Azad and I meet for drinks Saturday night in the Lower East Side. He tells me he doesn’t
think much of his name, but it’s cool that I love it so much. I think about that. Azad

doesn’t think much of the fact that he is always Free. Azad doesn’t think much
of his name, the mantra of the Iranian Revolution: Zan, Zendegi, Azadi.

                                                                                              Woman, Life, Freedom
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Azad and I split our second drink and then our Uber home. I imagine, for a second, what it would be like if we took the subway instead. I wonder out loud about what I would do
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if as I stepped onto the train, Azad suddenly grabbed me by my unruly, Iranian hair
and threw me to the floor. I guess I wouldn’t do anything. I guess I’d be unconscious.

Azad tells me not to get in my head about these things. I think about that.
Azad does not think much of the fact that he is always free.

On October 1st, 2023, 16-year-old Armita Geravand steps on the Tehran metro,
her Iranian hair slipping out of her hijab. Swiftly, she is grabbed, be-daste “gashte ershad.”

                                                                                                At the hands of the “Morality Police.”

She hits her head on the platform and does not wake, suffocating in a coma for 28 days.
She is declared brain dead the 22nd. Dead the 28th. I think about Armita

turning seventeen on the hospital bed, eyes taped shut, mind floating above her small,
sleeping body. I imagine her breath rising one last time, an act of resistance screaming:

                                                                                              I am still here

before laying down. Azad tells me he hadn’t heard this story ‘til now.
‘Wow,’ he says, ‘They killed her just for showing her hair? Don’t you think

that’s hardly a big enough
                                                                                                offense?'
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I think about that. Azad doesn’t think much. He is always free.

Published 9th March, 2026.
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Shayana Foroutan is a twenty-one year old Creative Writing student at NYU, and many of her poems focus on the Middle Eastern diaspora.

"Azadi is an examination of freedom, both literally, as an Iranian living in America, and emotionally, as a woman, who is not free until all women are free."

- Shayana Foroutan

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