118 the iowa review mehdi tavana okasi YOU MY BLOOD I. I picture your faces, the way you all sit cross-legged on the rug, splitting melons into the night. I want to capture the air between our eyes, the way it feels settling. Exactly like baby powder. Something like the way you my blood taught me to crack sunflower, pumpkin, and cantaloupe seeds. We placed each one carefully between our lips. Yours cracked clean down the middle; mine disintegrated into pieces that got lodged between my teeth. It made you all laugh: my American mouth. But it made me think of digging, and gold, and excavations—the way I sought the seed with my tongue, separating the salty shell from the meat of each small seed. At first, I could not sleep in the middle of the day. I was still wide-awake when you rose from your afternoon naps. It was thrilling to be in Tehran; having left before I knew it was important to commit certain details to mem- ory. How in the gloaming, the last lines of sleep disappeared from your eyes as you drank the chaiee from the saucers, the narbakee. I left before I’d learned to hold a narbakee just with my thumb and middle finger, so that as the tea cooled, I could inhale its steam. I now fumble with the saucer, the hot tea; I am different from you in every way that matters: a child who greedily eats one sugar cube after another. I relish the gritty ache. It’s as if I have never tasted anything sweet. My God, you exclaim, pinching my chubby cheeks, how very fat you’ve grown. There are weddings, parties, picnics, and trips to the Caspian. White fish fried on burners set up in rented seaside villas, a large pot of lima bean and dill rice steaming. Americans would call this cuisine earthy, and only now do I understand what that means. I think you loved us most then—when we returned that first time, after eight years away. My mother had aged, gained weight. She blamed it on America. She worked sixty-hour weeks. There was no time to sleep in the middle of the day, no time to separate hundreds of tiny bones from the flesh of white fish. In a corner of the villa, my grandmother pulled my mother aside. “Save your money. What are you thinking buying all these gifts? They will only want more. Goldfish eat until they explode.” But my mother was bringing