Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus had come to expect certain constitutional surprises from his sponsor, sizing him up to be one kind of man—starchy, conservative—only for him to illuminate again and again the wide gulf between the image on his dust jacket and the story inside.

Even this, breathing, felt freighted, suddenly more meaningful, the way money means more to the poor than the rich.

“Nobody thinks of now as the future past.”

“That the only difference between a coal miner and a prostitute is our retrograde puritan values about sex. And misogyny.”

The unforgivable vanity of fantasizing about one’s own death. As if continuing to live was a given, inertia that needed to be disrupted inorganically.

I didn’t know what any of it meant, but I knew it meant intensely.

In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction.

He felt a flash of familiar shame—his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.

Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.

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

Only in a culture that privileged infallibility above all else could a man like President Invective rise to power—a man insulated since birth from any sense of accountability, raised in a pristine cocoon of inherited wealth to emerge pristine, dewy, wholly unsullied by those irksome mortal foibles, grief and doubt.

when poetry simply became a place to put his physical body, something he could do for a few hours without worrying about accidentally killing himself. That was poetry then, a two-by-four floating in the ocean. When Cyrus wrapped himself around it, he could just barely keep his head above waves.

The cold came in and for a moment, two, Cyrus was able to just think of that, the feeling-cold. It stilled his higher brain a bit, one of the few minor highs still left in Cyrus’s ever-dwindling arsenal.

Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.

Clearly some of the compositional parts of the language itself are junk while others are essential. There is no dictionary to tell you which is which.

Fear made me work hard, get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works. And anger? Anger helped me to leave him. To get my boys away from him as soon as I could. To come thrive in this country that didn’t even believe we were people. To prove it wrong. You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.”

Creativity didn’t live in my brain any more than walking lived in my legs. It lived in every painting I ever saw, every book I ever read, every conversation I ever had. The world was full enough that I didn’t need to store anything inside myself.

laughing. I couldn’t help laughing, but laughing didn’t need my help.