Back on Mesrop Mashtots Street, near the Blue

Mosque, the neighbors talked each time we’d stroll

after your prayers; you with your Siouxsie Sioux

eyeliner and hijab, me with my troll

doll hair and corduroys. English let us

chat, for twenty-minutes, about your life

before fleeing Baghdad and a worthless

marriage. “Only a fool becomes a wife.”

In school you loved Forugh and punk. “Forugh

*is* punk,” you’d state. Also: “Gay Grrls,” “Blunts

& Cunts,” “God Save the Queen.” Twenty-minutes;

then the mask would slip back. “Righty-right, droog,”

you’d sigh. “Back to my diapers and Y-fronts”—

and rage-smolder for “Gay Grrls” who riot.

)(*)(

NOTES.

I am not good with eulogies, even ones twenty-years late.

The Forugh that I reference is Forugh Farrokhzad (فروغ فرخزاد), an Iranian modernist poet, feminist and film director who was murdered in 1967 at the age of 32. Because English does not have any words that end in “gh” I’ve cheated and pronounced her name as (fo-ROOG), as in Fugue or Moog.

The Blue Mosque is an 18th-century Shia mosque, located on Mesrop Mashtots Street, in Yerevan, Armenia, across the street from where the glorious Pak Shuka (think: huge, beautiful indoor market full of spices and exotica and the ghosts of the Silk Road) once stood.