Category: Kaveh Akbar

by Kaveh Akbar

You’re in a car and crying and amazed

at how bad it feels to do bad things. Then

you’re in a hotel bathroom with blood

on your undershirt and the smell of a too-

chlorinated pool outside. You know

one hundred ways to pray to the gods

rippling beneath that water. Confess, tangle,

pass through. Once your room is dark

they come inside, dripping wet. When you show

them the burnt place on your arm,

they show you the bands of flesh cut

from their thighs. You suck their tongues,

trace the blisters under their wings. It’s so lucky,

this living forever all at once. When you turn

on the lights, you’re inconsolably

glad. You could stop this whenever, but why?

from Calling a Wolf a WolfFind more by Kaveh Akbar at the library

Copyright © 2017 Kaveh Akbar
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Kaveh Akbar

some boys aren’t born they bubble

up from the earth’s crust land safely around

kitchen tables green globes of fruit already

in their mouths when they find themselves crying

they stop crying these boys moan

more than other boys they do as desire

demands when they dance their bodies plunge

into space and recover the music stays

in their breastbones they sing songs about

storms then dry their shoes on porches

these boys are so cold their pilot lights never light

they buy the best heat money can buy blue flames

swamp smoke they are desperate

to lick and be licked sometimes one will eat

all the food in a house or break every bone

in his jaw sometimes one will disappear into himself

like a ram charging a mirror when this happens

they all feel it afterwards the others dream

of rain their pupils boil they light black candles

and pray the only prayer they know oh lord

spare this body set fire to another

from Calling a Wolf a WolfFind more by Kaveh Akbar at the library

Copyright © 2017 Kaveh Akbar
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Kaveh Akbar

Some days we can see Venus in midafternoon. Then at night, stars

separated by billions of miles, light traveling years

to die in the back of an eye.

Is there a vocabulary for this—one to make dailiness amplify

and not diminish wonder?

I have been so careless with the words I already have.

I don’t remember how to say home

in my first language, or lonely, or light.

I remember only

delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you,

and shab bekheir, good night.

How is school going, Kaveh-joon?

Delam barat tang shodeh.

Are you still drinking?

Shab bekheir.

For so long every step I’ve taken

has been from one tongue to another.

To order the world:

I need, you need, he/she/it needs.

The rest, left to a hungry jackal

in the back of my brain.

Right now our moon looks like a pale cabbage rose.

Delam barat tang shodeh.

We are forever folding into the night.

Shab bekheir.

from Calling a Wolf a WolfFind more by Kaveh Akbar at the library

Copyright © 2017 Kaveh Akbar
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Kaveh Akbar

What use is knowing anything if no one is around

to watch you know it? Plants reinvent sugar daily

and hardly anyone applauds. Once as a boy I sat

in a corner covering my ears, singing Qur’anic verse

after Qur’anic verse. Each syllable was perfect, but only

the lonely rumble in my head gave praise. This is why

we put mirrors in birdcages, why we turn on lamps

to double our shadows. I love my body more

than other bodies. When I sleep next to a man, he becomes

an extension of my own brilliance. Or rather, he becomes

an echo of my own anticlimax. I was delivered

from dying like a gift card sent in lieu of a pound

of flesh. My escape was mundane, voidable. Now

I feed faith to faith, suffer human noise, complain

about this or that heartache. The spirit lives in between

the parts of a name. It is vulnerable only to silence

and forgetting. I am vulnerable to hammers, fire,

and any number of poisons. The dream, then: to erupt

into a sturdier form, like a wild lotus bursting into

its tantrum of blades. There has always been a swarm

of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now,

I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds

of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are

arranging their plans like worms preparing

to rise through the soil. They are ready to die

with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.

from Calling a Wolf a WolfFind more by Kaveh Akbar at the library

Copyright © 2017 Kaveh Akbar
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Kaveh Akbar

Reyhaneh Jabbari, a twenty-six-year-old Iranian woman, was hanged

on October 25th, 2014 for killing a man who was attempting to rape her.

the body is a mosque borrowed from Heaven centuries of time

stain the glazed brick our skin rubs away like a chip

in the middle of an hourglass sometimes I am so ashamed

of my sentience how little it matters angels don’t care about humility

you shaved your head spent eleven days half-starved in solitary

and not a single divine trumpet wept into song now it’s lonely all over

I’m becoming more a vessel of memories than a person it’s a myth

that love lives in the heart it lives in the throat we push it out

when we speak when we gasp we take a little for ourselves

in books love can be war-ending a soldier drops his sword

to lie forking oysters into his enemy’s mouth in life we hold love up to the light

to marvel at its impotence you said in a letter to Sholeh

you weren’t even killing the roaches in your cell that you would take them up

by their antennae and flick them through the bars into a courtyard

where you could see men hammering long planks of cypress into gallows

the same men who years before threw their rings in the mud who watered them

five times daily who shot blackbirds off almond branches

and kissed the soil at the sight of sprouts then cursed each other when the stalks

which should have licked their lips withered dryly at their knees may God beat

us awake scourge our brains to life may we measure every victory

by the momentary absence of pain there is no solace in history this is a gift

we are given at birth a pocket we fold into at death goodbye now you mountain

you armada of flowers you entire miserable decade in a lump in my throat

despite all our endlessly rehearsed rituals of mercy it was you we sent on

from Calling a Wolf a WolfFind more by Kaveh Akbar at the library

Copyright © 2017 Kaveh Akbar
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.