Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated.

Her voice sounded the way wild rabbits look, just on the cusp of tearing off out of sight.

“There’s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more.” “Good-person drag,” Cyrus thought out loud. That’s what they called it after that.

“Maybe you don’t believe God wants you to be happy? God, your mother, poetry, whatever. What makes you so special that everyone else deserves that except you?”

What was left of his life had no intrinsic meaning, he knew, since such meaning could only be shaped in relation to other people.

The other guys rarely talked about home, their old ones or their new ones. A mercy. We did talk about food. A Congolese guy, Jean-Joseph, would talk all the time about cooking. Cassava, fufu, fish. And also French stuff. People were interested in Iranian food and I shared what I could about it, but I was never much of a cook. Pomegranate molasses, walnuts. Eggplants. Rice. Koobideh. We couldn’t bring anything in to share, so what we described just had to live in our heads. One time Jean-Joseph came in, excited to tell the Spanish guys he’d tried tamales, how it reminded him of kwanga back home. But of course, none of them, none of us knew what kwanga was. That kind of thing.

I get frustrated this way so often. A photograph can say “This is what it was.” Language can only say “This is what it was like.”

Zee talked about how luxurious it felt to do nothing in New York City, a place where you could do anything.

When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.”