Poem of the Week | March 30, 2026

Leila Farjami was a 2025 poetry finalist for The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize. She is an Iranian American poet and psychotherapist. Her debut poetry collection, Daughter of Salt, an Editor’s Selection at Trio House Press, is forthcoming in July 2026. She has received The Iowa Review Award in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award, and a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, and was runner-up for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for prizes from The Missouri Review, Noemi Press, Perugia Press, and Southern Indiana Review. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, AGNI, and Southeast Review, among many others. She lives in Los Angeles.  

“Blue Mouths: An Ending” by Leila Farjami is our Poem of the Week.

***

Blue Mouths: An Ending

An old photo   
     of my mother—  
holding an apple  
     and a knife.  
A sixty-two-year-old   
     object: Iran-made  
steel blade, 
     walnut hilt. 
 
Apples always  
     find her hands. 
Some picked   
     half-bitten, 
 before I knew  
     what half-bitten meant— 
curves long gone,  
     still breathing. 
She peels and slices   
     without end. 
Each bite becomes  
     my body: 
my heart, my spine.   
     Water divides 
in our bellies: flesh  
     of nebula and salt. 
 
Tomorrow, she dies   
     in the next room— 
a drunken ghost   
     wanders her mouth, 
head propped, 
     back powdered for sores. 
 
Look—the moon  
     flashes before it falls.  
 
The sea drinks us   
     in a single gulp. 

***

Author’s Note

Expecting the imminent loss of my mother, I wrote this poem as the final piece in a series titled “Blue Mouths.” It is both homage and requiem for a woman who gave birth to me not once but twice. An accidentally discovered photograph in a forgotten stack of old images returned me to her youth in 1950s Iran, an era that she and many others remembered as a moment of promise toward modernization and establishment of women’s rights, before the 1979 revolution extinguished those hopes under an anti-democratic, deeply misogynistic regime. Now, as we prepare for end-of-life measures, this poem is a daughter’s meditation on the moment where birth and death are equal, mirrored thresholds in the same cycle, holding grief and celebration at once.