Purr

1/27/2026

When Nasim told me she was Iranian, I looked up poets and found a woman who had written about a bird because anybody can quote Rumi. Forough Farrokhzad died in a car crash trying to avoid a school bus when she was thirty-two. Nasim was thirty-seven when we met, far away in the cold of Toronto and I wrote a poem for her everyday from December of ‘21 until April of ‘22. I met her in the shivering winds of February at Toronto Pearson Airport. I could not have predicted then what would be happening in Iran now. 

There was a glass shield between us during our first kiss, an after-effect of Covid on the subway. I’ll be sad if I’ve lost those images. Some of 16,000 on my phone, before she taught me about gigabytes and data. 

Nasim loved George Michael and we would walk the streets of Split, Croatia, singing “All I Want for Christmas” in the winter of 2022. She would come to stay with me in New Orleans in the Spring of 2023, in the 9th Ward, next door to Rome, who kept a gun in his oversized Shaquille O’Neal basketball shorts. This was before Nasim wore Shaquille O’Neal basketball shorts of her own, before we moved out to Arabi, a suburb of New Orleans. 

Before Ali Khamenei ordered the killing of tens of thousands of Iranian people. What do you say when the woman you love describes the markets in Rasht?

When she tells you that after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij set fire to the booths and the whole market was ablaze, the people walked out with their hands raised in the International sign of surrender and were shot and killed in the name of God? What do you say when she shows you piles of body bags in the middle of the street and describes how a big truck scooped up the bodies and dumped them on top of each other until the pile touched the roof of the room? 

How about how her cousin was shot and could not go to the hospital because the Islamic Republic was kidnapping and executing people who ended up there. What do you say when she asks why the only Western Media covering this tragedy is Fox News? What do you say when she tells you that if only five percent of Americans raised their voices what a difference this might make?

What do you say?

How do you exist when you can’t fully fathom the pain? When you see photos of teachers, and smiling weight lifters, a teenagers who make crafts, and dads and moms and sons and daughters, piano players giggling after recitals and knowing that all these photos and videos were taken months and weeks and days before they were murdered?

When she wishes for the first time that you were Iranian, so you could better understand, so you might halve the pain, what do you say? You can have compassion but you can’t fully suffer with unless you have been there. You never met her other cousin, the one who wanted to go to the streets. The one who dragged her husband and kids in the name of hope. The one who was smiling moments before the Basij ripped her husband away and beat him to death in front of those kids. You don’t know how it feels to be shot in the back or to have pellets stuck in your skin days later like she did, days later a reminder of how you can never run. 

Through all of this, your wife sits on a computer each day. She works while checking the news. She, like millions of others, hopes and prays and waits for intervention, for Trump, for Israel, for somebody to dismantle, to destroy, to decimate, to sow division within, to borrow the word that has most been spoken about what the IRGC did, is doing, to the people. To slaughter.

And this is where the politics come. This is your letter to your senators. This is where hate so deep cannot help but blind some people who claim to believe in justice. That’s it. That simple? The guy who might save the Iranian people is so hated, so vilified (and rightfully so in many instances), that people can’t see past the good he might do, no matter his reasons. 

So you sit. And you wait. A holding pattern of sorts. The description of planes. The TV news. Your wife memorizing “Blowin’ in the Wind”.

And she feeds the cats and lets them inside because it is freezing in Arabi. And she says she does not like the cats. And she says the cats are yours. They’re meant to eat mice in the greenhouse. And you know different. You know what it sounds like to be called sweetheart and my little pretty in Farsi. And you know what a purr does to the chest of a person. And you know that words cannot solve the muck that sometimes sticks around the core of the heart, and if only the world could see that a purr is needed, deep in the Middle East, deep in the hearts of the Iranian people.