Kaveh Akbar’s (CRF 2021) poem “Love Poem with Bighead” is featured on poem-a-day today, June 21st, 2022. Hear Akbar read and reflect on the poem here.
the dignity I’ve actually earned could fit
in a pigeon’s eye, holy and not merely so,
jupiter holy, gravity-making holy
jerking me around like a horse dragging
his cowboy through the mud, no ghoulish cruelty though,
no genius, just our cat leering out the window
like a French marquise, sprinkling drugs into our
drugs like it’s 2009, Jehovah, the aridness
of prayer, the aridness of public hygiene, holy too
that babies recognize logos at six months, generous
to be given detectable villains, birdgrass
growing up to the pink striped fruit you’ll leave
for the squirrels, ya Ali, the part of you that weeps
at dead fish in the market, how to extract that,
inject it straight into my hippocampus, mine
and everyone’s, fix all the unsolvable problems
in countries that don’t exist on a map, origami
god, boiled fox, how the new translation left out my
crimes, and how much better I liked it that way,
my carrion crown finally slackening a bit
Copyright © 2022 by Kaveh Akbar. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 21, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.