 I'm going to read another poem called Pomegranates. And I'm a little bit crazy about pomegranates as my husband and son can attest to. I grew up eating pomegranates before they were commercially known. My parents planted a lot of trees from the Mediterranean region. And we grew up eating pomegranates. And most people just let them fall and drop to the ground. But we would raid other people's trees. So when the pomegranate craze, the palm wonderful, started appearing in the stores, I thought, huh, that's so funny. They've always been a part of my life. And I never really appreciated their antioxidant qualities. But I always loved eating them. So when the first collection I edited came out called A World Between, my cousin made a beautiful picture of a pomegranate on the cover. And suddenly, all these Iranians were sending me pomegranate photographs, jewelry, sculptures. It was as if this hidden pomegranate lust was suddenly unleashed. So I decided I'd better write a poem about pomegranates. And this is in memory of my father, Baba, who taught me how to eat pomegranates. To root themselves in their new home, mother and Baba planted native trees, madrone, oak, and the manzanita at the end of the drive. To remind them of their foreignness, they planted olive, almond, quince, pomegranate. The first time my mother packed one in my lunch, I shrank in embarrassment, quickly returning the leathery bulb to the brown bag. How to eat a pomegranate without being conspicuous? It is a slow and exacting endeavor, an act of worship. You never slice them with a knife, Baba would say, when the September heat made the trees sag with the ornaments of autumn. In his world, men sold them on the streets for a few tumans, shouting, anare hosmeze, delicious pomegranates, rolling sun flushed hides between their palms. Customers at the corner of a cart needed coax the last of the blood red juice from a hole, allowing it to touch only their lips. Our American sensibility refused this technique. We never took their exotic form for granted. Throw them in the air, let them crack open, my brothers yelled, waiting for the quiet thud. And then the invisible seam that would split them open like an unhealed wound. I liked the splatter of color on face and hands, evidence of pomegranate carnage. In my 20s, I understood the feaken symbol. A health magazine in the waiting room advised women wanting to conceive, eat estrogen-rich foods, shrimp, scallops, pomegranates. Like the larvae of a magical butterfly, the red ovules offered a cure for barren women. There are two kinds of people in the world, those who plucked the seeds from the waxy yellow membrane, tossing them into their mouths, and those who hoard the ruby jewels, jealously guarding the pile until the last kernel is extracted. Once in a child's game of war, my brother plucked a pomegranate towards feathery crown, and with a heave mimicked the sound of a grenade exploding with his mouth full of saliva. Burry it, I said, looking at the inedible remains. Baba would not tolerate such sacrilege. When I learned a Sephardic version of the fall that it was pomegranate and not an apple, I felt a kind of secret pride. This fall, my son, undaunted, eats his first pomegranate. His tiny probing fingers harvest the seeds one by one. With hands stained by this baptism, he offers them to me like the remnants of an untold story inherited in the womb. That boy was two, and now he's 12.