Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Kaveh Akbar
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.
YEKI BOOD YEKI NABOOD
every day someone finds what they need
in someone else
you tear into a body
and come out with a fistful of the exact
feathers you were looking for wondering
why anyone would want to swallow
so many perfect feathers
everyone
looks uglier naked or at least
I do my pillar of fuzz my damp
lettuce
I hoarded an entire decade
of bliss of brilliant dime-sized raptures
and this is what I have to show
for it a catastrophe of joints this
puddle I’m soaking in which came
from my crotch and never did
dry
the need
to comfort anyone else to pull
the sickle from their chest seems
unsummonable now as a childhood
pet as Farsi or tears
I used to slow
dance with my mother in our living
room spiritless as any prince I felt
the bark of her spine softening I became
an agile brute she became a stuffed
ox I hear this happens
all over the world
PORTRAIT OF THE ALCOHOLIC WITH HOME INVADER AND HOUSEFLY
It felt larger than it was, the knife
that pushed through my cheek.
Immediately I began leaking:
blood and saliva, soft as smoke. I had been asleep,
safe from sad news, dreaming
of my irradiated hairless mother
pulling a thorn from the eye of a dog.
I woke from that into a blade. Everything
seemed cast in lapis and spinning light,
like an ancient frieze in Damascus.
Listen to me, faithful silence: somehow
we’ve become strangers. Growing up
I kept a housefly tied to a string tied to a lamp.
I fed him wet Tic Tacs and idly assumed
he would outlive me. When he died
I opened myself to death, the way a fallen tree
opens itself to the wild. Now my blood
is drying on the pillow. Now the man
who held the knife is gone, elsewhere
and undiminished. I can hardly remember
anything about him. It can be difficult
telling the size of something
when it’s right above you—the average
cumulus cloud weighing as much
as eighty elephants. The things I’ve thought I’ve loved
could sink an ocean liner, and likely would
if given the chance. From my window,
the blinking windmills seem
further away than ever before. My beard
has matted itself into a bloody poultice,
and a woman’s voice on TV is begging for charity.
She says please and reads a phone number. Soon I will
mumble a few words in Arabic to settle back
into sleep. If morning arrives, I will wash my face.
RECOVERY
First, setting down the glass.
Then the knives.
Black resin seeps
into the carpet.
According to science,
I should be dead.
Lyptus table, unsteady
boat, drifts away.
Angostura, agave,
elderflower, rye—
the whole paradisal
bouquet spins apart.
Here, I am graceless.
No. Worse than that.
DRINKAWARE SELF-REPORT
—How many drinks do you have per week?
I drink what I drink lie where I lie I
deserve all the things I desire cocktail
chatter cymbals crashing green pills
which long ago stopped working
which I still carry to trade for
cigarettes or pitchers of Old Style it almost
feels like cheating
—How often during the last year have you found that you were not able to stop drinking once you had started?
I am an ugly boy but it’s a pretty
day everywhere