No Hand to Save Her
Leila Farjami | Poetry
Forgive me, Father Almighty
for surviving the first riptide.
I thought I was meant to live when my fingers
raked wet sand.
I rose
from clinging mud, limped home—
what home?
Mother drowned
in her cursed sea.
No hand to save her.
I did not want a life
like hers.
Never good at diving deep
into the maze
never had patience
fins, oxygen hunger for the abyss—
its wreckage.
I always asked, Chera? Why?
چرا؟ چرا؟ چرا؟
Why, why, why?
You didn’t like that.
Now you ask
What has become of you now?
I’ve turned to words
not pearls.
I am night sky.
A gullet of stars.
I am moon.
A cheek,
gnawed through.
Leila Farjami 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. 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. Readers can learn more about her work at leilafarjami.com.