“Shoulder to shoulder with your absence
I play hopscotch on the long streets of Berlin
the chalklines half erased by the afternoon rain.
One hop to where you are, far away.
One hop to faded memories of Faith Kindergarten in Mashhad.
Another hop and I might reach him
I might see him
I might hug my father, still twenty-nine
and about to be a father for the first time.
I hop one square forward over the artificial borders.
I hop, hop, hop
three squares back to the seven-year-old girl
who like the shadow of a frightened crow
darts from the tip of the white poplar.
And then, on the landing, a brief pause
one foot dreaming of going back
one foot stuck in the present
repeating the paradox of living now
in the roofless cube of memory.
To play hopscotch on long streets
in the elsewhere of being thirty-eight
is to walk with a pilgrim’s gait in a childhood dream.”
In Hopscotch, Fatemeh Shams crafts a vivid liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Her work, geographically and metaphorically situated between her birthplace in Iran and her current life in exile, evokes a “third space”—a realm of creative liberation and a sanctuary for the play of memories, language, and place. Shams frames this space with tangible metaphors—airports, suitcases, the thresholds of nightclubs. Her poems, like the game of hopscotch itself, leap over borders with a childlike agility, contrasting against the harsh reality of exile. They invite us to consider our own places of belonging and the potential spaces we inhabit—those rich intersections of language and lived experience.
Fatemeh Shams is the author of 88 (Gardoon, Berlin), Writing in the Mist (H&S Media, London), and When They Broke Down the Door (Mage, Washington D.C). Her poems and translations have been published in Poetry magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, and elsewhere. Fatemeh grew up in Mashhad, Iran and is an Associate Professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
