Safranal

You stand by the stove, stirring
a pot of bubbling rice—
sticky, gelatinous—your arthritic fingers
stained gold by pinched saffron.
Your hair is the same rusty bob,
your brown eyes ringed with blue— macular degeneration, the gnawing
inability to see.
Yet as the years blind you,
somehow you become clearer in my mind.

In Iran, you were a chemist.
Before the university papers
forgotten in a midnight haste to flee.
Before Khomeini’s regime deemed our family
legally non-human, less than dogs.
Before collagen tablets, chia-seed-and-cantaloupe
smoothies for your aching hands.
Before your husband’s brain
began eating itself.

Picrocrocin is what gives raw saffron its bitterness.
When heated, the chemical breaks down
into safranal: C16 H26 O7
becomes C10 H14 O—the same structure,
fewer atoms—the molecule shedding itself,
yielding a sweet, hay-like aroma
transformed by loss.

Here are the streaks
a body leaves as one drags it away,
the thick boot print
of someone fleeing the scene.

Our language was self-consciously saved:
In 1010 AD, Ferdowsi wrote the Shahnameh
to protect Farsi from Arab assimilation.
Can writing save more than just language?
Can it rescue the people we were
from the things that happened to us?

Dinner is nearly ready—
one of thousands of meals
whose molecules will make me.
Splotches of gold in the rice;
diced cucumbers, tomatoes,
smears of slick yogurt
with fresh dill— vegetal, sweet,
like a clump of moss reciting poetry.
I watch as a little boy approaches,
dissolves in your embrace.
I hear your laughing chastisement
as he grabs the charred rice off a plate.
You wrap your hands around his face and say
words too true for me to hear: Ghorboon-et
beram, literally: “I hope I become
sacrificed for you”— more description than prayer,
a formula scraped into my mouth
as I swallow the saffron-sweetened steam.