I burn, I fade, I become smoke

(June 17/2025)

“Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”

I don’t know about you, but after reading that Donald Trump tweet, I went to bed worrying about nuclear war. After five days of bombing Iran and gaining control of their airspace, I worried Israel would drop a nuke in the dark of night, and we’d all wake into a real-life remake of The Day After, that old nuclear war movie that scared the shit out of me, my friends, and the hundred million other people who sat down in front of their television sets on November 20th, 1983 to watch Kansas City, Missouri being hit by Soviet missiles. I remember the blast, the nuclear wind, the greyness. I remember most of the cast, terrified families with kids, being incinerated. I remember the shadows of atomized people imprinted on a wall.

“Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!”

Trump’s tweet, which was shared by the White House, made for a restless night. Honestly, I didn’t sleep well at all, and I imagine the sixteen million people in greater Tehran did not either.

This morning I was relieved when I reached for my phone, that while, yes, there were further attacks by both Israel and Iran and the genocidal atrocities continue in Palestine where two million people are still being starved, shot, and bombed by Israel, Netanyahu had not gone nuclear on Iran. Honestly, the things that bring us relief in these crazy, dangerous days. The small reprieves we now consider small victories.

I’ve always been an optimist when it comes to the human condition. I fucking believe in the peace sign tattooed on my wrist. I played Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World at my wedding. I believe in John Lennon’s, Imagine. I believe in post 9-11 Gander, Newfoundland. I believe, if left to our own devices, most of us want to get along with our neighbours, regardless of whether they live across the street or halfway around the world. I believe we all want to live free and safe and give our children a better life. That such a thing would be possible if we didn’t have such omaniacal old men in charge. When this is over, when tensions subside, we really have to do a thorough breakdown of how we ended up teetering on the brink of nuclear war. We need to re-watch The Day After movie. Or Terminator 2.

Donald Trump is a delusional seventy-nine year old narcissistic moron who reportedly smelled bad at the G7 meeting from which he fled. His regime is kidnapping brown people in America, trying to gut the judiciary, and reverse Robin Hooding the country. He’ll trade a million people’s lives for promise of a tacky hotel.

Netanyahu is a seventy-five year old war criminal, surrounded by hard right ministers who’ve openly declared their intent to exterminate the Palestinian people.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei is eighty-fucking-six, has been in power over forty years and heads a corrupt, repressive theocratic regime where woman who dare take off their hijabs in public are beaten, imprisoned, and killed. His hatred for Israel and the US is legendary.

These are the men running a good chunk of our world.

The Extinguished Star

I wept for the both

for you

and for me

you blow at

the stars, my tears

in your world

the freedom of light

in mine

the chase of shadows

you and I will come to an end

somewhere

the most beautiful poem in the world

falls quiet

you begin

somewhere

to cry the

murmur of life

but I will end

I burn

I’ll be that extinguished star

In your sky

like smoke

Parnia Abbasi

Parnia, a 23-year-old Iranian poet, English teacher, and bank clerk, was killed in Tehran on June 13th, when an Israeli bomb hit their apartment building. Also killed, Parnia’s brother Parham, a student, her mother, also a bank employee, and her father, a retired educator.

This is the good news? The at-least-it-wasn’t-an-A-bomb relief?

According to Maryam, a close friend of Parnia’s, an Israeli missile hit the center of the Abbasi's apartment building. “That’s why the whole structure collapsed,” she explains. “Others died too. That photo—of the pink mattress stained with blood, with strands of a woman’s hair on it -- that was Parnia’s bed.”

“The building’s fourth block had 10 apartments. Floors three to five were completely destroyed. “It seems everyone in those units is gone,” Maryam says quietly.”

Where are the good guys? Who are the good guys? We cannot count on a bunch of angry old men to save us.

Everyone. Everywhere. All at once. We must understand that an attack on any of us—a Mexican farm worker, an Israeli hostage, an Iranian poet, a Ukrainian office worker—is attack on us all. That until we say a mighty definite NO MORE to the mad rulers killing people with impunity, none of us are safe.

The battle is just beginning. It will take all of us. I dare dream of a better world, one that we all must create. There are so many of us and so few of them, never mind their scary bombs and their creaky tanks.

I dare dream of a world where young poets wake up alive, grab their journals in case they’re struck by inspiration not missiles, and head outside into a safe and vibrant world, where lunch with be shared with friends, laughing and lounging in the shade of a gracious, thousand-year-old tree.

RIP Parnia Abbasi. And all the others.

Courage, love, and solidarity. Everyone. Everywhere. All at once.

xoxo Joanne

Notes:

Tehran Times, ‘I burn, I fade, I become smoke’: The story of Parnia, a young poet silenced in Israeli airstrike, June 15, 2025