Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest.

Poems taken from The Wrong Person to Ask
By Marjorie Lotfi
Published by Bloodaxe

Packing for America

my father in Tabriz, 1960

He can’t take his mother in the suitcase,
the smell of khoresht in the air, her spice box
too tall to fit. Nor will it close when he folds
her sajadah into its corners. He can’t bring
the way she rose and blew out the candles
at supper’s end, rolled up the oilcloth, marked
the laying out of beds, the beginning of night.
He knows the slap of her sandals across
the tiles will fade. He tosses photographs
into the case, though not one shows her eyes;
instead, she covers her mouth with her hand
as taught, looks away. He considers strapping
the samovar to his back like a child’s bag;
a lifetime measured in tea from its belly.
Finally, he takes her tulip glass, winds
a chador around its body, leaves the gold rim
peeking out like a mouth that might
tell him where to go, what is coming next.

The Last Thing

a boy throws his coat overboard in Sergey Ponomarev’s
Pulitzer Prize-winning image of migrants landing in Greece

She always told him to put his coat on,
but he didn’t feel the cold. Nights
he’d come home without it, to be sent
back out for its black form waiting
like a dead animal on the corner
where the only streetlamp still worked,
where football was possible after dark.
The morning he leaves, she pushes it
into his bag like a relic, listing the reasons
he’ll need the weight, winter is coming.
It’s the last thing he loses. When all the bags
are gone and the men chest-deep
in water hauling the boat to land, he keeps
his shoes for shore, flings the coat overboard.

Granddaughter, I entered your mother’s house

as I entered every house, head covered, shoes off.
I wore a black chador for all my outings.
Your mother said black is for funerals.
What she didn’t know was that I agreed.
This funeral of a life; I’d been in mourning
since my wedding. I entered my son’s house
as a stranger, reading each carpet as I might
almond trees in bloom or bolts of cloth
to determine yield, how much they might fetch.
Your parents prospered, didn’t always smile.

I placed my shoes at the front door, as is only
proper. Bebakhshid, they said. Beshin eenja,
pointing to the largest lounge chair. I wanted
to drop to the ground, fold my heels beneath me.
I wanted to speak in the old language, the one
your mother hadn’t learned. But instead, I sank
into the seat with a flick of the head, saying
khayli mamnoon, as if grateful, remembering
how hard it is in this foreign land to keep
holding the spine straight, to keep looking down.

The Hebridean Crab Apple

mysterious lonely apple tree on uninhabited Hebridean island baffles scientists

This, I understand: the instinct to cling,
at any cost, to the place you are rooted,
to see another season through, though
the others seed elsewhere. Even in this

sedentary act you push the limit: winter
becomes summer becomes winter
and you are steadfast on your crag,
your outcrop. No one knows the shape

of your limbs against a darkening sky;
you question the need to grow against
the wind. Despite what they say,
there’s no mystery in simply holding on.

And what is home if not the choice –
over and over again – to stay?

The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi is published by Bloodaxe, priced £10.99.