Darius Atefat-Peckham

They wake me. Like car alarms bleating along an empty
block. How many beloveds in me whom now I survive?

Even Forough must have run her loving hands to water.
My lips move like a merchant’s hoping to sell survive.

Can you use it in a sentence? Swinging their pendulum
heads, they foretell how few survive.

Sour as berries died on the vine. My fingers stay
in the mouth of astonishment. Can such a shell survive?

Like the owl of Sunday morning cartoons, I want one big
chomp! To see what, on the tongue of a cracked bell, survives.

I reach time. I step in front of a honking car—jump
back. I outlive myself. Can’t help but survive.

A citizen of my catch-all drawer. A keep-sake of the stayed-
behind. A one-way ticket, that will to survive.

To worry is a law of nature. Is it enough? To be
inscribed in lighter hue: she is well-survived.

Veiled mother flickers bodily in the lamp-light
of you. Steps, unsteps in the melt that survives.

I want to love so well, that I spell a name with each
foot-fall in dirt. I reach palms down the wet well. Survive.

They say my mother’s was more than a death. Must mine be more
than a life? How to make my name undone? How to spell survive?