Vincent Poetry Prize Honorable Mention
Nicole Pomeroy
All Women, Born in Distress
When the protests began,
I started dreaming of mosaic-tiled
Mosques and
long-haired women
holding hands freely
in the streets of Tehran.
Here, outside, the tide drags
its cold hem through another fishing
town emptied of work.
A gull lifts a mussel into the air,
drops it like a bomb,
before gorging the confetti of carnage,
all shell and meat and salt-pearl
I, being born a woman in distress,
learned early how history enters the body:
first as silence, then as appetite,
always as a rage so cavernous
the want,
the hunger–my own need to gorge on
pearly carnage–is unending
I came to know Farsi as a language of anger
—my mother slipping into her native
tongue only when her emotions were too big to leave room
for remembering the other three languages
renting space in her temporal hallways.
And still–
it soothed me like a cold hand pressed to the hot cheek
it just slapped. I never knew
a place I'd never been to could feel more like home
than my own country.
On the news,
I watched the women chant
زن، زندگی، آزادی
Woman, Life, Freedom
and for one impossible second
I believed language itself might pry open
the mouth of God.
Glints of hope,
like my grandmother's secret piles of gold
I daydreamed more: about coming
home, learning home,
seeing home.
But the regime tightened its grip,
while women cut their hair in the squares,
lit their hijabs on fire,
stood in the smoke of their own burning.
It kept snowing here in this home-not-home.
Flurry after flurry, the pile growing from two feet to three to six,
outside the window flanked by the TV where
rubble kept accumulating too, a different kind of pile.
Blood swirling with motor oil on the streets of Tehran,
Turning everything an iridescent copper,
almost pretty
before you remember
the blood came from the bodies of
five year old school girls,
their recess cut short with a single drop
of a bomb.
My grandmother escaped
a revolution with gold sewn
into her bra lining.
I keep her gold at my sternum; I reach for it without thinking,
the way you reach for a word in a
language you learned too late, or maybe forgot too early.
And what kind of woman am I?
too Iranian for this country, too American for the grief
I inherited, standing barefoot in wet grass
at midnight while the moon stains
itself the color of a healing bruise.
Sometimes I think womanhood is merely the art of becoming a homeland
for catastrophe.
Still, each morning, the body
continues its false show of democracy:
heart insisting on heartbeat,
mouth insisting on song,
pretending I have a vote in whether this shell
of me survives, pretending
it won't always be a weapon
used against me by someone, somewhere, calling it mercy.
I whisper the names into seawind—
strangers, my grandmother, the girls,
all the needs and notions of my kind—
and feel them traveling outward through me
like so many constellations colonized,
named by someone else.
I know.
But I do not approve.
And I am not resigned.
—
Edna St. Vincent Millay poems referenced:
"I am not resigned" and "I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned." — Dirge Without Music, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1928)
"I, being born a woman and distressed" — I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1923)
