{"id":410,"date":"2009-03-23T20:39:53","date_gmt":"2009-03-23T20:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/nucleus-import\/?p=410"},"modified":"2009-03-23T20:39:53","modified_gmt":"2009-03-23T20:39:53","slug":"the-village-well-by-sholeh-wolpe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/the-village-well-by-sholeh-wolpe\/","title":{"rendered":"The Village Well by Sholeh Wolp\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"rightbox\"><img src='https:\/\/mahmag.org\/nucleus-import\/media\/7\/20090323-SholehWolpe_LATimes2.jpg' width='195' height='176' alt='Sholeh Wolp\u00e9' \/><\/div>\n<p>\n<b>The Village Well<\/b><br \/>\nFrom <i>Rooftops of Tehran<\/i><\/p>\n<p>You were children, curious. Something splashed<br \/>\nin the belly of the well and she took your hand, descended<br \/>\ninto the mouth opened wide, <br \/>\nstep by concrete step down its dark spiral throat.<br \/>\n<!--more-->The creature that unhinged the damp stillness <br \/>\nof that well was not a man, not an animal\u2013 <br \/>\njust the silhouette of something vast\u2026.<br \/>\nYou thought it was God, she thought it was djinn,<br \/>\nand then you with fear did not think at all, running back up <br \/>\nbreathless, the chill of the well at your heels.<\/p>\n<p>That night you didn\u2019t wait for his leg to accidently <br \/>\nrub against yours, or his hand accidentally brush <br \/>\nyour thigh as it always did, away from eyes that never <br \/>\nblinked. Instead, you reached for his knee, the flesh and bone <br \/>\nof this gray man who pretended to be daddy\u2019s friend. Beneath <br \/>\nthe table laden with almond rice your mother had lovingly cooked, <br \/>\nthe saffron-stewed lamb, the chicken smothered in herbs\u2026<br \/>\nyou squeezed,<br \/>\nsqueezed so hard his eyes turned your direction and melted <br \/>\ninto a watery scream like the one still rising in the throat of that well.<\/p>\n<p>\n<i>Sholeh Wolp\u00e9 is a poet, visual artist and playwright. She is the author of Sin\u2014Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (University of Arkansas Press), The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press),  Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen Press, Jan. 2008), Shame (a play in three acts) and has a Poetry CD featuring poems read by the author to traditional Persian music (Refuge Studios). She is the associate editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern Literature from the Muslim World (Norton, 2010) and her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals and anthologies worldwide, and have been translated into several languages. Sholeh was born in Iran but spent most of her teen years in the Caribbean and Europe, ending up in the U.S. where she pursued Masters degrees in Radio-TV-Film (Northwestern University ) and Public Health (Johns Hopkins University ). She is the recipient of several awards for her poetry. She lives in Los Angeles.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Village Well From Rooftops of Tehran You were children, curious. Something splashed in the belly of the well and she took your hand, descended into the mouth opened wide, step by concrete step down its dark spiral throat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":550,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/550"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mahmag.org\/archive-english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}