Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her. That’s what I’m after.”

sometimes epiphany was as subtle as a friend showing you something they saw on Twitter.

So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

“Expendable” may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong.

That people found the surplus psychic bandwidth to consider—or even worry over—anyone else’s interior seemed a bit of an unheralded miracle.

“Yeah, it took me a while to get the hang of things here.” When he said “here,” Rumi pointed not to the parking lot or the sky around them, but to his own head.

I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?