Stolen Lives

Niloofar Fanaiyan

The way you would peel an orange—the carving of grooves, the parting of rind from flesh, juice dispersing in humid air—do you dream of it, curled in a cold cell, the memory of sunshine—and after you go home, do you dream of the dark, your legs dead beneath you, do the muscles in your back twitch at the thought of curling your toes, of metal cords—and when they sit you out in the sun are pieces of orange handed to you one at a time—and do you close your eyes as someone carefully peels another?

Niloofar Fanaiyan is a writer and poet who has lived in the US, Australia, the Netherlands, Tanzania, and Israel. She was the 2016 Donald Horne Research Fellow at the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra, where she obtained her PhD. She received the Canberra Critics Circle Literary Award for poetry for her book of poems titled Transit (Recent Work Press, 2016).