POETRY

Runner-Up for the 2025 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York

More Than a Dirge

By Leila Farjami     VOLUME 58 No. 3

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

I buried my sister
in a summer storm.

Warm mud
drowned 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 mare
breaking into open field,

her mane lashing the air--
unveiled. No to hijab! !نه به حجاب

When her fist closed,
the men drew near.

Far as freedom,
a bullet took her--

round and copper
as the last moon she slept under.

Eyes followed her
all 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. Her debut poetry collection, Daughter of Salt, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in 2026. She is the recipient of The Iowa Review Award in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award, and a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Cincinnati Review, AGNI, and Pleiades, as well as in anthologies from Sundress Publications and Guernica Editions. She lives in Los Angeles.


VOLUME 58 No. 3