The End of Elegy
Temperance Aghamohammadi | Poetry
Heul, how. How, howl.
The wolf-me fjords my anatomy into an ambage assemblage, sunders
to Bone and Spirit: archaic, famined, sounding in space. Peregrinations
ruining in this runic, nacred Wen umbrage me into a brute, a wild beast,
resolute lycanthrope cruising the center of a Capital bedeviled by all
that which I will and will ever not claim. I feel rather like the End
of Elegy. Death is physiognomy. Inclement rain. This city is a Necropolis
misnamed, obsidian as the opulent flame, which is shadow, the aqueous
body with which I bewitch terrain. I am the obviate State. I am the moon’s
exanguinations in its surfeit days. To pass. To pass on. Lovelorn insomniac.
Wulfsheude. New Countenance. Sinew crack. Out of the rambling Earth
I emerge, wet the palate, bow down to all fours, and fanfare the Truest – O
I am eschatology, the Little Science of Last Things. Muzzled trumpet.
I dominate. I do not submit. Behold. When I take off my face, I replace it.
Temperance Aghamohammadi is an Acolyte of the Exquisite. A trans Iranian-American poet, medium, and critic, she is the author of BATTALION SHAPED GIRL (DISCOUNT GUILLOTINE, 2025) and Behnt (New Delta Review, 2026), selected by Dorothea Lasky as the winner of The New Delta Review Chapbook Prize. Her work appears in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, New England Review, Fairy Tale Review, Worms Magazine, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at RHINO Poetry and was the Claudia Emerson Scholar at the 2025 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Hailing from the Northeast, she currently haunts the Midwest.