An Ablution
One, a dream involving tossing torn up pizza to pigeons,
An icy courtyard and grandmother helping me feed them;
The other, my father, my unbuckled seatbelt, vodka, and police.
What makes one a dream and one a memory?
Who is to say that pizza didn’t exist in Tehran in 1986?
Or that grandmother was not the type of women to feed pigeons,
Or that she had trouble enough feeding her own eight children.
And father that night behind the long line of brake lights,
Forgetting to go, forgetting to stop,
Eyes softly pressing together, then fluttering open.
The gentle punch of fender into bumper.
Who is to say that the police didn’t hose him down with love?
In the precinct yard while I watched, perched on a bench,
In the same gentle air where his cheek prostrated to concrete,
And water moved over him.
Mahsa Hosseini is a student of life, guided by curiosity and a long-standing love of words and languages. She studied English literature, poetry, Persian, and Arabic at UCLA and earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Having lived in Iran, Germany, California, New York and Morocco, her work is shaped by movement, translation, and place. Her poetry explores how experiences and languages shape people, examining the ways these forces form and inform our reality. She is interested in how these dynamics shape perception and the world we inhabit.