About the Feature
Listen to our podcast discussing this poem here.
crumble them if you must but if you do
I will withdraw my pleasantries and boil
all your chickens which are purring now
behind my house
in fact considering
the circumstance I will bake them
hard and black as cannonballs
and launch them at you till you are
dead as Columbus and forgotten as
his sandy sock full of shells
harmony
is a kind of grammar and I am not
a native speaker you are not speaking
to anyone least of all me with my
crackless whip and boiled
workshirts
I gave you half my
doubt you gave me half
your wool the judge ruled it
a fair trade but she didn’t see you
pinching your cheeks to seduce
the bailiff
it was summer then
it is winter now and a bad one so cold
the great lake froze no layer of ice just
ice and all the baffled fish
frozen mid glub
About the Author
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. His debut full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, will be published by Alice James Books in September 2017.