The Consequence

Today I am re-reading Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf. The past month I kept hearing his line: “just say yes and step into the consequence” as I went about my days. I knew I had to return to the collection, which I first discovered in graduate school and then re-read around this time last year. The collection contains themes of addiction, revelation, and identity, so the idea of desire becomes complicated in the text. Dangerous—life ending, but the idea of what life is ending, more so a metaphysical death, emerges between the speaker’s dance with darker impulses and narratives they’ve received about themselves. Re-reading the poem, I was reminded of the lines that come before the one I’d been whispering to myself: “it’s / lovely / because it’s simple.” I imagine this an instruction, a way to measure what that leap towards a consequence signals—the simpleness of desire, and the loveliness of that desire, and for desire to be enough of a reason to jump.