Holy Men

~after James Wright

I am almost afraid to write this
down. I must have been
ten years old

when I mistakenly saw
a photo of my priest’s wife, her naked
breasts full to blossoming.

It must have been the most
beautiful thing I had seen
in my life, besides

the many turns of season like a face
from a flame or her eyes stuck
eternal in their blur as if in

an ecstasy I couldn’t yet understand or
a fear I suddenly could. Similar to the way
her husband, my priest, taught me

a trick I still use. His eyes were
kind and unsuspecting of me,
he wasn’t like a priest at all

but like many men who would show me
to hold the whole of the earth, or as much
of it as I loved or two of them

together, rivered veins dripping
into the valley, in my palms, in prayer.
This, he told us, made in each of us

a collective. But this too
I feared, and I was just a boy
anyway, sitting, for a moment,

with my first nakedness, again
my heart pounding, unsure of God
and sorry. And now, I think, I may

have been very selfish
because when my friend beside me
placed his chin on my shoulder, a great

nuzzling, and I felt his breath quicken
as if to remember, himself,
I shivered and the worlds

shot from my palms like ships and I
slammed the screen shut, wishing
I was alone to pray and

to spare him his beautiful mother.

Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Texas Review, Zone 3, Nimrod, Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, The Southampton Review and elsewhere. In 2018, Atefat-Peckham was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet, the nation’s highest honor presented to youth poets writing original work. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). Atefat-Peckham currently studies Creative Writing at Harvard College.