Yeki Bood Yeki Nabood
by Kaveh Akbar
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
From Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Reproduced with kind permission of Penguin Books UK.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2018
Calling a Wolf a Wolf
Kaveh Akbar
About Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar (b. 1989, Tehran, Iran) teaches at Purdue University, Indiana, and is the founding editor of Divedapper, a journal devoted to interviews with poets. His first published poem, at seven years old, was called ‘A Packer Poem’, and took as its subject-matter the Green Bay Packers football team. Calling a Wolf a Wolf has darker concerns at its heart: alcoholism, desire, faith. He has described it as an unconventional addiction recovery narrative, ‘less focused on war stories and more on the psycho/physio/cosmological implications of addiction and recovery’.
As a very young child in Tehran, Akbar was taught by his parents to pray in Arabic, a language none of them spoke. This idea of a special, secret language would become the bedrock for his conception of poetry: ‘the understanding that language has a capacity beyond the mere relay of semantic data, that if a line could be spoken with sufficient beauty and conviction, it might thin the membrane between its speaker and whichever divine (God, desire, despair, the mind, the body) they wish to address.’
