Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

I remember in school Agha Pahla holding up a stone suspended in the air by a string, telling us how the stone was full of potential energy—potential energy, the names we give things!—and how when the stone is dropped all that potential energy gets converted into motion, into kinetic energy, action, something like that. And that transformation, potential energy into motion, is what makes stones powerful, terrible, how they can crush people. Sometimes I feel like that, like I’m walking around all stuffed up with potential energy, a stone hanging in the air with no knife sharp enough to cut the rope. I do wonder sometimes what it would feel like to cry, to beat my chest and wail like an old woman at a funeral, no potential anything being stored for later, all motion, all energy. I think about that and feel stuffed up even in my imagining, like a nose you can’t breathe out of, my brain can’t even move me into that place, can’t even pretend it to be true. One thing happens, then the next. For a long, long time.