Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Kaveh Akbar
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Poetry Society of America: “Heritage”
Puerto del Sol: “Some Boys Aren’t Born They Bubble”
Redivider: “Prayer”
Sixth Finch: “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before”
Sonora Review: “Despite Their Size Children Are Easy to Remember They Watch You”
Spoon River Poetry Review: “Milk”
THRUSH: “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Moths and River”
Tin House: “Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game,” “Against Dying,” “Against Hell”
TriQuarterly: “Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives”
Vinyl Poetry: “Rimrock”
Virginia Quarterly Review: “The New World,” “A Boy Steps into the Water”
Waxwing: “Learning to Pray,” “Recovery”
West Branch: “An Apology”
ZYZZYVA: “Portrait Of The Alcoholic With Relapse Fantasy”
Portrait of the Alcoholic, a short chapbook containing several of these poems, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in January 2017.
“Fugu” was anthologized in Best New Poets 2016.
“Portrait Of The Alcoholic With Relapse Fantasy” was selected to be reprinted in Pushcart Prize XLII: Best of the Small Presses.
“Neither Now Nor Never” was anthologized in The Orison Anthology 2016.
“Palmyra” was reprinted for PBS NewsHour.
“Heritage” was awarded the Lucille Medwick Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America.
Deep abiding gratitude to Chris Forhan, Alessandra Lynch, Steve Henn, David J. Thompson, Carey Salerno, Bryan Borland, Seth Pennington, Don Share, francine j. harris, Eduardo C. Corral, Frank Bidart, Fanny Howe, Max Ritvo, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Arash Saedinia, Ruth Baumann, James Kimbrell, David Kirby, Jayme Ringleb, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Martha Rhodes, Robert Olen Butler, Kelly Butler, Solmaz Sharif, Yona Harvey, Kazim Ali, Nick Flynn, Jonathan Farmer, Sean Shearer, Gretchen Marquette, David Tomas Martinez, Zack Strait, Allison Wright, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Andrew Epstein, Damian Caudill, Chase Noelle, Carl Phillips, Alyssa Graffam, Darrian Church, Julia Bouwsma, Tomaž Šalamun, Michael Purol, Thaddeus Harmon, Wanda, Mammy, Arash, Mytoan, Nora, and Layla for their patience and love and support.
My thanks to Franz Wright, Reyhaneh Jabbari, W.H. Auden, Ali Akbar Sadeghi, Khaled al-Asaad, Carolus Linnæus, Aaron Weiss, Fanny Howe, Sohrab Sepehri, Lydia Henn, Leslie Jamison, Diane Seuss, Gertrude Stein, Kahlil Gibran, Max Ritvo, Dan Barden, and all other voices in the choir.
An eternity of wild love and gratitude to Paige Lewis, who all this is meant to impress.
for Dan
SOOT
Sometimes God comes to earth disguised as rust,
chewing away a chain link fence or mariner’s knife.
From up so close we must seem
clumsy and gloomless, like new lovers
undressing in front of each other
for the first time. Regarding loss, I’m afraid
to keep it in the story,
worried what I might bring back to life,
like the marble angel who woke to find
his innards scattered around his feet.
Blood from the belly tastes sweeter
than blood from anywhere else. We know this
but don’t know why—the woman on TV
dabs a man’s gutwound with her hijab
then draws the cloth to her lips, confused.
I keep dreaming I’m a creature pulling out my claws
one by one to sell in a market stall next to stacks
of pomegranates and garden tools. It’s predictable,
the logic of dreams. Long ago I lived in Heaven
because I wanted to. When I fell to earth
I knew the way—through the soot, into the leaves.
It still took years. Upon landing, the ground
embraced me sadly, with the gentleness
of someone delivering tragic news to a child.
I. TERMINAL
“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”
—W. H. AUDEN
WILD PEAR TREE
it’s been January for months in both directions frost
over grass like pale fungus like
mothdust the branches of the pear tree are pickling
in ice white as the long white line running from me
to the smooth whales frozen in chunks of ocean
from their vast bobbing to the blackwhite
stars flowering into heaven the hungry cat gnaws
on a sliver of mirror and I have been chewing
out my stitches wondering which
warm names we should try singing
wild thyme cowslip blacksnake all the days
in a year line up at the door and I deflect each saying no
you will not be needed one by one they skulk off
into the cold the cat hates this place more than he loves
me he cannot remember the spring when I fed him
warm duck fat daily nor the kitchen vase filled with musky blue
roses nor the pear tree which was so eager to toss its fruit so sweet
it made us sleepy I stacked the pears on the mantle
until I ran out of room and began filling them into
the bathtub one evening I slid in as if into a mound
of jewels now ghost finches leave footprints
on our snowy windowsills the cat paces
through the night listening for their chirps our memories
have frosted over ages ago we guzzled
all the rosewater in the vase still we check for it
nightly I have forgotten even
the easy prayer I was supposed to use
in emergencies something something I was not
born here I was not born here I was not
DO YOU SPEAK PERSIAN?
Some days we can see Venus in midafternoon. Then at night, stars
separated by billions of miles, light traveling years
to die