RICH KIDS OF TEHRAN

The rich kids of Tehran are eating cheese
cake, at dawn
I’ve never seen such parallel bodies
and symmetrical mouth to nose ratios—and iPhones as
limbs as
they level on to each other.

At the dinner table, they suck on dark Eucharist
and talk about what will happen when they go to silent
brazil they exclaim about “cucumber salad!”

I decide to bring up the new gender natural pronoun HIR.
This confuses them.

(CNN) quotes: “Women lounge in designer bikinis next to glistening infinity pools. Young men race
their latest Porsches and Maserati’s, their wrists draped in gold jewelry.”

I love this world. I try to get closer to it. To its tanned dispositions.

Bikinis made of fruit preserves and hair gel that hints to the aura of hummus.

I tell them to look at my creole skin tone and they tell me my shade is too beige. I tell them, they have to be kidding me.

It is 2022. Some things have changed.

They all have rhinestones next to

eyelids They say father, and Father.
DO YOU KNOW?
MY Father?

They brush their Italian horses’hair or their Italian horse hair —they tell me it is better than the camels
their parents rode.

Do they watch
Bravo? “Of course.”

AndyAndyAndy.
They Love HIM.

Oh, I watch them in such glee.

Thumbing devices,
sucking sickness from their inner tubes
glitter in their ear drums,

I tell them stories of longing and truth
and feed them French fries in bed

but they only want Kateh.

I can’t get next to the gold suspended in their earwax.

There is only so far to go into their world I lie down on their eyebrows and bathe in the shimmer of their pores,

waiting for their tan to rub off.

EMILY PRESENT is a New York City based poet and co-founder and editor of glitterMOB.