Fatima Jafar

---

1996

​​[written for Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s ‘A Moment of Innocence’]

​dark tea to greet the moon with is a low-simmer whisper I can sip. The sugar rush
is cubed and handed sweaty-palmed from me to you. Watermelon crush at the
dinnertable sits sopping in a white bowl. The mosaicked silence swells and breaks
like a moment of innocence. A ray of shattered sunlight dances across a bare shoulder,
glimmering himself away from my eager touch. Pressed between the pages of my own
Book, i am carved thin like a moment of innocence. In the middle of my chest lives
a dusty street with a broken car and an old bougainvillea tree. I run down to its corner
and meet myself years later. We embrace and a shadow touches a shadow in the sun.
Your eyes speak to me in tehran talk and unravel everything I thought I was. My tongue
cannot offer you enough; in silversilence each mouth is traced like a moment of
innocence. Where my chadar stops your shadow begins, so when I touch your hand
you almost don’t flinch. Something hidden gasps between our fingers, glittering and
Chaste like a moment of innocence. you say you will change the world with your two
Unblemished hands but I’ve seen your body tremble at its own watery reflection in the
mirror. Something about these streets feels familiar. feet fall easy here. I see a dead
plant forgotten on a ledge and then suddenly I remember it all. Foolish girl. You had
slithered through these very halls centuries ago with a knife in your hand, crying out the
name of that ragged piece of sunlight hoping one day it would say your own name Back