Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus considered for a moment whether it was fucked up to imagine a dead Syrian child as the foil to his relative fortune, as a prop in his psychic play about the ethics of gratitude. He wanted to ask Orkideh what she thought about this, what she thought about gratitude broadly. So much of his psychic bandwidth was taken up with conflicting thoughts about political prepositions. The morality of almond milk. The ethics of yoga. The politics of sonnets. There was nothing in his life that wasn’t contaminated by what he mostly mindlessly called “late capitalism.” He hated it, like everyone was supposed to. But it was a hate that made nothing happen.