ASHLEY HAJIMIRSADEGHI

haibun as a chalk outline


The remnants of the crime has disappeared with summer rain: smeared white chalk blending with cracked cement. I wish I could map out my body in galaxies, disappear with the tides of gravity & nebulas. Once, in middle school, a substitute made us read a Shirley Jackson short story, “The Lottery,” made us reenact the story with a stoning of paper balls. I drew the slip with the black dot and trembled with the onslaught. They say the good always die young, but when you’re twelve and told you’re going to die metaphorically, you kind of want to heave up your chicken nuggets. I always considered myself a final girl, the one always left alive in a horror film. Not this time.

***

I didn’t see a hummingbird until ninth grade biology, when we had to dissect a baby. It looked like a nectarine, all fleshy & gutted & terribly dead. Biology class never taught me my lineage of depression. I learned grief is evolutionary as I stared down at that little hummingbird with its taut beak & marble eyes. I prayed as I made an incision down a limp wing, wept as my lab partner disposed of the carcass into the trash. It lived a fleeting life & a stunning death. Little bird, tell me a story. I tattooed my own loneliness on my thigh in the shape of a hummingbird. My momma grew honeysuckle for years, said it warded away evil. Sister & I ate the flowers whole, laughing about how petals & stems would burst from our eyes. Momma would shake her head, said the hummingbirds would peck our eyes out if we kept doing that. As I tried to sleep, the birds outside loudly wept & I dreamed of the forest burning. Little bird—let me pray to you, just don’t let me be lonely anymore.

***

What if I tricked you,
pretended to be alive?
Stripped bare, a mere concept—

When I dreamed in summer


I thought I was the saint of girlhood.
Drenched my lips in cheap cherry
lip gloss, put on a one-woman radio
play about teenage crushes. Took
a flashlight at midnight & doodled
self-portraits in my diary. Faded film
posters on cerulean walls, taking a
camcorder & making home movies.
Sometimes I looked in the mirror &
told my reflection, “I miss you.” It was
a strange kind of yearning, like seeing
an old friend after years, outlining
the curves of their eyes as they smile.
Relatives always told me I lost so much
weight compared to when I was little—
do I still look the same? Or did it seem
I took scissors to my cheekbones, cut away
the chubbiness, in pursuit of something
more? They always called me ambitious
as I put on plays, while half-naked, in
the living room. An actress, they said:
an actress can tuck away & hide the pain.

When I was Dying


there were no love poems,
no fortune cookies from
Chinese takeout. I cut my
lioness hair today, stripped
the wildness in me—
I was standing alone at the
broken ATM machine when
fireworks lit the harbor &
howled at the moon. Drowning
in light, every picture I took
looked like a blurry, dull
sparkler. God was a flickering
neon sign—I swallowed his light
in prayer. Scheherazade, tell me
what to do, I’ve written & rewritten
my death 1,001 times, wrote my
Persian name until my fingernails
cracked & bled. I once dated a man
who chuckled when I said I wanted
to be Persian art. “Going back
to your roots, I see,” is what he said—
as if I wasn’t Persian enough
for this body. I take upside down
self-portraits with a film camera
I stole from the bodega: rusted
cross earrings, a bouquet of withered
snapdragons, a taxidermy puffin.
I blow out candles on a cheap Walmart
birthday cake, scrape melted wax off
the sickly blue icing with a fork.
I don’t even like cake. If I were
to fill in my scars, my stretch marks,
with light, would I have been wanted
in this world? Oh heavenly father,
how I say your prayer again & again—

Ashley Hajimirsadeghi’s work has appeared in Into the Void Magazine, Mud Season Review, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She currently reads for Mud Season Review and EX/POST Magazine, is the Playwriting Director’s Apprentice at New Perspectives Theatre Company, and was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Her debut chapbook cartography of trauma is forthcoming from dancing girl press. Her website is https://ashleyhajimirsadeghi.squarespace.com

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Art by Meridith McNeal