I was promised epiphany, earth- honey, and a flood of milk, but I will settle for anything that brings you now, you still-hungry mongrel, you glut of bone, you, scentless as gold.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Calling a Wolf a Wolf Author Kaveh Akbar Do you not know how scary it can get here? The talons that dropped me left long scars around my neck that still burn in the wind. Wounded wolves will pad away from their pack to die lonely and cold. They say even longing has its limits: in a bucket, an eel will simply stop swimming long before it starves. I thought I saw you last year, bark wrapped around your thighs, lurching toward the shore at dawn. Remember when you breathed through my mouth, your breath becoming mine? Remember when you sang for me and I fell to the floor, turning into a thousand mice? Whatever it was we were practicing cannot happen without you. A body can cause almost anything to happen. I dump my ashtray into a bucket of paint and coat myself in the gray slick, rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers while they applaud and sip their scotch. The work I’ve been doing is a kind of erasing. The mind wants what it wants: daily newspapers, snapping turtles, a pound of flesh. Sometimes I can feel it pulsing through the dirt, though even this you ignore. I live on the skull of a giant burning brain, the earth’s core. Sweet nothings sour in the air while the ocean hoots itself to sleep.

On this one the wet is driving people mad-the bankers all baying in the woods while their markets fail, a florist chewing up flowers to spit mouthfuls here and there as his daughter’s lungs seize shut from the pollen. The earth is a giant chessboard where the dark squares get all the rain.

Whether in a train full of dying criminals or on the gleaming saddle of a locust, you are needed again. With their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.” They areĪrranging their plans like worms preparing

I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds Of hungry ghosts orbiting my body-even now, Into a sturdier form, like a wild lotus bursting into I am vulnerable to hammers, fire,Īnd any number of poisons. It is vulnerable only to silenceĪnd forgetting. I feed faith to faith, suffer human noise, complainĪbout this or that heartache. I was deliveredįrom dying like a gift card sent in lieu of a pound Or rather, he becomesĪn echo of my own anticlimax. When I sleep next to a man, he becomesĪn extension of my own brilliance. We put mirrors in birdcages, why we turn on lamps The lonely rumble in my head gave praise. In a corner covering my ears, singing Quranic verseĪfter Quranic verse. To watch you know it? Plants reinvent sugar dailyĪnd hardly anyone applauds. “What use is knowing anything if no one is around

Kaveh akbar calling a wolf a wolf