Science and Technology
by Ali Asadollahi
translated by Amir Ahmadi Arian
Ten years ago, I wrote this poem in memory of my fellow student, Kianoush Assa. On June 15, 2009, Kianoush participated in a protest against the rigged presidential elections in Iran and was shot twice at Tehran's Azadi Street (Azadi in Persian means Freedom). His family received his body 13 days after he was killed. At the time of his death, Kianoosh Assa was a graduate student of petrochemical engineering at Science & Technology University in Tehran. He was also a Tambour player, painter, and cartoonist.
If you call a 5.45 millimeter hole inside the valves of a heart that used to pump blood into veins for twenty six years and is now spurting blood into the sky “Kianoush,” then the last name of the leisurely movement of the bullet as it grinds its way through flesh and bone is “Assa.”
Our monstrous body was wounded
We didn't know where the wound was
So we looked it up on Google Maps.
Somewhere in our body was bleeding
An organ scientifically known as Kianoush Assa
So you would go to the doctor and say, my Kianoush Assa is aching
My Kianoush Assa is infected
My Kianoush Assa, born on the nineteenth of March nineteen eighty-four in Kermanshah, is hit by two bullets
And you would return home with a bottle of antiseptic and a sheet of antibiotics
And another crowd, clad in red uniforms, would pour into the street, amorphously
Out of the nose
Out of the eyes
Out of the mouth now part of the blood circulation
To make metaphors with trash bins
Because the city bus is a metaphor
Sneakers and vinegar are metaphors
The executioner’s van with those mysterious, dark glasses
Is a metaphor when its door is slammed shut and the smell
Of food wafts in from the university cafeteria
The smell of an embryo sizzling in hot oil
At Vali Asr Square.
The pulse of a young heart in a fist
The heart run over by a mud-green truck that slips like ground
Meat through fingers.
This is my body eat it up
This is my body
Touch it.
Ali Asadollahi is the author of six Persian poetry books. He is the former secretary of the Iranian Writers’ Association and is pursuing an MA in Persian literature. His works and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Amir Ahmadi Arian is an author and journalist, the author of Then the Fish Swallowed Him (Harper, 2020). He teaches Creative Writing at Binghamton University.