The Doorstep by Leila Farjami

When my mother first left Iran,
she didn’t know she’d never return.

No jewelry—just thyroid pills,
a change of clothes, three photographs—

one of me, gap-toothed, smiling.
No suitcase could carry

what she left behind—
a sick child, a dying mother, 

a land more graveyard than cradle.
She must have wept at the gate, 

on the plane, after landing in LAX—
Aamreekaa. Aamreekaa. Aamreekaa.

The bombs. The sirens. 
Sleepless nights. Her body scattered 

across the sidewalks of a new country—
each piece pulling back toward home. 

Months later, I joined her.
Her hand, a stranger’s on my face—

skin half-familiar, cold-bitten. 
She didn’t say, I love you. 

Only: I missed you. We’ll all share 
a bedroom. Shoes go on the mat.

I lingered at the doorstep. 
My feet never crossed the threshold.

Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet and psychotherapist. Her debut, Daughter of Salt (Trio House, 2026), received the Editor’s Selection. Winner of The Iowa Review Award and the Schiff Award, a 2025 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, her poems appear in Ploughshares, AGNI, and Pleiades. 

30 March 2026