I left you without saying goodbye
though you wouldn’t care
I was Pluto and you the Sun

an indifferent smog grew
shrouding a giant
with thousands of heads

you cried and acidic tears
burned my clothes and eyes
your face got a lunar spot

my throat dried and you
couldn’t afford water to heal
the cracks of the boxwood lips

trees were felled one by one
and you didn’t care until
all the pines were extinct

and only ravens remained
croaking to please you
competing with cats for leftovers

I know many of your lovers
left you before, and I was less
than a nothing among them

every day I ask myself
if you even noticed my flight
when I departed you, Tehran

Image credit:Ninara

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-