Akbar - Calling a Wolf a Wolf

2017 by Kaveh Akbar All rights reserved Printed in the United States 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc., an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. Alice James Books 114 Prescott Street Farmington, ME 04938 www.alicejamesbooks.org Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Akbar, Kaveh. author. Title: Calling a wolf a wolf / Kaveh Akbar. Description: Farmington, Maine : Alice James Books, 2017. | Alcoholics--Rehabilitation--Poetry. | Poetry. | BISAC: POETRY / American / General. | POETRY / Middle Eastern. | POETRY / Inspirational & Religious. | POETRY / Inspirational & Religious.

Classification: LCC PS3601.A43 (ebook) | LCC PS3601.A43 .A6 2017 (print) | DDC 811/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015979 Alice James Books gratefully acknowledges support from individual donors, private foundations, the University of Maine at Farmington, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Amazon Literary Partnership. Cover art: Il Digiuno by Nicola Samori / 2014 / Oil on copper / 100 x 100 cm / Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART NOTE TO THE READER Alice James Books encourages you to calibrate your e-reader device settings using the line of characters below as a guide, which optimizes the line length and character size: we are given at birth a pocket we fold into at death goodbye now you mountain Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. Doing this will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accomodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems may be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the line break will be marked with a shallow indent. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A great debt of gratitude is owed to the editors of the following publications where these poems first appeared, often in earlier versions: The Adroit Journal: Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Inpatient) AGNI: God American Poetry Review: Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler, Best Shadows, Exciting the Canvas At Length: Drinkaware Self-Report Bennington Review: Wild Pear Tree, Desunt Nonnulla, Black Warrior Review: I Wont Lie This Plague of Gratitude BOAAT: Neither Now nor Never Boston Review: Portrait of the Alcoholic with Craving Copper Nickel: Portrait of the Alcoholic with Doubt and Kingfisher Denver Quarterly: Thirstiness Is Not Equal Division, Portrait of the Alcoholic Frozen in Block of Ice Diagram: So Often the Body Becomes a Distraction Diode: Portrait of the Alcoholic with Withdrawal FIELD: What Seems Like Joy Guernica: Tassiopeia Gulf Coast: Fugu Harvard Divinity Bulletin: Soot Haydens Ferry Review: Personal Inventory: Fearless (Temporis Fila) Indiana Review: Portrait of the Alcoholic with Home Invader and Housefly The Journal: Orchids Are Sprouting from the Floorboards jubilat: Besides, Little Goat, You Cant Just Go Asking for Mercy The Literary Review: Everything That Moves Is Alive and a Threata Reminder Lit Hub: Long Pig The Los Angeles Review: Portrait of the Alcoholic Stranded Alone on a Desert Island Muzzle: Supplication with Rabbit Skull and Bouquet Narrative: Do You Speak Persian? Nashville Review: Portrait of the Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober New England Review: No Is a Complete Sentence The New Yorker: What Use Is Knowing Anything if No One Is Around The Offing: Palmyra PANK: The Straw Is Too Long, the Axe Is Too Dull Ploughshares: Yeki Bood, Yeki Nabood, Ways to Harm a Thing Poetry: Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus, River of Milk, My Kingdom for a Murmur of Fanfare Poetry Society of America: Heritage Puerto del Sol: Some Boys Arent Born They Bubble Redivider: Prayer Sixth Finch: Stop Me If Youve Heard This One Before Sonora Review: Despite Their Size Children Are Easy to Remember They Watch You Spoon River Poetry Review: Milk THRUSH: Portrait of the Alcoholic with Moths and River Tin House: Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober Its How We Beat the Game, Against Dying, Against Hell TriQuarterly: Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives Vinyl Poetry: Rimrock Virginia Quarterly Review: The New World, A Boy Steps into the Water Waxwing: Learning to Pray, Recovery West Branch: An Apology ZYZZYVA: Portrait Of The Alcoholic With Relapse Fantasy Portrait of the Alcoholic, a short chapbook containing several of these poems, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in January 2017.

Fugu was anthologized in Best New Poets 2016. Portrait Of The Alcoholic With Relapse Fantasy was selected to be reprinted in Pushcart Prize XLII: Best of the Small Presses. Neither Now Nor Never was anthologized in The Orison Anthology 2016. Palmyra was reprinted for PBS NewsHour. Heritage was awarded the Lucille Medwick Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America. Deep abiding gratitude to Chris Forhan, Alessandra Lynch, Steve Henn, David J.

Thompson, Carey Salerno, Bryan Borland, Seth Pennington, Don Share, francine j. harris, Eduardo C. Corral, Frank Bidart, Fanny Howe, Max Ritvo, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Arash Saedinia, Ruth Baumann, James Kimbrell, David Kirby, Jayme Ringleb, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Martha Rhodes, Robert Olen Butler, Kelly Butler, Solmaz Sharif, Yona Harvey, Kazim Ali, Nick Flynn, Jonathan Farmer, Sean Shearer, Gretchen Marquette, David Tomas Martinez, Zack Strait, Allison Wright, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Andrew Epstein, Damian Caudill, Chase Noelle, Carl Phillips, Alyssa Graffam, Darrian Church, Julia Bouwsma, Toma alamun, Michael Purol, Thaddeus Harmon, Wanda, Mammy, Arash, Mytoan, Nora, and Layla for their patience and love and support. My thanks to Franz Wright, Reyhaneh Jabbari, W.H. Auden, Ali Akbar Sadeghi, Khaled al-Asaad, Carolus Linnus, Aaron Weiss, Fanny Howe, Sohrab Sepehri, Lydia Henn, Leslie Jamison, Diane Seuss, Gertrude Stein, Kahlil Gibran, Max Ritvo, Dan Barden, and all other voices in the choir. for Dan SOOT Sometimes God comes to earth disguised as rust, chewing away a chain link fence or mariners knife. for Dan SOOT Sometimes God comes to earth disguised as rust, chewing away a chain link fence or mariners knife.

From up so close we must seem clumsy and gloomless, like new lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time. Regarding loss, Im afraid to keep it in the story, worried what I might bring back to life, like the marble angel who woke to find his innards scattered around his feet. Blood from the belly tastes sweeter than blood from anywhere else. We know this but dont know whythe woman on TV dabs a mans gutwound with her hijab then draws the cloth to her lips, confused. I keep dreaming Im a creature pulling out my claws one by one to sell in a market stall next to stacks of pomegranates and garden tools. Its predictable, the logic of dreams.