Three Poems + Three Micro Poems by Soodabeh Saeidnia

 

The Mansion She Inherited

she lives in a mobile mansion

inherited from Hopis in New Mexico

built with sugar cane and cinnamon

decorated with yellow flyers

hanging all over the wall in the dining room

 

blue stairs are one-way only toward Sirius

green, two-lane highway toward Orion

the curtain, knitted from butterflies' dream in cocoon

windows open to the scent of Chaparral

 

she irrigates the field with a cup of coffee

filled with organic memories of her ancestors

 

non-GMO flowers growing in the backyard

are the only weeds she needs to crop

 

Rootless

I saw a man
stood still on the edge
of the George Washington bridge.
His feet rooted into the river
and his hands offered birds
a resting nest but the man
was just a man and the bird,
just a bird. His roots,
taken away by the stream
and birds weren't patient
until the spring ushered.

 

Garden of Memory

There is an apple tree
standing in the middle
of the grandfather's garden.

People say
it's been there
since Adam and Eve
took its fruit
and lost their memories.

We gave away
hundreds of the apples,
and now the city
is stumbling
on the edge
of oblivion.

 

Micropoetry 

#1

his well-thumbed pages
torn off
and his fragile binding
fractured,
when she closed his book

 

#2

sometimes a man
bends his dream
to build a bridge

 

#3

since the day
you flew away
from this cursed land,
a picture of your last kiss
rises every dawn
and a memory
sets every dusk

 

Soodabeh Saeidnia got her Pharm.D. and Ph.D. of Pharmacognosy but fell in love with poetry long ago. She is currently living in New York. Her English poems have been published in different American, Canadian and British magazines and literary journals including Squawk Back, Sick Lit Magazine, Dying Dahlia Review, Sisyphus Quarterly, Paradox, TimBookTu, Babbling of the Irrational, Scarlet Leaf Review, SPINE, Tuck Magazine, La Libertad, Tiny Poetry, Indiana Voice Journal, and many others. A number of her poems have been printed in the anthologies, The Careless Embrace of the Boneshaker (by great weather for MEDIA), Where the Mind Dwells, American Poet, Dandelion in A Vase of Roses, Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze and The Literacy Review NYU, vol.15. She is the author of "Street of the Ginkgo Trees", and the translator and editor of anthologies like "Voice of Monarch Butterflies" (Middle Eastern Anthology by Ten Poets from Ganges to Nile), "Apple Fruits of an Old Oak", and the bilingual anthologies “Where Are You From?”, "Persian Sugar in English Tea Vol I, II, III" and “ Saffron Flavored Rock Candy, Vol. I and II in Persian and English. Among them, the digital file of “Persian Sugar in English Tea Vol. I” is going to land on the Moon through the time capsule on a lunar lander in a project “Writers on the Moon” in 2021.