By Karen Tolui
Featured Art: “Re Centered” by Gabriela Denise Frank

I could go on and on about 
my adopted language, 
how Farsi sometimes misses the point, 
like ‘missing you’ my heart is tight, del tang, 
And then, the heart 
means also the stomach, 
and I don’t know where to point 
when I’m hungry for love. 

And sometimes you’d say 
you could eat my liver 
and thought I’d take joy 
in that, but meanwhile 
you had swallowed me whole. 

I remember that night 
at Sambo’s in Eugene.
Your question rang in my head 
like thunder I couldn’t hear 
because the language has no word
for the sound of thunder. 

We had filled our hearts
with banana cream pie, 
so what else could I do 
but say yes, from the bottom 
of my guts, when I should have said 
khak bar sar, or 
dirt on your head.

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Karen Toloui’s stories and poems have appeared in Catamaran, Meat for Tea, The Santa Barbara Literary Magazine, Slipstream, and the Nebraska Poetry Society. Her memoir, A Late Stop in Queersville, is about her late-in-life experience of finding the love of her life, then falling way, way down into a tragic heap, and her ultimate rising and landing in a better place. She teaches writing and literature at Diablo Valley College and lives in Ashland, Oregon. She has an MFA in fiction from Pacific University and an MA in creative writing (poetry) from San Francisco State University. Not that long ago, she played drums in “Placenta,” an all-mom punk band based in Oakland, California.