Glutoneer

ISSUE: Summer 2018

The stillness you prize.
Won’t prize you back. Two beefsteaks.
Ripening on a windowsill. A purple tray.
Piled with coal. From the field.
Of solemn brothers calling.
Your name in unison you learn.
Men are irrelevant but.
Persistent symmetries are not.

Become the many-roomed house.
You walk through in dreams. Show me.
On the great blue door where it hurts.

This is the season where grace.
Is the likeliest. Where the uttermost.
Angels heavy our galaxy with.
Their sound. A silver ring.
Lost in the bedsheets is still.

A silver ring. You can either be.
More holy or more full but.

Not both. See how the hot.
Element glows red. How.
Honey cools the tea. Suppose.
There was a reason for it.
Suppose there wasn’t.

Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar is the author of the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James, 2017) as well as the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017). Akbar’s poems appear in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Paris Review, Best American Poetry, the New York Times, and elsewhere. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, the Levis Reading Prize, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Akbar is the Poetry Editor of the Nation. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.