Supplication in My Mother's Yard

Supplication In My Mother’s Yard

Leila Farjami

In a grainy Polaroid,

my face – round, wet,

Caspian shore behind me.

Death, distant.

Mother sunbathes

in a now-banned bikini.

Father, elsewhere. Summer of ’75.

The Shah’s gaze

glows from my grandmother’s mantle.

Later, in America, Father says:

We should have left sooner.

Now he rests in Newport Beach –

a grave I never visit.

These days, Mother sprawls

on the sofa, voice brittle:

Bury me beside him.

In her yard of bare lemon branches,

no bird sings in the mulberry.

My shoulders ache with age

and rain taps its litany.

On the lawn, a whale’s mouth

shines. I am Jonah, taken whole.

Inside its belly’s night,

I beg: Bring me to light.

Poetry

21 February 2026

Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet and psychotherapist. Her debut poetry collection, Daughter of Salt – an Editor’s Selection at Trio House Press – is forthcoming in July 2026. She is the recipient of The Iowa Review Award in Poetry (2025), The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award in Poetry (2024), and PEN America’s Emerging Voices Fellowship (2025). Her work has been recognized as a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize from Pleiades, the Trio House Press Award, the Perugia Press Prize, and Southern Indiana Review's Michael Waters Poetry Prize. She has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Swamp Pink, AGNI, The Cincinnati Review, The Mississippi Review, Southern Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, and in anthologies from Sundress and Guernica Editions, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.