The rain on concrete smells like Iran.

A memory so faint

that while I hear the words and understand the melody

I cannot speak them.

For you see,

I have been assimilated.

Told as a child that foreign words

and voracious tongues

eagerly lapping up every sound was a deficit,

and

how could you succeed in this society with such a deficit?

They took my mother tongue and

left me lisping English.

They took my internal conversation

and made it an eternally misspoken monologue.

I

have been successfully assimilated.

Olive scrubbed white

linguistically castrated

socially isolated

sitting between my families chatting away in Farsi

realizing that I am not a part of the critical conversation.

realizing that the family stories and memories die with me

because I cannot understand them

and thus,

they cannot live in me

and I cannot spread this genealogy.

They die with me

first-generation assimilated.

In the U.S., they did this with the native children.

Took them from their tribes,

cut their hair,

and educated them.

Force-feeding a foreign tongue

until they were regurgitating legal adults

deemed useless

and sent back to a place they didn’t recognize

to a family eager to embrace them

but their world would die in their tribe

and they would forever be an inland outsider.

And that, you see, is what it means to be

an assimilated American.