Grandfather, memorymust be subatomic. The cells rememberwhen the tumor blooms, choking silentthe neck where only darkness oncebreathed through and through, a sore heartseething in the ribs of your throat, a seedhanging by one root, an albaloo fruit.That tiny red thought—it’s chromosomal.The cells—they remember all the darkpassageways of the body. I carry yourdying inside me like this, rememberingyour first symptom—unable to swallow—when you swallowed all your life mast-esadeh, hoping to keep doctors away,swallowed all that lean beef and lamb,sure to cut the fat off first, no liquor,no drugs. What good did it do? Iremember your never setting heelson the street of anyone you evensuspected had cancer. As if you couldbreathe the sickness in—we all haveour superstitions. I think, Don’t temptthe body, this, when I forcemy legs to jog down our suburbanMichigan streets, far from the hot tarTehran smells of your house, of wetasphalt, your body, your soap, forcemyself through echoes of your voicepraying, through lake effect heat, wind,sleet, fog, whatever, as if runningfrom the bone-baring paring knife,bowls full of marrow, and I’m sure Iknow how I will die, the pull of thighs,tearing through tangles of leaves.Walls cluster quiet midwestern homestoward the lake while the future coursesthrough the beating heart, over, and over,keeping time. Pushing through blueburning water, to sky, through torn seamsof membranes, we burst from the deep,dark black mouth of memory.
The Memory of Cells
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- June 16, 2023
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“The Memory of Cells” from Deep Are These Distances Between Us: by Susan Atefat-Peckham.
Published by CavanKerry Press.
Copyright © 2023 by Susan Atefat-Peckham.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Susan Atefat-Peckham (1970–2004) was born in New York to Iranian immigrant parents and lived most of her life in Switzerland and the United States. Her collection of poetry, That Kind of Sleep, won the National Poetry Series in 2000, selected by Victor Hernández Cruz, and was published by Coffee House Press. In addition to writing poetry, she was an accomplished pianist and visual artist. She taught creative writing at Hope College and Georgia College, and was a volunteer for Caritas, Habitat for Humanity, and the United Way. Since her death in 2004 while on a Fulbright Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, Atefat-Peckham’s anthology of Middle Eastern writing, Talking Through the Door, was published by Syracuse University Press. Her second collection of poetry, Deep Are These Distances Between Us, was released with CavanKerry Press in the spring of 2023.
"It is natural that under the words of poems like these, a geography forms. Transnational, existing between countries and cultures, the poems of Susan Atefat-Peckham were part of the charting of a unique landscape. Like the poems of Meena Alexander, Shreela Ray, Reetika Vazirani, and Agha Shahid Ali, her poems have languages, locales, food, and fabrics fully other than the familiar material of American poetry. We have been waiting a long time for new poems from Susie, and here they are, found in files by her son, another poet of life and the mind. Rumi taught us that every poem must be followed by silence. We must listen carefully to the words we have been given. We are not bereft. This is a cartography of love and wonder. Cardinals, cardinals everywhere."
—Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra
"These poems burst from 'the deep dark black mouth of memory' where Atefat-Peckham navigates borders of existence and effectively sings herself back into this world. 'Nothing dies in places we’ve left behind,' she writes, then lifts up the moon at her feet and gives it 'back to the empty sky.'"
—Sholeh Wolpé, author of Abacus of Loss
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