I WAS ALREADY AN AMERICAN LAST WEEK WHEN A LEAF FELL

from my hair mid-conversation, but certainly
after it happened I felt moreso. P giggled—she knows
I always provide a good show. I know I am not
turning into a tree or a pinecone or anything else
I have not already been. For decades I’ve smelled
like my mother (raspberry and nut meat) and sounded
like my brother (on the phone even our parents
can’t tell us apart). Mostly my days are mine
to do with as I please: speak in English, speak
in code, or not speak at all. Whatever I decide, I’ll go
to sleep with a headache. As a boy I imagined adulthood
would just be endless bowls of bastani sonnati: pistachio,
saffron, and clot after clot of frozen rosewater cream.

Instead it’s like blood sucked from a still-gasping
salmon—fresh, fought for, but not exactly sweet. Even
our corpses are improvable: in some places they dig
up the dead each year to dress in new clothes, putting a niece
in a dustless abaya, a still-handsome uncle in a starched
white suit. Once, drunk and amphetamined, I stayed up
all night licking a friend’s knives. In the morning
my tongue was shredded to ribbons, delicate as wet
newsprint. Almost anything can become kindling
if the fire’s big enough: a cellist’s bow, a bag
of vipers, an entire truckload of hair. The best fires
can hiss moisture right out of the air. The same
sounds will never mean the same thing.

Kaveh Akbar founded and edits Divedapper. His poems appear recently or soon in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Boston Review, FIELD, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere.