Calling a Wolf a Wolf

by Kaveh Akbar

I put a sugar cube on my tongue and swallow it like a pill

You know one hundred ways to pray to the gods rippling beneath that water.

When you show them the burnt place on your arm, they show you the bands of flesh cut from their thighs.

You could stop this whenever, but why?

It is becoming mostly orchids.

Oh, Lydia, we miss you terribly.

The soul is a thirsty antelope nervously lapping up water from a pool in the hunter’s backyard.

Sometimes when I listen to old Persian music I get so sad I can actually smell rosewater. This is a Real Thing That Happens.

If home is the question, the honest answers must all be ...

He yawns immortally on his throne, fans himself with an elephant ear.

The calculus of desperation yields everything in miniature. I fell in love with the volume of an earlobe rotated around the axis of a spine.

Withhold the accident. Withhold the tiny aches. Withhold the body’s capacity for desiccation, for ineffable grief. There are no new worlds left to dream. There is no new world.

So much of living is about understanding scale – a tiny crystal dropped in a river turns the entire river red.

with sin now inevitable as summer sweat.

Most days I try hard to act human, to breathe like a human and speak with the same flat language, but often my kindness is clumsy – I stop a stranger to tie his shoe and end up kissing his knees.

I believe in luck and am barely troubled by ...

The charm of this particular dilemma: faith begins where knowing ends.

The undertaker spills his midday latte on a corpse, a chariot wheel flies off and kills a slave, and nobody asks for a refund.

I feel most like a person when I am forcing something to be silent, holding a rat underwater or twining shut the jaw of a lamb before it’s roasted on the spit. It’s only natural to smell smoke and feel hungry, to lean into the confusion of tongues. If I am to be punished for any of this, it will be thousands of years too late.

bonepole bonepole since you died there’s been dying everywhere

I am all tangled in the smoke you left

horror leans in and brings its own light

I saw a picture I want to dive into that darkness

how much of the map did you leave unfinished

your mouth a moonless system of caves filling with dust the dust thickened to tar your mouth opened and tar spilled out

now they sit in graveyards drinking coffee forking soapy cottage cheese into their mouths

intent arrives like a call to prayer and is as easy to dismiss

how many times are you allowed to lose the same beloveds before you stop believing they’re gone

some migrant birds build their nests over rivers to push them into the water when they leave

the addictions that were killing me fastest were the ones I loved best

it seems to me the significance of remorse would deflate with each performance

sometimes a mind is ready to leave the world before its body

sometimes paradise happens too early and leaves us shuddering in its wake

to be steel bent around an endless black to once again be God’s own tuning fork and yet and yet

what we mean when we say immortal bruised and bluefleshed loathsome as glass pulled from a child’s mouth

but what’s worse is this silence everything quiet as a bowl of fruit hardening under lava

it’s a long drive into manhood but such a short walk out

I spent so long shocking myself with my own carelessness misnaming lovers and tripping over the homeless until finally the world crushed me to ice the way a fever crushes you to sleep

dear single- breasted archer of my dreams I heartily endorse your grief! it’s hard to remember your ribs connect to your backbone until the chill in your chest reaches around for your spine

the idea of a land flowing with milk and honey makes me excited, but I do wonder what gets left out –

Devastation occurs whether we’re paying attention or not.

Like the belled cat’s frustrated hunt, my offer to improve myself was ruined by the sound it made.

I am sealing all my faults with platinum so they’ll gleam like the barrel of a laser gun.

Please, spare me your attempts; I’m a victim of my own invention.

The desire to help others is a kind of symmetry, an eccentricity of our species like blushing, gold teeth, and life after children. I don’t worry myself with what my doctor said before he burst into flames. I just eat his wet blue pills, stay emotionless as a fig.

The strangeness between us opens like a pinhole on the ocean floor: in floods a fishing boat, a Chinese seabird, an entire galaxy of starfish.

The god-harnesses we thought we came with were just our tiny lungs.

This is why we put mirrors in birdcages, why we turn on lamps to double our shadows. I love my body more than other bodies. When I sleep next to a man, he becomes an extension of my own brilliance. Or rather, he becomes an echo of my own anticlimax.

The spirit lives in between the parts of a name. It is vulnerable only to silence and forgetting.

There has always been a swarm of hungry ghosts orbiting my body – even now, I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone.