Grey Speaks & Sonnet for My Father’s Final Bus

Poetry by Leila Farjami | From Issue 30, Spring 2026

Grey Speaks
After Ghayath Almadhoun

When silence turned color, my grandma sipped 
black tea, a glass in her hand, a gilded tray beside her. 
The sugar cubes, I said. She did not hear me. Drank it 
bitter, hemlock-cold. When the door slammed open, 
no one entered but the wind. She said, It’s silence—
the tongue of mystics, angels, death. A girl married 
at nine—her feet not touching the floor, weaned from 
her mother too soon. It’s grey. Grey as hair on her thighs, 
a plea forsaken, a decayed bouquet of dahlias. Grey 
as her irises, her fingers weathered by cigarettes, coal, 
coarse as a Tehran peach. I was born before silence 
went grey, named for an exiled princess who downed 
two hundred pills, a bottle of cognac. I never knew 
water clots like stone, clouds grey on my face, my hands, 
my mother’s belly—as she rose from her bedside toilet. 
Grey urine in the pan. Grey reek in the air. And like a tide, 
it wrenched me out to the middle of the sea. Silence 
dressed in grey—of all the colors we could have owned.

Sonnet for My Father’s Final Bus

Oracle of ruin—rotted teeth, sarcasm, dweller 
of a dead cosmos. Steered by dementia. 
At dawn, you ride the bus for hours, broker sales, slump 
in the doorway, sigh—a hunched phantom, 
briefcase stuffed with rayon, silk, chiffon. 
Your skin? Burlap. You never learn my tongue. 
Even silence crucifies—your pauses, nails. 
Vowels barbed, tearing flesh. I cannot bear 
your myths, your exiled-colonel martyrdom, 
your loot, your lost warships, mock kingdom. 
You tilt your head like Agamemnon, beg 
Artemis for wind. You’d kill your daughter 
for Troy. When death meets you, no handshake. 
Only the fare, the route, the ETA.

Leila Farjami (She/Her)

Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet and psychotherapist whose work explores ancestry, displacement, and inheritance; her debut collection, Daughter of Salt, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in 2026.

Author Note

“Grey Speaks” began as a response to Ghayath Almadhoun’s prose poem “How Hope Became Green,” offered as a workshop prompt. The first color that surfaced was grey, a palette of memory tied to my grandmother: her cigarette smoke, her iris hue, her experience as a small girl given to marriage. That grey ripples through my matrilineal line—my mother’s arranged marriage, and her present body succumbing to Parkinson’s. An entrapment. Grey air, grey urine. A spirit yearning for flight. The poem wrote itself as both elegy and inheritance. “Sonnet for My Father’s Final Bus” emerged from the charged, strained dynamic between my father and me. In writing it, I wanted to braid the ordinary with the mythic repeating ancient scripts. The poem’s closing lines invoke the Greek myth of Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to preserve his rule. That mythic filicide mirrors the historical betrayals inflicted on girls and women. Through this sonnet, I sought to confront this violence, unleashing a buried rage.