Gluttoneer, and: Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997
- Gluttoneer, and: Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997
Gluttoneer
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. [End Page 155]
Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997
the waiters milled about filling sumacshakers clearing away plates of onion andradish my father pointed to each person whisperedPersian about the old man with the silver beard whispered Arab about the woman with the eye mole Persian the teenager pouringwater White the man on the phone I was eight and watching and amazedI asked how he could possibly tell when they were all brown- skin-dark-hair’d like us almost everyone in the restaurant looked like us he smiled a proud little smile a warm nest of lip said it’s easy said we’re just uglier
he returned to his lamb but I was baffled hardlytouched my gheimeh I had huge glasses and bad teeth I felt plenty Persian when the woman with light eyes and blonde-brownhair left our check my father looked at me I said Arab? he shook his head laughed we drove home I grew up it took years to put together what my fathermeant that day my father who listened exclusively to the Rolling Stoneswho called the Beatles a band for girls [End Page 156]
my father who wore only black even around the house whose arms could cut chicken wire and make stew and bulged with old farm scars my father myfather my father built the world the first sound I ever heard was his voice whispering the azan in my right ear I didn’t need anything else my father cherished that we were ugly and so being ugly was blessed I smiled with all my teeth [End Page 157]
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in the New Yorker, Poetry, the New Republic, Best American Poetry, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of the book Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James, 2017) and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017). A recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Akbar is the founding editor of Divedapper. Born in Tehran, Iran, he currently teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.
