Calling a Wolf a Wolf

Kaveh Akbar

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781938584671
• eBook ISBN: 9781938584725
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"The struggle from late youth on, with and without God, agony, narcotics and love is a torment rarely recorded with such sustained eloquence and passion as you will find in this collection." --Fanny Howe This highly-anticipated debut boldly confronts addiction and courses the strenuous path of recovery, beginning in the wilds of the mind. Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.

From "Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before"          Sometimes you just have to leave
whatever's real to you, you have to clomp
through fields and kick the caps off
all the toadstools. Sometimes
you have to march all the way to Galilee
 
or the literal foot of God himself before you realize
you've already passed the place where
you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember
the being afraid, only that it came to an end.    
Kaveh Akbar  is the founding editor of  Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in  The New Yorker, Poetry, APR, Tin House, Ploughshares,   PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.

 

I. TERMINAL

“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”

—W. H. AUDEN

WILD PEAR TREE

it’s been January for months in both directions frost

over grass like pale fungus like

mothdust the branches of the pear tree are pickling

in ice white as the long white line running from me

to the smooth whales frozen in chunks of ocean

from their vast bobbing to the blackwhite

stars flowering into heaven the hungry cat gnaws

on a sliver of mirror and I have been chewing

out my stitches wondering which

warm names we should try singing

wild thyme cowslip blacksnake all the days

in a year line up at the door and I deflect each saying no

you will not be needed one by one they skulk off

into the cold the cat hates this place more than he loves

me he cannot remember the spring when I fed him

warm duck fat daily nor the kitchen vase filled with musky blue

roses nor the pear tree which was so eager to toss its fruit so sweet

it made us sleepy I stacked the pears on the mantle

until I ran out of room and began filling them into

the bathtub one evening I slid in as if into a mound

of jewels now ghost finches leave footprints

on our snowy windowsills the cat paces

through the night listening for their chirps our memories

have frosted over ages ago we guzzled

all the rosewater in the vase still we check for it

nightly I have forgotten even

the easy prayer I was supposed to use

in emergencies something something I was not

born here I was not born here I was not

DO YOU SPEAK PERSIAN?

Some days we can see Venus in midafternoon. Then at night, stars

separated by billions of miles, light traveling years

to die in the back of an eye.

Is there a vocabulary for this—one to make dailiness amplify

and not diminish wonder?

I have been so careless with the words I already have.

I don’t remember how to say home

in my first language, or lonely, or light.

I remember only

delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you,

and shab bekheir, good night.

How is school going, Kaveh-joon?

Delam barat tang shodeh.

Are you still drinking?

Shab bekheir.

For so long every step I’ve taken

has been from one tongue to another.

To order the world:

I need, you need, he/she/it needs.

The rest, left to a hungry jackal

in the back of my brain.

Right now our moon looks like a pale cabbage rose.

Delam barat tang shodeh.

We are forever folding into the night.

Shab bekheir.

YEKI BOOD YEKI NABOOD

every day someone finds what they need

in someone else

you tear into a body

and come out with a fistful of the exact

feathers you were looking for wondering

why anyone would want to swallow

so many perfect feathers

everyone

looks uglier naked or at least

I do my pillar of fuzz my damp

lettuce

I hoarded an entire decade

of bliss of brilliant dime-sized raptures

and this is what I have to show

for it a catastrophe of joints this

puddle I’m soaking in which came

from my crotch and never did

dry

the need

to comfort anyone else to pull

the sickle from their chest seems

unsummonable now as a childhood

pet as Farsi or tears

I used to slow

dance with my mother in our living

room spiritless as any prince I felt

the bark of her spine softening I became

an agile brute she became a stuffed

ox I hear this happens

all over the world

PORTRAIT OF THE ALCOHOLIC WITH HOME INVADER AND HOUSEFLY

It felt larger than it was, the knife

that pushed through my cheek.

Immediately I began leaking:

blood and saliva...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Soot
• Part I. Terminal
• Part II. Hunger
• Part III. Irons
• About the Publisher