Poem of the Week

What I Want

Kaveh Akbar

To make with a font
or a life

something endless as you.
For you.

A font is a finite set of shapes.
A life is a finite set of shapes.

Pink glass,
blue bullets.

I point
at what I want with my lips.

What I want?
The prosperity

of the wicked
for the just.

To be just.
And prosperous.

A man in uniform
presses a hot iron

to a bullet
set on a naked man’s chest.

The bullet is finite.
The naked man

is finite. Pointed lips
and red glass. Which is a liquid,

it flows over time.
Liquid uniforms,

wicked font.
What I want

is time, endless as you.
And terrible as all this. 

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf and the collection Pilgrim Bell. The poetry editor at The Nation, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.
Originally published:
May 19, 2021

Featured

10 Ways Ms., Sassy, and Jezebel Changed Your Life!

How contradiction drove fifty years of feminist media
Maggie Doherty

How Emily Wilson Reimagined Homer

Her boldly innovative translation of the Iliad is an epic for our time
Emily Greenwood

In the Shallows

Why do public intellectuals condescend to their readers?
Becca Rothfeld

You Might Also Like



Here & There

Will Frazier