The New World

ISSUE: Fall 2016

Do I have to talk about fear?
So much has already been said
about hidden spiders, compass needles
lodged in the soft of an eye.

The soul is a thirsty
antelope nervously lapping up
water from a pool
in the hunter’s backyard.

Or so I’ve been told. Sometimes
when I listen to old Persian music
I get so sad I can actually smell rose water.
This is a Real Thing That Happens.

If home is the question,
the honest answers must all be elegant
forgeries. Must be sprinkled
with sumac. Droughts occur

constantly under God’s holy watch.
His response? He yawns
immortally on his throne,
fans himself with an elephant ear.

The lion was so exhausted and numb
that a person might’ve thought
they could
kiss it.

The calculus of desperation yields
everything in miniature. I fell in love
with the volume of an earlobe
rotated around the axis of a spine.

My dear,
how did you
end up
like this?

Withhold the accident. Withhold
the tiny aches. Withhold the body’s
capacity for desiccation, for ineffable
grief. There are no new worlds left to dream.

There is no new world.

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.