In my all-boys school they’re all dumber than me.
I sit in the back and read André Gide
inside The Elements of Chemistry.
I draw a naked girl with pointy breasts
for my classmates, who fold her into a plane
and fly it across the room. For the midterm,
I make a cheatsheet in Armenian
which our Persian teachers cannot read.
When the others leave, I stay with a friend to study.
Behind the stacks, he unbuttons his uniform
and then lies down. Leaning over his body
like Ali Baba over the thieves’ treasure,
I copy out the answers on his chest
with what I know even then is too much pleasure.
ARMEN DAVOUDIAN is the author of Swan Song, which won the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. His poems and translations from Persian appear in AGNI, Poetry London, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran and lives in California, where he is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.