The writer had just finished his story when he realized he was dead.

His wife stood in the doorway, calling after their son, who had already left the house.

“Wait.”

It sounded as though she had forgotten something.

The writer could no longer tell whether he had written this moment into the story or whether the story had somehow been written from it. Either way, he understood that he must already be dead.

People said a writer lived as long as someone was reading his words. But no one had ever read his last story—not yet. It was the story in which the writer died at the end.

He had always believed that a story could go on after its author was gone, carrying some small piece of him forward. There could be memorials, speeches, photographs, people saying how much his work had meant to them.

“Yeah,” he thought. “That’s better. It gives it a moral, too.”

So he added another page.

He had to keep writing. If he stopped, perhaps he would disappear completely.

But how could a dead writer continue writing?

What if he had been suffocated? Murdered? What if he had taken his own life? A dead man could not lift a pen. A dead man's fingers could not move across a page.

And yet his hands kept moving.

When his wife returned with a cup of tea, the writer handed her the pages he had just finished.

She read them in silence.

Then she looked at him.

“You’re dead,” she said. “You’re not my husband anymore.”

The writer stared at her.

Then he wrote:

I have been dead at my desk for more than an hour. My wife has only just discovered it. She brought me tea and shook my shoulder, thinking I had fallen asleep.

His wife screamed and ran from the room.

The cup slipped from her hand and shattered on the floor.

The writer listened to her footsteps disappear down the hallway.

For a moment, he thought the story was finally over.

Then his hands began to move again.

He wrote one last sentence:

She screamed because she had seen a dead writer whose hands were still writing, while the story, refusing to end, kept him alive.

The documentary-theatrical monologue Mother Stars has been published by Derang, a Frankfurt-based literary and cultural quarterly.

Marking the fourth anniversary of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, the play gives voice to seven grieving mothers whose teenage and young-adult children were killed during the protests. Structured as a solitary performance, the work transforms the stage into a space of memory, mourning, testimony, and resistance.

A woman moves silently across an almost bare stage, stopping before seven photographs. Each portrait becomes a site of remembrance and testimony. As she lifts the photographs one by one to her chest, the voices of the mothers emerge, recounting their children’s lives, dreams, tenderness, final moments, and violent deaths, while confronting the unbearable aftermath of their loss.

The play draws on interviews, testimonies, and statements shared by the mothers through media outlets and social networks. Their individual accounts are brought together to transform personal grief into a collective act of remembrance and bearing witness.

Moving between intimate memory and political testimony, Mother Stars brings seven distinct voices into a single theatrical space. In the final image, the seven photographs are gathered together on the stage while a mother stands among them—refusing silence, erasure, and forgetting.

Through its documentary form and minimalist theatrical language, Mother Stars seeks not only to remember those who were killed, but also to preserve the voices of those left behind: mothers whose mourning has become an enduring testimony to violence, memory, and resistance.

You can read here [+]

An essay by Ahmad Zahedi, titled “Poetry Is Peace,” has been published in Shahrvand Weekly, an Iranian cultural diaspora magazine based in Canada.

Shahrvand (Shahrvand B.C.) is a Persian-language weekly publication, available in both print and digital editions, serving Persian-speaking communities in British Columbia, Canada.

In “Poetry Is Peace,” Zahedi reflects on the role and responsibility of poetry in a world increasingly marked by war and violence. From Gaza to Ukraine, and from Iran to Sudan, he argues that the poet must stand neither with armies nor with flags, but with human life.

Poetry cannot stop a missile, he writes, but it can resist the language that turns a child into a “target.” Against propaganda, militarism, and organized forgetting, poetry becomes a means of keeping humanity alive. Peace is not silence; it is resistance to the logic of war.

You can read here [+]

DERANG, an independent literary platform based in Frankfurt, Germany, dedicated to literature, poetry, fiction, art, and critical thought, has published Ahmad Zahedi’s experimental poem “Graveyard.”

The poem explores the possibilities of experimental poetry through syntactic disruption, grammatical deviation, fragmentation, and linguistic dislocation, challenging conventional structures of language and poetic expression.

You can read here [+]

DERANG, an independent literary platform based in Frankfurt, Germany, dedicated to literature, poetry, fiction, art, and critical thought, recently published a short biography of Ahmad Zahedi, along with two of his poems.

You can read here [+]

Endless is an English translation of a poem of the same title that won the Naghmeh Internet Poetry Festival Award in 2002, the first Internet poetry competition held in Iran. [+]

Endless

Becomes an ocean

The paper of this poem

When I write your name

How sailless you are

Going wherever you want

And when

you reach the shore

on the last line of this poem

There is no space left

for the poet's name