonomy and ingenuity. Taheri has lived most of her life in Iran but just moved to France.