for Mohsen Ahmadipour
Our bodies are maps of every tragedy
we survived
to see another one coming.
Tracing the lines for a fairytale ending
hope takes us to the memories we left behind,
the lives we are grieving. We don’t
give her a chance to do the reading,
each take out a card from our pockets,
“These are friends who didn’t get to live their dreams
Throw the cards enough times and you’ll see
which ending goes- would have gone- with which.”
We play rock, paper, scissors
with the palm reader who wins every time and cackles:
“Maybe next time.”
We keep playing.
We bet on the fig tree
that has blossomed anyway,
on yesterday’s tomorrow,
on the hundred planes that didn’t crash,
on another hundred that weren’t shot
is this, the fairytale ending?
Sarvin Parviz (she/her) is a multi-genre writer, collaborator & multimedia artist born in Tehran, Iran. Her repertoire includes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, libretti, plays, collages, video art, performance and photography. She is the winner of Graduate and Professional Council Award in Creative Activities and a semifinalist in the European Opera-directing Prize who recently developed her first opera at Guerilla Opera Writing Collective. Her song cycle S(or)i, developed at FUSE: Collaborations in Song, had its world premier at MIT in 2025. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and currently is based in Saint Louis. Her work has appeared in Fractured lit, Grain Magazine, The Indianapolis Review, Apple Valley Review, Roi Fainéant Literary Press among others. As usual, she is working on multiple projects, one of which is a collection of micro-fiction.