“Coming Out of the Shower” by Armen Davoudian

A Special Post to Commemorate National Coming Out Day

Coming Out of the Shower

I shut my eyes under the scalding stream
		scrubbing off last night’s dream
when suddenly I hear your voice again
	as though it caught in the clogged drain
	
and was sent bubbling back up from the other
		world where you’re not my mother.
This time it’s really you. I’m really here.
	I blink. We do not disappear.

Dad left, you say, to shower at the shop
		so I don’t need to stop
just yet—and yet I do, unable to
	resume old customs, unlike you.

In a one-bath four-person household, we
		learned what we mustn’t see,
become, in time, so coolly intimate
	with one another’s silhouette

behind the opaque frosted shower screen
		that once more stands between
us two. While at the mirror you apply
	foundation and concealer, I

wash out my hair with rosewater shampoo,
		which means I’ll smell like you	
all day. Mama, I shout, I’m coming out,	
	and as you look away I knot

around me tight your lavender robe de chambre,
		cinching my waist, and clamber
out of the tub, taking care not to step
	outside the cotton mat and drip

on the cracked floor you’ve polished with such zeal
		we’re mirrored in each tile.
Yet, you’d forgive the spillage, or forget.
	What else will you love me despite?




Originally appears in The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tinhouse, 2024)

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Audio: Armen Davoudian reads “Coming Out of the Shower”

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Photo Credit: Matthew Lansburgh

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House), which won the Northern California Book Award in Poetry and was long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He is also the translator, from Persian, of Nabood by Fatemeh Shams (Copper Canyon Press, forthcoming Spring 2027). He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and lives in Berkeley, California.

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