Love Poem with Bighead

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.

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“To insist that one’s pain is complex can feel cringey, withering. But it is. Complex. One’s love, too.”
—Kaveh Akbar