It’s 1982 in the Islamic Republic of Iran:

The boy buys cassettes from a man skulking in the bustle of the bazaar;

excited by what he’s got today—Boney M., Donna Summer, ABBA—

he stuffs them into denim pockets, shoulders hunched, and

when the boy pops a tape into the car stereo, his friend riding passenger side,

he imagines he can see beneath the black chador of the women on the street.

He’s old enough to remember before, when everything was bell-bottoms,

platinum hair, miniskirts and stilettos. Now music is a threat,

a big fuck you and give me my life back to the regime, loud enough

to get them both thrown in prison. And so the boy wants nothing more

than music. He sees the red light ahead—the intersection its own metropolis

of humming engines—and he swerves to the curb, stops the car,

turns the volume dial all the way up. ABBA shouts

Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! and his friend’s eyes grow wide

as the Ayatollah’s turban, perhaps picturing the police who may

be hiding just around the corner. The boy doesn’t care. He’s seventeen.

Next year he’ll be sent to the army, fight a war he doesn’t believe in,

shave his curly hair and kill Iraqis who probably love ABBA

as much as he does. So today he jumps out the car and dances,

shaking his hips and mussing his hair. His friend can’t help but join him,

and so they begin their own kind of revolution:

Synchronized disco fingers, denim-on-denim, singing along

to words they can’t understand. Cars honk. People cheer. Across the street,

a man grayed and wrinkled laughs, sways, shuffles his feet like

he’s seventeen again. The boys are mirrors of one another, eyes ablaze

as hookah coals. War and prison cannot touch them here.

On the next green light they hop back in the car, peeling off,

dizzy and dazzling with hot life.