Kaveh Akbar

am not a slow learner I am a quick forgetter

It’s serious business, this living.

As long as the earth continues

its stony breathing, I will breathe.

Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated.

In sobriety, he endured long periods of writer’s block, or more accurately, writer’s ambivalence. Writer’s antipathy.

“Right, palliative, yeah. All that stuff is palliative. It stills the suffering, but it doesn’t send it away.”

“You know, Mrs. Kaufmann, it’s entirely possible, common even, to have psychological co-morbidities. It sounds like you’ve been getting help for addiction issues, which is great. But you may also have another diagnosis alongside it that’s going untreated, an anxiety disorder or major depression or something else. It could be useful for you to seek help for those as well.”

“ ‘Living the poems you’re not writing?’ ” Zee scoffed. “C’mon, you’re better than that.”

“I’m really not,” Cyrus said, sharply, before stepping out the apartment door.

“I don’t even know what my higher power is.”

“That didn’t stop you from getting on your knees with me a year ago and asking it to remove your suffering.”

“Asking what?” Cyrus asked. “What were we even talking to?”

“Who cares?” Gabe answered. “To not-your-own-massive-fucking-ego. That’s the only part that matters.”

like a tongue in a mouth between bites

He could probably get away with bumming the occasional cigarette now and again, but in his mind he was saving that for something momentous: his final moments lying in the grass dying from a gunshot wound, or walking in slow motion away from a burning building