Sketches on Foggy Glass: Mehdi Akhavan Sales and the Floating Time of Poetic Speech In a number of poems by Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1929-1990), one of the foremost representatives of “New Poetry” in Iran, a fictive orality is staged: These texts become decipherable only to a reader attuned to the tradition of epic storytelling (naqqali). The act of speaking is staged through the figure of a storyteller (naqqal) in a setting that was, at the time of the poem’s composition, already obsolescent. This paper proposes to examine the relationship created between poetic text and world through such a fictitious staging of epic performance. In close readings of three narrative poems (Akhar-e ShAhn?meh, Qesseh-ye Shahr-e SangestAn, KhvAn-e Hashtom-o Adamak) we will touch upon the nature of “I” and “we”, the shifting narrative grounds and identities enacted by the narration, the imbrication of past and present in the figure of the storyteller, and the memory spaces that are created both in and through the texts. Although the historical moment at the origin of the poems is never mentioned, “reality” – politics – enters them surreptitiously. In Khvan-e Hashtom, the death of the hero is marked by the empty space of a rhyme present only in the three dots of an ellipsis: symbol at once of censorship and quiet resistance. Who is “we” in these poems? As readers, we are vessels who shift with each instance of the poem’s performance. Through the imaginary speech act of the narrator, we come into being as audience, while at the same time, the epic past becomes overlayed by a tumble-down present. If such an analysis of Akhav?n’s texts is unable to change our understanding of modern Persian poetry as such, it may hone our sense of an Iranian poet giving voice to what those in power were trying to silence: little stick figures traced on a foggy window.