More Than a Dirge

Leila Farjami

for victims of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran

I buried my sisterin a summer storm.Warm muddrowned my body.She dreamed a century,lived two decades—spoke the height of pines,her face sunlit like their tips.She took the street like a marebreaking into open field,her mane lashing the air—unveiled. No to hijab! !نه به حجابWhen her fist closed,the men drew near.Far as freedom,a bullet took her—round and copperas the last moon she slept under.Eyes followed herall the way to the grave.Eyes wept. Mouths wailed.Crowds gathered to witness.In each palm,a strand of her hair.

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Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet and psychotherapist and the author of Daughter of Salt (Trio House Press, July 2026), an Editor’s Selection. The recipient of The Iowa Review Award in Poetry and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award and a fellow of PEN America’s Emerging Voices program, her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles. You may follow her work at leilafarjami.com and @Leila_Poetry.

58.3

Auburn, Alabama

Auburn University

Editors
Anton DiSclafani, Rose McLarney

Managing Editor
Emma Brousseau

Poetry Editor
Rose McLarney

Southern Humanities Review is the literary quarterly published from the Department of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. Founded in 1967, SHR publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Work published in Southern Humanities Review is considered for Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, Prize Stories: O. Henry Awards, and the Pushcart Prize.

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