The more you shared memories that broke
off inside you, the longer I stayed every time you hit me.
At nineteen, I thought that was love.
Soldier-you smoked opium to forget boys,
whose high-pitched voices chimed about promises
of bikes, rice above rations, even a lamb.
Khomeini, short on tanks and men, ordered soldiers
to take boys, to teach them a new game called mine-sweeping.
Those who won “shaheed shod”, became martyrs.
Open-air trucks dropped boys off daily then near the front,
where your troop was ordered up dunes to man
anti-aircraft guns. Boys fingered plastic keys
painted gold, oohed at khaki jackets, new and stamped:
“Permission from Imam Khomeini to enter heaven.”
They didn’t even question the rope looped between their wrists.
Exile-you chain-smoked Marlboros, tried to forget them,
but the more you tried, the harder it was for your fists to open
and remember why you loved me.
A 2004 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, multilingual poet, and educator, María Luisa Arroyo facilitates poetry workshops widely. Her latest ones were at the 2014 Split This Rock Poetry Festival (DC), the annual Monson (MA) Arts Council art exhibition, and through the Vitamin P for Poetry Series in Springfield (MA). Arroyo’s publications include the full-length collection of poems, Gathering Words: Recogiendo Palabras, and individual poems in various journals and anthologies, such as Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (2013).