(Author Image Credit: Andre Chung )
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, Hobart, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com
Still Life
My childhood home in ruins. Dancing
barefoot, meticulously dodging fireflies,
gutting lychees, a small satisfaction
of tearing apart these fleshy planets. They
gloriously drip onto the glossy countertops,
throbbing papercuts on my thumb begin
trickling streams of blood. The executioner
of my mother’s marigolds, the act of dying
forever immortalized in stick-and-poke tattoos.
A little girl peering into a dusty mirror,
sloppily applying wine red lipstick—it
tastes like justice, a bittersweet freedom. Ashy
white fur from a dead childhood cat, faded
burgundy Persian carpets. Father saved
them for when I’m married; I doubt
his new heart will last that long. A photograph
of a family before being ruptured by revolution,
a smiling grandfather and grandmother that
only exists in memory. An empty home full
of guillotined flowers & what was lost.