a sparrow in the fist, an eagle on Everest

1314

don’t frown
don’t kick the door
don’t slap the chance
it’s a sensitive bad-ass
don’t zip up the wound
if it begs to expose
don’t turn on the light
if you have no idea
what monster
waits for you in the closet
don’t crush,
don’t crash
and if you have to,
don’t forget
to clean up the shards
i hate my room a hodgepodge
don’t stop chasing the eagle
if 90% of the world population
believes in the sparrow
you’ve kept in your fist for years
as when the meteor hit the gulf of Mexico
small mammals survived
they didn’t believe in dinosaurs’ dynasty

Image credit:Evan McDougall/Unsplash

Soodabeh was born in Iran and received her Pharm.D. and Ph.D. of Pharmacognosy from Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS), Iran. She has worked as a Visiting Researcher and awarded a Foreign Researcher Fellowship to work as a Research Associate in Kyoto University, Japan, as well as Assistant and Associate Professor at TUMS and Visiting Professor at Saskatchewan University, Canada. She has written roughly 150 scientific papers for various academic journals, books and Chapbooks (published by Springer and Elsevier).

She is also interested in literature and poetry, and has published a collection of her poems, “Harfhaee- Baraye- Khodam” (Words for myself, published by Azad University, Tehran) and “A Poem and Three Generations” in Farsi.

Soodabeh is currently living in Kew Gardens, 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" in Persian and English.

 

Her micro-poems are daily updating on her Twitter @SSaeidnia

 

A number of her poems are routinely posted through her weblog: https://soodabehpoems.wordpress.com

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soodabeh.saeidnia

 

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Soodabeh-