he used to beckonbia moohet mibinametcome let me look at your hairI confusethe word moo for hairwith moon the word mahcome let me look at your moonhair a natural satellitehis hands a gentle orbitmy head crateredwith its own skinI’ve lost my moonthe hair is full tonighthe used to dragher by herhair the only imageI have of his violencehair is pulled to the earthwhat can youtell meabout gravitythat isn’t aboutcontrolhe dragged her by the moonaround the earthTehranMontgomeryShirazMarietta the lawsof physics tell me if she losther hair like mehe could not havebecause she wouldnot have had and therefore hair pulls the tide or look perhapsif my hair hadbeenhe could havehe would have come where did your moon go? tellme letme lookatallthelightonthefloor
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Copyright © 2025 by Aria Curtis.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Aria Curtis is an Iranian-American writer from Atlanta. She holds an MFA from Arizona State University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing as well as a 2021 Georgia Review Southern Post-Colonial Emerging Writer Fellowship. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, The Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere.
Spring 2025
Sewanee, Tennessee
University of the South
Editor
Adam Ross
Managing Editor & Poetry Editor
Eric Smith
Assistant Editors
Hellen Wainaina
Jennie Vite
Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is the longest-running literary quarterly in America. The SR has published many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Hannah Arendt, and Ezra Pound. The Review has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent, from excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels to the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “ it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.
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