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      Poetry Society of America: “Heritage”

      Puerto del Sol: “Some Boys Aren’t Born They Bubble”

      Redivider: “Prayer”

      Sixth Finch: “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before”

      Sonora Review: “Despite Their Size Children Are Easy to Remember They Watch You”

      Spoon River Poetry Review: “Milk”

      THRUSH: “Portrait of the Alcoholic with Moths and River”

      Tin House: “Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game,” “Against Dying,” “Against Hell”

      TriQuarterly: “Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives”

      Vinyl Poetry: “Rimrock”

      Virginia Quarterly Review: “The New World,” “A Boy Steps into the Water”

      Waxwing: “Learning to Pray,” “Recovery”

      West Branch: “An Apology”

      ZYZZYVA: “Portrait Of The Alcoholic With Relapse Fantasy”

      Portrait of the Alcoholic, a short chapbook containing several of these poems, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in January 2017.

      “Fugu” was anthologized in Best New Poets 2016.

      “Portrait Of The Alcoholic With Relapse Fantasy” was selected to be reprinted in Pushcart Prize XLII: Best of the Small Presses.

      “Neither Now Nor Never” was anthologized in The Orison Anthology 2016.

      “Palmyra” was reprinted for PBS NewsHour.

      “Heritage” was awarded the Lucille Medwick Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America.

      Deep abiding gratitude to Chris Forhan, Alessandra Lynch, Steve Henn, David J. Thompson, Carey Salerno, Bryan Borland, Seth Pennington, Don Share, francine j. harris, Eduardo C. Corral, Frank Bidart, Fanny Howe, Max Ritvo, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Arash Saedinia, Ruth Baumann, James Kimbrell, David Kirby, Jayme Ringleb, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Martha Rhodes, Robert Olen Butler, Kelly Butler, Solmaz Sharif, Yona Harvey, Kazim Ali, Nick Flynn, Jonathan Farmer, Sean Shearer, Gretchen Marquette, David Tomas Martinez, Zack Strait, Allison Wright, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Andrew Epstein, Damian Caudill, Chase Noelle, Carl Phillips, Alyssa Graffam, Darrian Church, Julia Bouwsma, Tomaž Šalamun, Michael Purol, Thaddeus Harmon, Wanda, Mammy, Arash, Mytoan, Nora, and Layla for their patience and love and support.

      My thanks to Franz Wright, Reyhaneh Jabbari, W.H. Auden, Ali Akbar Sadeghi, Khaled al-Asaad, Carolus Linnæus, Aaron Weiss, Fanny Howe, Sohrab Sepehri, Lydia Henn, Leslie Jamison, Diane Seuss, Gertrude Stein, Kahlil Gibran, Max Ritvo, Dan Barden, and all other voices in the choir.

      An eternity of wild love and gratitude to Paige Lewis, who all this is meant to impress.

      for Dan

      SOOT

      Sometimes God comes to earth disguised as rust,

      chewing away a chain link fence or mariner’s knife.

      From up so close we must seem

      clumsy and gloomless, like new lovers

      undressing in front of each other

      for the first time. Regarding loss, I’m afraid

      to keep it in the story,

      worried what I might bring back to life,

      like the marble angel who woke to find

      his innards scattered around his feet.

      Blood from the belly tastes sweeter

      than blood from anywhere else. We know this

      but don’t know why—the woman on TV

      dabs a man’s gutwound with her hijab

      then draws the cloth to her lips, confused.

      I keep dreaming I’m a creature pulling out my claws

      one by one to sell in a market stall next to stacks

      of pomegranates and garden tools. It’s predictable,

      the logic of dreams. Long ago I lived in Heaven

      because I wanted to. When I fell to earth

      I knew the way—through the soot, into the leaves.

      It still took years. Upon landing, the ground

      embraced me sadly, with the gentleness

      of someone delivering tragic news to a child.

       I. TERMINAL

      “All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”

      —W. H. AUDEN

      WILD PEAR TREE

      it’s been January for months in both directions frost

      over grass like pale fungus like

      mothdust the branches of the pear tree are pickling

      in ice white as the long white line running from me

      to the smooth whales frozen in chunks of ocean

      from their vast bobbing to the blackwhite

      stars flowering into heaven the hungry cat gnaws

      on a sliver of mirror and I have been chewing

      out my stitches wondering which

      warm names we should try singing

      wild thyme cowslip blacksnake all the days

      in a year line up at the door and I deflect each saying no

      you will not be needed one by one they skulk off

      into the cold the cat hates this place more than he loves

      me he cannot remember the spring when I fed him

      warm duck fat daily nor the kitchen vase filled with musky blue

      roses nor the pear tree which was so eager to toss its fruit so sweet

      it made us sleepy I stacked the pears on the mantle

      until I ran out of room and began filling them into

      the bathtub one evening I slid in as if into a mound

      of jewels now ghost finches leave footprints

      on our snowy windowsills the cat paces

      through the night listening for their chirps our memories

      have frosted over ages ago we guzzled

      all the rosewater in the vase still we check for it

      nightly I have forgotten even

      the easy prayer I was supposed to use

      in emergencies something something I was not

      born here I was not born here I was not

      DO YOU SPEAK PERSIAN?

      Some days we can see Venus in midafternoon. Then at night, stars

      separated by billions of miles, light traveling years

      to die

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