POETR REVIEW AMERICAN · 2021. 8. 22. · Stephen Berg (1934–2014) Co-founder Sidney H. Berg (1909–1973) Periodical postage paid, Philadel phia, PA, and at additional oi ces

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 VOL. 50/NO. 5 $5 US/$7 CA

AMERICANPOETRY REVIEW

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ROGER REEVESSOMETHING ABOUT

JOHN COLTRANE

MARY RUEFLEEIGHT POEMS

ALSO:

PATRICK ROSAL

PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS

WENDY XU

DANIEL NESTER

PHOTO: NATHAN ACKERMAN

“. . . one thing that makes humans uniquely

human is that we future, making decisions

now on what we believe will make us happy

later. Apparently, we’re pretty bad at this. . . .

And yet we future on. We can’t help it. e

Future-ing is what allows us to shape our

lives, an essential part of what Gilbert calls

‘our psychological immune system.’”

BROWNE, pp. 16–17

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JENNIFER

CHANG

2 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW

SEPTEMBER /OCTOBER 2021 3

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BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Ann BeattieRobert ColesRita Dove

Carolyn ForchéEdward HirschEmily Mann

Joyce Carol OatesCynthia OzickFrederick Seidel

Linda Lee AlterNatalie BaumanRichard BoyleMarianne E. BrownPaul CumminsHelen W. Drutt English

Rayna Block GoldfarbWerner GundersheimerLynne HonickmanWilliam KistlerEdward T. Lewis

Judith NewmanCarol ParssinenS. Mary Scullion, R.S.M.Peter StraubRose Styron

BOARD OF ADVISORS

JENNIFER CHANG 4 The Lonely Humans

& Other Poems

ROGER REEVES 7 Something About John Coltrane

PATRICK ROSAL 10 When Prince Was Filipino

& Learning to Slaughter

DOROTHEA LASKY 12 The Ballet & Other Poems

STEPHEN IRA 14 Rage and Grief

JENNY BROWNE 15 Too Late to Stop Now

MICHAEL DUMANIS 18 Annunciation

MARY RUEFLE 19 The Understanding & Other Poems

WENDY XU 20 Poem Beginning to Sound

& Other Poems

SHARA LESSLEY 22 The Hawthorn & The Monarch

EDWARD HIRSCH 23 An Appreciation of Muriel

Rukeyser, “St. Roach”

BLAS FALCONER 26 Strata & Other Poems

PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS 28 The Void

MELISSA BRODER

& ALEX DIMITROV29 A Conversation

DANIEL NESTER 31 Pompous Symmetry

& Other Poems

DIDI JACKSON 32 Void & Aubade on Hawk Mountain

DERRICK AUSTIN 33 Diary: Six Days in October

MICHAEL BAZZETT 35 It’s Not You, It’s Me

MICHAEL BAZZETT 37 Menu & Other Poems

AEON GINSBERG 38 Marble Run for the Intramuscular

Cyborgs

CASEY THAYER 40 Reminding Myself That We Are

Not Remarkable

ANNUAL PRIZES

THE STANLEY KUNITZ MEMORIAL PRIZE: A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning

poem in The American Poetry Review, awarded to a poet under 40 years of age in

honor of the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets.

THE APR/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE: In partnership with The Honickman

Foundation, an annual prize for a fi rst book of poetry, with an award of $3,000,

an introduction by the judge, publication of the book, and distribution by Copper

Canyon Press through Consortium.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 VOL. 50/NO. 5

IN THIS ISSUE


The Lonely HumansA type of hickory, it grows by water.

So are we fools to drive to the river

the day after our most savage storms

have finally stopped to see

a tree we’ve never seen before?

To hike in cold mud through a leafless forest,

to behold clearings now cluttered

by whatever fell last night—mostly oaks,

no hickory—to attend the mad performance

of a newly roaring current.

I do not want to call it singing,

the wounded poet’s head howling

downriver. Remember we scorned

his broken heart, broken rashly

by himself, some say, for wanting love

too soon. You say I am unfair, that too much

rain is what makes the river rush (there is no “we”

in what you say, dear): we hear itrr

as mythology. We hear it outside

ourselves, a surfeit of music quickening

wind against winter trees, branch-taps

I mistake for premonitions. Of what? That the tree

is here, ready to spring to life again. I am

unfair. I want to love honestly; I want love

honest. Every tree is the wrong tree.

This is the direction we get lost in.

Beech, sweetgum, more oak. But she

was impatient too, you say, it is possible

she willed him to look back. We do not love alone

is what I think you mean. When I walk behind you,

the back of your head is golden, ungovernable

light I cannot look away from. Is it love

that to follow you I find myself choosing

an unexpected path; should we find the tree,

will it be I who led us there or you? Long gone

are the leaves alternate, compounded, each

an arrow, the thrust of a green thought;

along the forest floor centuries crack and turn

to dust. We have children, grudges,

a Dionysian mortgage, habits

mostly bad, and yet every December

I imagine spring, our time past

and to come, how when you follow me

I track the blazes to reach the river, and often

I have to stop myself from looking back.

To stay together, look away, some god said.

Here in these trees, our voices have no

faces, we’ve walked like this for an eternity.

In the Middle of My LifeI’m nobody’s child, I write my father

and lie the next day

to a friend on the phone a time

zone away: I’m fine. I used to write

letters to everyone I loved; now

I head for the woods, phone

in hand. My friend, with whom

a decade ago I’d exchange

heartaches, each one stamped

with exacting artlessness—writing

letters about other letters, we marveled

how our words arrived wherever

we weren’t, signed Yours Love Soon, across

the Atlantic over the hardly blue

Blue Ridge beyond basins of western

plains. I once loved a man

who’d force the weight of his body

into a felt-tip pen, scoring torn

paper with savage loops of cursive.

He wrote everything down—

whirling manifestos, treatises overtaking

oceans of thought. In person,

he could not stop talking,

and loudly,

louder, arms sweeping away

the air, what I wanted to say,

an animal voice I often found

abhorrent, though

wasn’t I the animal, enraged

that being together

was nothing

like our letters? Those accordant

silences, sweet hectic

grappling for words. I remember

the longing inside my head,

his beautiful letters,

mine, my fingers tracing the ridges

of consonants, questions

and postscripts littering margins,

uncontainable form, the page

a stage for candor. To know another

is the terrible work of love,

is it not? Who said that? I note the clouds,

see through tree canopy, late

summer, a bowl of black plums

THREE POEMS

JENNIFER CHANG


on the kitchen table

awaiting my return. I am walking

up a steep hill

in the forest along a city

parkway: what you hear is

my breathing, the roar

of midday traffic, trees

moaning in sudden strong

wind. It is too late

in the season for flowers,

but there are wild herbs

with tiny white blooms,

the truculence of fungus

newly sprung and

plentiful after last week’s rain.

My friend’s trail is drier,

unnamed, and ornery

from Texas sun. Go ahead,

we each say to the other

when our voices tangle.

It’s 100° out. Writing

has no voice

because voice is a metaphor,

I know, having read How

Poems Get Made. Longenbach

calls it “a perceiving”

sensibility” that lets us pretend

—Near 90 here—someone is talking

to us, “a wish

for visceral immediacy,”

listen:

no one is here,

the voice in my head

I thought I loved,

merely clean syntax

and generous diction. Of that man,

“I” might have said, “as I loved

nobody, nobody loved me”—that figure

that is and is not me,

that was me, perhaps will be me.

I don’t particularly like writing

in the first person, in the future tense,

though pleasures abound.

Eventually, I will not have to wait

for my father

to come home again. I will not

have to avoid the question

“And how is your family?” It will not

always hurt—Are you—

by the creek?—being his daughter.

Yes, but it’s so dry

this could be Texas.

I don’t know why

I hurt. I wish! And!

here is where we,

our voices, rest. I see

an oak’s roots twisted,

exposed where the hill’s eroded

from too much rain.

Everything’s weather,

I want to say, but how

I mean that voice

who knows. In letters

I’ll never send my father,

I number days

of drought and flood, this August’s

manic squalls bursting sewers

beyond capacity, city blocks

gone riverine

for one night, two. Today the air’s

stiff with thirst, my marigolds

unplucked and dying, the other

yellow annuals, stiff-

stemmed in a glorious green pot,

not a leaf left, bought

to look at, not to care for, how

careless of me

to not even remember

its name. Write

what you can’t say, long-told

advice told again: I’m nobody

to my father, and he’s nobody

to me. Do you hear that? The wish

for such visceral immediacy.

What Is Music

She told me a story about a boy,

the child of a cousin, who had not

fared well. How the conversation veered

here

I can’t recall. I had shifted

my embouchure, butchering Varèse

as I again dashed ahead

of the metronome. That I

would never be a great flutist

was her tragedy and not mine

it would take me years

to realize. First chair

in a minor ensemble, she fixed

her blue gaze on me

with no expression, listening

for what she once called

my pure tone

when deciding if I were worth teaching. In the afternoon light

of her living room I paused when she sighed

a melody I could not reach,

her voice a second golden instrument,

then digressed, sparked

by a sudden shade of white

evoking summers on the Upper Peninsula,

the children wild with moss

and lake water.

The room where it happened

had a view

and a wall of books

that sometimes, in the dark, looked like ladders,

sometimes a row of shoulders,

men colluding. Before the accident,

the boy was the first to dive in, first


to dock his kayak, first to toss down dinner

and dart from the house, and now,

that day, he scaled the shelves

like a chased animal. One cried STOP

another WAIT, and then

a noise, a low moan that swiftly

gathered in the wood, a kind of rondo

sounding like horses

stampeding,

my teacher said, her flute across her lap,

mine leaning tiredly at my neck,

a habit I’d acquired in rehearsals

as violins usurped, once again,

the concerto’s compulsion. Even after

the shelves collapsed

books kept falling, the last

colts galloping

after the dust of elders—

ordinary stallions, old tireless

mares, clouds we all traverse

just to keep up. Never the same again, she sang,

but he survived, and we were, for a while, glad

for this new quiet, the next year

on the lake, when he’d avoid

that room and make of lake-wading

an occasional breaststroke, gently, not even reaching

the easy cove we measured as a lap. The worst

can happen and not be

that bad, I think she meant to say,

though perhaps thinking back

was how she endured our lessons.

The stories she told

were of other people’s misfortune,

that without the expected glory

the boy would still live,

curled at the banks of the lake

mute as a frond, growing duller

and without distinction.

Her own son had been watching,

at the threshold. He had been fine,

and wasn’t that fine

for her?

When my phrasing stumbled,

she took my place, a mark of artful instruction or

impatience, and sound opened the room, her sound

spacious as escape.

I don’t know what happened to the boy

or my teacher. Her son lived in the northeast, visited rarely

and rarely alone. I remember his name,

but not the name of her husband,

who for years of Wednesdays, opened their door,

his face an austere pallor, calmly nodding

towards the music stand where she waited,

sometimes playing Debussy, her favorite,

sometimes looking out the window.

He’d sit in the kitchen reading the paper

while I played my weekly disasters,

and then, when it was time to leave, he’d walk me

back to the door and wish me well.

Jennifer Chang is the author of two books of poems, most recently Some Say the Lark,which won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award.

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Something about a tree in shallow sleep

Listening for what it wants to remember:

The note of a seed, its neck sliding through

Dirt and its confusion—nothing cleansed

Of struggle. The weight lost after death,

A confrontation of death. John Coltrane

Even in death is a perfect instrument

Of water and working the day past its zero—

The fires in the trees, a legless rabbit

Drifting across the sky—dream of a mule

Covered in crows opened in front of a mule

Covered in crows, their wings beating against him

Like skin. An autumned tree in autumn

Watching fire autumn the other trees.

It doesn’t have to make sense now; it can

Make sense later on. A mule covered in crows—

Sometimes, you got to stick a little grass

In your mouth to sound like God. Allow crows.

Something about John Coltrane

Something about the bells in a faun’s hair,

A black boy standing in the rain at the edge

Of the road, wondering how to cross it

Without summoning his death or its hand-

Maidens, the grasshoppers clicking against him

Like he’s the water the world has been meaning

To come to—all the world’s water trapped inside

Him and needing to be let out. Something

About water waking a ghost, and the ghost

Waking a seed, rain in the hair of the world,

And the world opening its sudden flesh

The way stone opens sound against it—a bridge

Thrown from one absence to another,

As if to say, Extinction, I can live there too.

Something about Marion Brown

In a Georgia afternoon, the faun listens

To the Holy Ghost in a trickle of water

And is suddenly thrown down on the floor

Of the Sanctified Church, the woman’s feet

Lifting, stomping against the wooden boards,

And God somewhere he ain’t supposed to be

Or be momentarily, wasp in the hedge

Sheltering from the rain; a woman’s skirt

Hoisted and gladdened above her knee, the hem,

The hem of her garment touched by the faun’s eye

And holy, holy, holy is thy name and the snow

The woman becomes on the floor and the water

Ticking against the bottom of the pail, and, Lord,

The bridge opening above the faun in the air,

And he is what memory permits—pine needles

Turning on the skin of a bucket of water,

A bare shoulder in the rain,

God somewhere he ain’t supposed to be.

Something about Marion Brown

When the light came to the Georgia faun,

It was in a trickle of water, a brown leaf

Suddenly underfoot in the spring’s ringing

Green, the leaf underfoot spoke, speaks, became

A ladder of tongues—ghost and the good wood

A house fire needs—yes, good God, good God yes—

Became the pleasure of placing your mouth—

Oh yes, Lord, right here, right now, Lord—on something

Holy and holding it there until every

Sound in you becomes water—water moving

Over stone, moving in the hair of the trees,

Moving over the breast of the bee, beaver,

Buck of the day, its brown shoulder bearing

The hesitant light, its crown and thorn, water

Moving over the infinite gates of the city,

Moving as the wing of the wasp, which is

The voice of God, water moving over the two

Realms of the body, moving as the name of God—

Something is coming to kill him,

And something is coming to be born.

Today, he is both. Something beyond blood.

Wasp somewhere in the hedge sheltering from the rain.

Something about Aretha Franklin

Cousin Mary, don’t weep. The eternal

Without the wound of eternity begins now.

Sometimes, you can be made more than your body

While still in your body. Now, that’s power—

SOMETHINGABOUT JOHN COLTRANE

ROGER REEVES


A dog suddenly crying in the stables

For no other reason than something lifted

In him in the afternoon, lifted way up

And shook him into a moan and blade of grass

Gathered by a gale wind into a speaking

Thing. Just ask the Georgia faun all caught up

In some running and gladdened by it. Happy

Is what the old folks say. The boy, happy,

Happying in the field with nothing more

Than his body and the dark landing its dark

Against him. It doesn’t have to make sense now.

It can make sense later on. The faun coming

In the rain. The dark bending about him.

Power, Cousin Mary, power in the faun

Climbing into the tree as the dark earth flying.

And the clouds coming together above him,

And no danger, no danger to hanging

In the lower heavens as a bell,

As foreign pollen breaking in the wind,

Scattering its brown voice on anything

That will bear and not bear its gold. Vine, Fence,

A pail of water, the exposed shoulders of God.

Now, that’s power, Cousin Mary. And nothing

Dying rudely or for a dream of the rood.

The dream of this tree is not what will die

In it but what will live upside down

In the rain, trying its voice in heaven

And on earth. Power, eternal power,

Cousin Mary. Don’t weep.

Something about the Dream of a Tree

Something about a mule covered in crows,

The mule ridden by a faun with bells in his hair,

And the boy ringing across the field,

And the field ringing across the boy,

And all this ringing opening and with

And full of and tarrying and the silk skin of

And glory and the hem of a garment and Help me,

Holy Ghost and t yes, Lord, yes and the tiny racket

A seed makes cracking open in the dark and the stone

In the field worshipping the field by letting

The day fall all about it without moving,

And the dusk riding the rain and the tree

Dreaming and the light, the light without

Confession, castigation or beauty

But beauty, and the faun thrown down

In memory of once watching a hawk

Plucking red coins from the breast of a squirrel,

And the faun mimicking the hawk, his head

Dipping forward in the gesture of prayer,

His mouth working against the wind, the invisible

Breast and belly of an animal and the seed

Of something opening inside him

For which there was no source so call it mercy,

Grace, or nothing but becoming power.

Prayer. Hawk. The dream of a tree. . . .

The dream, also an autopsy—

What came in the middle of the night, a tree

Muttering about the muddle of fragrance,

Wounded sky bewound in light, morning

Misted in murder, maggots chattering

Dawn’s red rousing, calling it milk,

My Cherie Amour’s mystic wobble—

The autopsy, also a dream—what came:

A boy who found his work on the road

And had to lay down there with his work—

The hostility of living between the bullets

And the bullets hanging you against the night,

By the lapel, for examination, for a song,

For the smiths of gold, for gold, for the gallows,

For the fragrance of a field covered in crows

And the crows lifting as if a great black tent

Rising to shield the field from pestilence

But the crows just rising crows, the fragrance

Of freedom but not freedom itself—and here

Silence, what came in the middle of the night—

An autopsy, a dream: a boy on the road,

Crows bowing and bowing and bowing to the dead.

Something about Michael Brown

Something about Mahalia Jackson’s wig,

The crow and angel of it, its closer-

Walk-with-Jesus, with-thee, satisfied, lonely,

Holy, ghost, blessed in rapture, actual

And otherwise, her wig, a walking on water

With the faith of a wig; each wave of black hair

A pew strapped to the forehead of prayer

And singing all in it. What’s it all about

Is burning beyond loss, learning to rise

In and out of disaster smelling of smoke

That can heal the sick—wild cathedral

In the wilderness opening itself

To any light, dream, or dram of song unhitched

From heaven; And the mules and men get so happy,

Hallelujahed, they strut, brown-suited, bewound

In light like bow-legged Louis Armstrong

At the Newport Jazz Festival, 1970, Mahalia

Lining out ECSTASY and sweating through it

Until it can do nothing but rain

And the second line, confused, leaf-strewn, late

Limps onto stage, but Mahalia Jackson’s wig

Keeps flying, and the rain touches evening’s brow

Bringing with it the stars and Mahalia

Jackson’s wig flying as if a star

Suddenly freed from the mouth of God

A Black tooth blessing. No longer, no longer


Shall you take things second or third hand—joy

Ecstasy, pleasure, the blessing of sitting in the rain

While gathered in the hair of some tree—

Because Mahalia Jackson’s wig is fl ying,

And the dead, for once, are dancing, too—in the rain.

Roger Reeves’ fi rst book of poems, King Me, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Poetry,yyamong others. He’s won awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Whiting Foundation, and Princeton University. His next book of poems, Best Barbarian, isforthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2022.

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When Prince Was FilipinoIt was 1983 I was 14 years old the night

Charmaine Makaiyak led me in secret

to the basement kitchen of St. Matt’s cafeteria

She put her lips on my left earlobe

and soft-sang two choruses of Prince’s “Do Me”

so I might finally learn how to slow dance right

Was it winter?—because the prettiest sophomore

at the Annual Filipino Family Gala

took my hand and an icy wave

climbed up my banks a blizzard wind

shook both my alleys and all my leaves

fell off my trees

What’s a bony floppy-haired boy to do

but keep his eyes wide open acknowledge

the tabernacles of silence built above him

and then open his arms

to enter the thick religious mist

of grape hair spray that surrounds the girl

who is about to kiss him?

Every once in a while it is good

for us to remember there was one February

of the last millennium when Prince was

Filipino just like me five-foot-two

in big-heel shoes He sang so good

and played every instrument All the rumors

we wanted to believe He was our Ecclesiastes

of Nasty our Funky Future our unrepentant

sweet and sinful serenade

While all the grown-ups spazzed out to Laura Branigan

Charmaine and I convened in the dark

tearing at the seams of rayon

to study the country that history hid inside us

Every time we shifted our hips we killed

another century By August

they’d pop Ninoy in the skull and drop him

bloody on the tarmac of Manila International

so we slow jammed and sucked each other’s lips

under the fat dazzle of a disco ball Dawn

and dusk I watched both Jersey skies turn

purple OK Prince was never Filipino And I

was never very American even

when I was one of two horny kids

trying to get back to where our parents’ tropics

first burned and so what a lucky bum I was

when Charmaine snuck me

into the room where custodians kept all the fire

I held her until the sun bumped through

and the heavens swelled

the color of a busted left eye socket

Before you could type your name in light

to find where in the world your body was hype

before fiber optic before

we got terachomped before we hired a machine

to count the hits

a girl let me hook one finger

into the loop of her tight stonewash

Jordache knockoffs

and I brushed my thumb back and forth

over the little mile of sweat-cooled skin

hiding under the cropped neon tanktop

riding up her side She taught me to move

I never went to sleep

It was 1983

America didn’t know what time it was—

and neither did we

TWO POEMS

PATRICK ROSAL


Jacob SaenzThrowing the Crown

Throwing the Crown by

Jacob Saenz, winner of the

2018 APR/Honickman

First Book Prize, is available

in APR’s online store at

www.aprweb.org and at

other outlets. Throwing the

Crown was chosen by guest

judge Gregory Pardlo.

Jacob Saenz is a CantoMundo fellow whose

work has appeared in Pinwheel, Poetry, Tammy,

Tri-Quarterly and other journals. He has been the

recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship

as well as a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He

serves as an associate editor for RHINO.

Learning to SlaughterAfter a while I let the fl ies bite my legs

I never got sick of the children

singing karaoke I wasn’t amazed

when the young ones kept on cutting the air

with all the tin in their bodies

all the rust in their bodies

The pig squealed so wide I could see

the pink ridges of the roof of its mouth

The pig kicked so hard

the four men had to let go

It kicked and kicked until

it fl ipped off the block into the dirt

My cousin touched the spot

along the neck with his fi ngertips

as if there were no knife

to push hard through the hide

A girl waited on her haunches

holding a bowl to catch the blood

I stopped speaking to anybody

and that was the closest I got to prayer

I put down the knife

It was just a matter of time

before the music started again

though the children were well into the second chorus

I let myself weep openly in the unpaved street

The amateur muggers and sommeliers

of cheap rum didn’t even sneer

as they skipped over my ankles

I knew forgiveness: The children stopped

for nothing

not even the strange sobbing of an uncle

My aunt said Enough

and it was enough

The men brought buckets to wash away the blood

When they were done

the water was so clear

you could sip it from someone else’s hands

Patrick Rosal currently serves as inaugural Codirector of the Mellon-funded Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden, where he is a Professor of English. He is the author of fi ve full-length poetry collections including the forthcoming The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems.


The BalletThe dancers

In a terribly bright

Light blue gauze

Retained the mystery

Skating on a lake

Blue and ice

An illusionary time

Where poetry feels inevitable

The terrific clown

Who lies inside

Every blue dress

Does he see me

Always a star

Always a root

Horrible auras

At the door

But no matter where we start

It all ends in an ocean

Hard and fast

On the approaching blue dawn

Until then

A deep low whisper

What is language anyway

An ending that never happens

Love is like a butterflyWhen you’re around

It’s like the smallest lilacs

Are in bloom forever

Between us

I feel the tiniest tender flowers

The smallest little lilacs

Between us like many glowing eggs

That we gently volley

And roll back and forth between us as a song

Despite the world and all its cruelty

We dare not break them

We use every ounce to give them care

Despite it all

My mad heart

Small and insidious

Your heart and all its madness

An aquarium with the tiniest fish

Always sweet and green forever

Small and insidious

That is what they will say

Of our love

People write poems

About all of their

Fake love

Real love is a tiny flower

We barely touch between us

Real love is tenderness

VoiceWe all said horrible things to each other

You said I’m crazy so I said you’re boring

In the context of things, we certainly were even

The ghost said: All you do is make stuff up

So I said in sighs: But doesn’t everyone

When someone dies

Eventually you forget their voice

Death is such a lie

It buzzes around you

Poetry you are the red room of my life

Where I go to be any age

Where I can be anything at all

WinterMaybe I was born weeping

A sort of loss of faith

In the utter blanketing darkness

I muttered it

Until I meant it

I mustered: Poetry will save us all

The orange plants magnified

Everyone surrounded

By endless fires and disease

Maybe I was born kneeling

Atop the orange mountain

No rebirth in sight

I should have stayed alive

I told the end, a little quietly

The frigid sun—it said nothing

You know they tried

But they couldn’t stop me

I waited until they forgot about me

And then I ran

The Endless GardenEverything will be a tree

In the afterlife

And after we have ruined this one

With an endless party

Of oil and money

The spirits will make us flowering acres

To enjoy the limitless fruit

When you spot me there

You might take down a golden peach

And say, eat eat, my beloved

Oh but you were never my friend

And I’ll snatch your fruit from you

Ever since the day that we first met

I’ve been the snake in the endless garden

Waiting for your stupid kindness

Your big dumb hand to sever

You meant more to me than any of themYou meant more to me than any of them

I said as I wound around the bend

But you never listened

Just like every single person in the poem

You just up and went

About your business

While half complaining

While half

Not really complaining about anything

And when we took off our outerwear

And our lungs were filled with a sort of paste

Nothing was abstract

Certainly not my love of you

Still like everyone I forgot my name

The name of my town

I forgot nearly everything

Including you

But you meant more

Than any of them

I remembered that

Until the end

SEVEN POEMS

DOROTHEA LASKY


SpringNever blame a rat for being a rat

Never blame a cloud for being a cloud

Never blame a person for being who they are

Which in my case is short and stocky

And quite ill

Never blame a friend for not being your friend

Never blame her for stabbing you in the back

It was you that could have stopped her, after all

Never blame the sun for being the sun

Or the moon for you know, being itself

Never blame a face for being a face

Or the stars for being true to the sky

When things start, they start

Never stop them from being so

Never blame an aquarium from housing fi sh

Or a lock for keeping you in

Never blame the color blue for being very blue

Never blame the rat when he bites you on your back

He’s just doing what’s he’s supposed to do

His fanged teeth

Their hanging down

The way you missed them

The way you miss the sea

All these pretty fl owers

Drugged in the water

Creative sunrises

The very fact

Of their undertaking

That there is a spirit to things

You know, it is everywhere

All this beauty

The living art

The self

The roses

And all

Dorothea Lasky is the author of fi ve full-length collections of poetry and one book of prose. Her newest book is Animal (Wave Books).

Katherine Bode-Lang

THE REFORMATION

“. . . the speaker in these poems achievesher own form of grace, writing directly of thefemale body and learning to trust her own instincts. She wrestles with self-defi nition . . . revealing, for readers, one woman’s path through contradiction and tradition.”

—Robin Becker

Available from APR’s online store


All that matters is feeding the lake.

I don’t matter. The lake matters.

You must keep feeding the lake.

—Jean Rhys

There’s a goddess for

me attended by

two tall black dogs

named Rage & Grief.

You’re humiliated,

just like this, whenever

the familiar arrives.

You believe nothing

you have ever known

could save you now.

Stark tall

black dogs

attend the Goddess, with her

tall head toward the sea.

There’s a goddess for me,

or anyone. That’s the pattern,

but sometimes, you say

I feel like food

for a lake I can’t see

or buy property on.

I bend over my work

while the Goddess hovers

writhing in famous stillness,

like a paused fl y, between

the two magnets

inside of her dogs.

I serve her.

My reasons

though my own

remain unknown

to me. Something is mine

once I cannot touch it.

I pace the strand

with my hands folded,

passing her columns,

passing her obelisks,

her two tall dogs.

You wanted a place by the lake.

I wanted to sing a song there

with the voice that I sing in at home.

Stephen Ira holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has published work in Poetry,yy Fence, tagvverk, and others. Ira co-founded and co-edited Vetch, a magazine of trans poetry, and is currently a poetry editor at the magazine Strange Horizons.

RAGE AND GRIEF

STEPHEN IRA


When I write I like to listen to the same song over and over again, although need to listen feels a moreaccurate phrase. This repeated listening returns me to a place where I can see the next thing Iwant to say, although of course I don’t mean seewith my eyes, just like I don’t mean returns me to aplace exactly, although I wish I did.e

Let me try this again. When I sat down towrite about one of those songs, it returned me to the place where I first heard it, the place it came from and even the place where I’m listening to it now. These places have nothing in commonexcept inside of me, which is the place a story begins, as well as where it ends:

I’m on my way to meet Van Morrison for coffee.I text my husband from the backseat of Fran-

kee’s shiny red BMW. Frankee teaches mindful-ness at Queens University in Belfast, NorthernIreland, where I have been living for several months on a 2020 Fulbright Fellowship at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Fran-kee wears square black glasses, pedals around thecompact center of Belfast on an E-bike and is great company, if prone to spontaneous Zen-ish interrogation.

“And what do you have to offer the North of Ireland?” he asked five minutes into our first meeting. I’d just shoved a handful of onion crispsin my mouth.

“My attention?” I replied, my mouth still full. He nodded, but not in a way that indicated whether this was or wasn’t an acceptable response.

“And did you know your own face before you were born?” I don’t recall what I said to that one,but eventually I also learned that Frankee was life-long pals with Van the Man.

Yes, that Van Morrison, I reply to my husband’s surprise face emoji.

It has been nearly a quarter century since an otherwise unremarkable college boyfriend from Boston ghosted me cold while also gifting me immeasurably by leaving his copy of Astral Weeksbehind in my boom box. My apartment that sum-mer perched above an equally unremarkable mid-western Chinese take-out place. Each morning as I climbed out the window onto its roof to drink acup of scalding Nescafé, I pressed play. The early air smelled like greasy dumplings and soft tar and my hopes for what the still-unfolding day mighthold seemed to hinge on whether or not I’d got-ten up early enough to listen long enough to hear Van Morrison sing “Cyprus Avenue” before work. The song’s refrain of way up on, way up on worked on me—or so it felt—like a spell. One that sug-gested I was going to change my life.

I’d actually described my little Van Morrison listening ritual earlier in the week to students in the creative writing class I was teaching for theHeaney Centre. We’d just begun a module onekphrasis, a term that commonly refers to poems written in response to other works of art. By way of example, I’d shown them Rilke’s one aboutlooking at a headless Greek statue, which, in Ste-phen Mitchell’s translation, famously ends, from all the borders of itself, / / burst like a star: for here there is no place / / that does not see you. You must change your life.

“Haven’t y’all ever encountered a work of art that made you feel watched,” I asked, “something that made you want to change your life?” VanMorrison had been born and raised in East Belfast.It couldn’t hurt to bring him up, but the studentswere a polite bunch who smiled carefully and laughed nervously and it occurs to me now that Iwas likely asking a more loaded question than I’dintended, as words like encounter and r watched can dstill evoke Belfast’s notoriously troubled past.

Despite being born post-1998 Good Friday Peace Accords, my students still breathed sectarian air, especially when it came to their educations. Irecall one soft-spoken rugby player explaining that he’d “never even met a Catholic until Uni.” They were third years, closing in on graduation, and soabout the same age I was when I began climbing out onto the roof to drink bad coffee before bik-ing to my work-study job folding shiny pamphletsfor the Office of International Programs. I wasn’tsure where I was going but it was somewhereother than where I was, and this would becomesomething of a pattern. My students’ futures loomed even more uncertain, though not in ways any of us had even begun to expect. Boris John-son had finally managed to wrestle Brexit through Parliament, leaving details of the so-called North-ern Irish backstop in flux. Most everyone believed

this would be the big drama of 2020, although when my husband asked our cab driver how heimagined Brexit would change his life, he replied, “Two cheeks of the same backside if you ask me, so it is.”

Some friends back home in San Antonio remained understandably confused about where exactly Belfast was located, geographically on theisland of Ireland yet in an administrative region of the UK. The images of a blood-red hand I noticed on flags all over town also meant we were inside the province of Ulster, which includes northerncounties on both sides of the border. One medi-eval legend describes a boat race where the firstchieftain to physically touch the land would layclaim to it. As they approached, one cut his handoff and threw it ashore.

Wash your hands well and often. A new sign had flashed on the bus stop earlier that morning. It wasmid-March by then, and as we wrapped up what would turn out to be our very last class together,I glanced over to where students in the Account-ing course that met next waited in the hallway.The faces of three young Asian men were framedby the window cut into the door, and so appeared pressed behind thick shatterproof glass. Queens

University has loads of international students andI was accustomed to these guys lining up every Thursday. I wasn’t accustomed to only seeing their eyes, or to anyone wearing disposable surgical masks, pale blue flags of a strange not-so-distantcountry we’d all be living in soon enough.

Van’s concerts have all been canceled, Frankee mes-saged me on WhatsApp as I walked the long way home to our flat, cutting through the Botani-cal Gardens, the late morning sun making a sur-prising if blurry poached-egg-like appearance on the horizon. I told him a poet from Texas wasaround the place.

Frankee’s next question was more straightfor-ward than usual, if also a bit loaded: He wants toknow if you’re free to meet this Friday? Was I free?Freer than I’d felt in years actually. The weather since our December arrival had been uniformly wet and cold, but I still woke every morning with a glowing, almost giddy disbelief that I’d managed to arrive here—a new world, and notin the instant-coffee-fueled-make-a-new-life-plan-every-morning mode of a twenty-year-old who still believed she had time to do or be any-thing, but with the more weathered expectations of a still-married mother nearing fifty, my desires fully entangled in the lives of my beloveds. It gets harder to change your life. Or even to imagine how you might.

Together my husband and I had lost brothers and fathers, gotten and given up jobs, crashed cars and added second bathrooms. We almost lost each other at one hard turn. Closing my eyes, I can still return to the foggy morning, three years ear-lier, driving South Presa Street, sure I needed to burn down my life because I couldn’t recognize who I was or what I had loved. When, as Sea-mus Heaney’s translation of Dante puts it, “In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself astray in a dark wood/ where the straight road had

been lost sight of. /How hard it is to say what it was like . . .”

Actually, it isn’t that hard to say what it was like at all. I told my husband I felt more “seen” by another, and we began the long hard work of fig-uring out how to see each other better again.

Relocating our family, even just for this year, felt like a new project we could create together. It was going to change our lives, if not permanently at least ekphrastic-ly, providing a different windowin which our faces might be reflected with new clarity against a background of different trees, the dark Divis Mountains on the horizon, and framed by Samson and Goliath, as the shipyard’s immense and bright yellow cranes are known. I wanted our kids to learn the details of a different landscape that they would then carry with them, tangible evidence that their world wasn’t the world. I didn’teknow exactly where any of this would lead, but I believed I was okay with not knowing.

My more personal hopes also seemed reason-able enough. I was going to walk along the real Cyprus Avenue and recognize the smell of a turf fire coming from a row of ceramic chimneys. I was going to find a traditional music session with more fiddles than flutes. I was going to wave our

TOO LATE TO AA STOP NOW

JENNY BROWNE

Yes, that Van Morrison, I replyto my husband’s surprise face emoji.


daughters off to their grammar school all spring looking straight out of a Derry Girls episode inmatching skirts, ties and wool blazers. I was going to encourage my husband off on his own adven-ture to buy a mid-80s Land Rover Defender he’dfound online for sale in his grandfather’s Welshhometown, a massive rumbling green machine he would fix up to captain us around the rim of Scotland all summer long. I was going to let mynew path home change my way of looking, a newaccent change my way of listening, and new ques-tions change my understanding of myself. Most importantly, I had time to let a new place happen to me.

I am still an English professor, but I just had to Google what to call the verb tense of the sen-tences I just wrote, all those that begin with “I was going to . . .” Grammarians like to refer to this as “future in the past,” a way of talking abouta time in which something was still in the future, even though now, at the moment of speaking,it is passed. Another way to say this is that weuse future in the past when something anticipated tdoes not actually occur, when an expectation is canceled.

In the time that has passed since that bright morning when Frankee and I confirmed our plan to head out past the sparkling waters of BelfastLough and on to where the steep Antrim coastline peeks from beyond the Culloden Hotel to have coffee with Van the Man Morrison, the legendary singer has nearly gotten himself canceled, at least in the social-media-speak sense of the word, for writing and performing COVID anti-lockdown songs. I get it. I was going to go to his concert in Derry. I miss seeing live music fiercely, and worryfor the livelihoods of performers and those who depend on them, and I’m also not listening to these new songs.

But I have been listening to “Cyprus Ave-nue” again, if a different version this time around. The BBC calls It’s Too Late to Stop Now onewof the greatest live albums ever made. During the summer of 1973, The Man toured with aneleven-piece group known as the Caledonia Soul Orchestra. At some point, he took to ending these shows with “Cyprus Avenue.” The live recording is an inspired, improvised, and ferocious take that goes on for nearly ten minutes. You can hear thecrowd’s excitement from the beginning. The piano twinkles jazzy if a little restrained, biding its time. All the little girls rhyme something / /On the way back home from school. / /Then the leaves fall one by one by one by one by one by one / /Call the autumn time a fool.

What does it mean to call the autumn time a fool? I didn’t get to ask Van Morrison that ques-tion, but I thought of it often as I played the song on repeat, obsessively, every evening as I walked my dogs past a stand of Cypress trees on the SanAntonio River as weeks of lockdown dragged intomonths. Texas’ deciduous Bald Cypress are differ-ent than the evergreen variety that grow in Bel-fast, with rooty elbows and long needles that turn a deep red before falling, seemingly all at once, come winter. Herons and cormorants roosted on the bare branches, their reflections opening and closing on the river’s surface.

I likely told my Belfast students that the word ekphrasis comes from the Greek for description and was originally a rhetorical exercise of close atten-tion, one designed to recreate the experience of an object for an audience that was not there to see it. And probably also that painting developed asan art intended to depict, and ultimately preserve,what would soon be lost.

I am here to see you is what I heard myself say asI paused to watch the birds yet again, my throattightening with grief. And maybe this is a ver-

sion, if still insufficient, for what I was trying to say to Frankee way back when he first asked what I had to offer. It is also what we say with our bod-ies when we linger before a work of art, or enter a room where a loved one waits in a hospital bed. Except so many cannot see their beloveds. Except I can barely stand to watch my new freshman stu-dents back in Texas trying to impress one other on Zoom like eager, awkward birds. How frag-ile they seem, how lost. It has begun to feel like we are living through a time devastatingly full of what some call ekphrastic hope as we attempt to erecreate the canceled world: classes, relationships, concerts, plays, exhibitions, graduations, weddings and funerals, and also that we believe we some-how can.

Most days I still struggle to walk beneath theweight of all we have lost, and so I’ve taken to repeating that one line: I am here to see you. Dearest masked friend and dearest masked stranger, dearest future fear and dearest dumb regret, I am here to see you. I say it again, and in the saying I have slowlyand painstakingly made a new ritual that is chang-ing if not my life at least my days, of which a life is made.

But isn’t a life also made of the future youimagined? And what are we to do now, if that is what we call this in-between place when the future still feels dangerous, if not impossible, to accurately imagine?

I once read a book called Stumbling Upon Hap-piness by a Harvard psychologist named Dan-iel Gilbert, who suggests one thing that makes humans uniquely human is that we future, making decisions now on what we believe will make us happy later. Apparently, we’re pretty bad at this. I couldn’t find my copy but I did come across Mal-colm Gladwell’s (?!) Amazon review which echoes what I remember of Gilbert’s argument on the


objective failure of human imagination, “We’re far too accepting of the conclusions of our imagi-nations,” Gladwell writes, and “Our imaginations aren’t particularly imaginative.” Another way tosay this is that our versions of the future—and the past for that matter—mostly resemble the present. We unknowingly add and subtract details withoutrealizing how different things will feel when theyactually happen. And yet we future on. We can’t ehelp it. Future-ing is what allows us to shape our lives, an essential part of what Gilbert calls “our psychological immune system.”

But I was going to. I’ve also come to believe that future in the past is the verb tense of thepandemic. The unfinished sculpture. The vir-tual happy hour. The great incomplete sentence of 2020. Yeah, my tongue gets tied / every time I tryto speak. And that’s the line in “Cyprus Avenue,” the turn when the live version of the song really starts to feel like the moment we’ve been thrustinto. Van Morrison stutters dramatically, enacting the act of feeling silenced, uttering a series of pttsand tssts, sounds not words. Or at least this is what I hear now, and what I see, and what sticks in my head as I struggle to process—and maybe evenmore to name—what has come to feel like pro-found grief for something that hadn’t even hap-pened yet.

But I did get to meet him for coffee. I evenate several of the bracingly sweet Northern Irishfridge-bake desserts known as “fifteens,” so-called for the number of marshmallows, crushed biscuitsand candied cherries you dump together in the food processor. The Man is in his mid-70s now and has long trimmed the epic ’70s sideburns that fronted the Soul Orchestra. His leather-brimmed fisherman cap and skeptical eyebrows made memiss my own father, or what he might havelooked like had he lived long enough to come visitme in Belfast.

Frankee had warned me that Belfast’s most famous son isn’t exactly known for his charm, and he did seem plenty ticked off about his shows being canceled, but mostly he was kind, evensweet to me. We talked about poetry, and when Iasked him which of his own writing he was mostproud of, he didn’t hesitate. “What I’m writing now,” he said. “Now that I’m old enough to actu-ally know something. It’s hard to be other people’snostalgia.”

As we walked outside to take a picture, I leanedin closer to give him a kiss on the cheek, and he

made a joke about “giving them that old Scien-tology smile.” I look at this photo now and shakemy head. Was I trying to kill Sir Van Morrison?Of course not, but wasn’t what was going to hap-pen already happening? The cautious Asian stu-dents? The weird hygiene warning at the busstop? A known case of coronavirus already at Queens? Families from the girls’ school already enroute home from spring break ski trips in North-ern Italy? The virus was here and was going to behere, and it would change all our lives, and in say-ing this I can’t help imagining the young strut-ting lion he was on stage in 1973, pacing back and forth as the band waits for his sign, all the guitarsand the drums and the strings hovering in antic-ipation as he lowers his arm and ends the song, if not a version of the world, with a final great shout:It’s too late to stop it now.

Still we talked of meeting for breakfast the fol-lowing week, but then, on the way back to South Belfast with Frankee, I glanced at my phone andfound an urgent message from the U.S. State Department suspending all Fulbright programs worldwide. We would need to make arrange-ments to leave as soon as possible. I turned thephone over and looked out the window as Fran-kee drove all the way up Falls Road and back down the Shankill, playing impromptu black taxitour guide, pausing at an alley where his cousinhad been taken, shot during the Troubles. Friendsand colleagues closer to my own age, no matter what “side” they grew up on, all had some ver-sion of this story, a pervading sense of connec-tion via loss, so much that Belfast often seemed a place wholly devoid of nostalgia as I was regu-larly reminded of how bad it had been, how much things had changed, how I wouldn’t even recog-nize the place.

How will any of us describe where we wentthis year and what we saw this year? Will we even recognize ourselves? What will we call the con-stellation of all who have been lost?

At one point, Frankee slowed to point out somemurals on a towering iron “peace wall” built tokeep Protestant and Catholic sides of neighbor-hoods apart. Many of these walls are still func-tional, and perhaps still necessary. You can cross over during the day, but not at night, another detail I find myself wanting to describe whenever I hear the words social distancing. I also can’t help wondering if this corner of the world was some-how better prepared than others, having practiced distance, resistance, suspicion and grief for hun-dreds of years.

And I think then of my sweet Irish students,leaning forward in their seats, reading Rilke and trying to imagine their lives differently, now stuckwith a version of the past becoming present again. But is this not also the essence of the ekphras-tic urge, the attempt to represent an experience c

for another, to bridge the gap in time and space with language, knowing it is likely impossible, but still trying, a kind of future-ingf even? Once Igknew “Cyprus Avenue” as a song about possibility because it found me at a time when all the futures I imagined still felt possible. Now when I listen to it, I see a working-class Belfast kid crossing a fancier tree-lined street than the one he lived on,and the glimpse of the beautiful girl he was going to talk to. If he hadn’t been stuck with where he was, and with who he was, as we all are. But still he made me feel it. Mostly, though, I think about what Van actually said, the feeling he had of being trapped by other people’s nostalgia, by our longing to return to a place, a home that no longer exists,or perhaps never did.

Jenny Browne is the author of three collections of poems, Dear Stranger, The Second Reason, and At Once, all from the University of Tampa Press. A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin, she has received grants from the San Antonio Artist Foundation, the Texas Writers League,and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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18TH ANNUAL

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POETRY FESTIVALJanuary 10–15, 2022

• KIM ADDONIZIO • LAURE-ANNE BOSSELAAR

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How will any of us describe where we went this year andwhat we saw this year? Will we even recognize ourselves?


ANNUNCIATIONAA

MICHAEL DUMANIS

The words I put in him he troubles with

and over, shifting in reverse the syntax of,

as though a poet troubling the line

with malaprop, but not a poet yet. He’s three.

He’s lived less time than most

of the anxieties I’ve nursed for him.

Please don’t roll over on the other boy,

I whisper from the ball pit’s burbling edge.

Three years after he opened into the fluorescent

annunciative light of the extraction room

his eyes, I case the boiling pit’s perimeter

for his lit smile and fail

to understand one thing he feels,

this human foal, vortex of appetite, machine

of noise, child who won’t blow

the softest sound into the pennywhistle,

this charming man who can’t quite purse his lips

to activate the bubble wand, tiny muscles refusing

to hoist the necessary sails. The future promises

countless encounters with useless specialists

waving in his face wands, while tonight

my son waddles out three hours after being

put down, the muslin penguin

pajamas sagging slack at the hip,

to murmur to himself amid the assembled

living room wreckage of miniature trains,

with trancelike clarity, his eyelids half-glued,

this is my whole life, this is my whole life,

and my world too.

Michael Dumanis is the author of two books of poems: Creature, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2023, and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. He teaches at Bennington College and is the editor of Bennington Review.

Chessy Normile

Great Exodus,Great Wall,Great Party

Great Exodus, Great

Wall, Great Party

by Chessy Normile,

winner of the 2020

APR/Honickman First

Book Prize, is available

at APR’s website,

www.aprweb.org,

and at other outlets.

Great Exodus, Great

Wall, Great Party was

chosen by guest judge Li-Young Lee.

Chessy Normile received a BA from Sarah

Lawrence College and an MFA from the

Michener Center for Writers at University

of Texas Austin, where she was awarded

an Academy of American Poets University

Prize in 2018. She lives in New York and

edits a zine series called Girl Blood Info.

-


The UnderstandingThe rain is splashy.

The baby is fat as a

pat of butter.

Mother is sleeping.

No one is crying.

Because it was time

to live with strangers

baby was born.

Hearing the rain

jumping in puddles

he feels another event

is due in time.

Not knowing what,

not guessing what,

he listens to the rain

as if it were a figment

of his new home.

He doesn’t know it’s

the lonesome denial

of all he wished for.

Da, he says, Da da da.

Manger StoryToday they are storing the manger.

The lamb and the donkey get folded flat

and put in a box with a hand-painted

sign Do Not Disturb! Manger Scene!

Watch that angel goddamnit gets yelled.t

Mary and her baby collapse in a crate

where she can’t quite hold him.

They get stuffed with the hay

and fall asleep, like we do after

our dinner, only longer, and longer,

like prisoners of their own dreams.

The Big Star’s energy is turned off

so it’s of no help at all

to any of us, everywhere.

And the unpacking! It’s hard, life-

draining work when that day comes.

One by one the wise men wake up.

The camel’s leg may be broken

but Mary’s breast is still perfectly

round, like an apple in a parachute

gently landing.

First CommunionIn my opinion, Walt Whitman

was the first man

on the moon,

even your ashes

on the last day

of autumn, half-

broken by the wind,

cannot go there,

these words physically

in front of your eyes

cannot go there,

but if you look

at your pancakes

when the little bubbles

break and rise

you may get some sense

of the surface of his mind

and when you eat them

he will fill you

with the whole benefit of being,

heavy at times, so heavy

come lie with me

for a moment love

Poem in Which IExplain MyselfBecause there was never an infant

in our house, I never learned to cry.

Because there was not a goldfish

I never learned to swim.

Without plants I could not grow,

without flowers I did not open.

A pen was first created by God

so he could write down events

to come. Without events,

what use were our pens?

Plenty, it turns out.

This is how I write when I’m not

being very careful. This is how

I write when I’m a bit more careful.

This is the best I can do.

MarcasiteI who speak here spent a winter

in wisdom. It is a hard cold

glittering place, its music disappearing

as the snow falls laterally over

a level field. No one can hear it, no one

can possibly listen to that kind of

lost space. Sure, a few blue glints

but really, dusky friend—

it’s like a photograph of the dead

you only really see after they’re gone.

And you feel the birds and the cats

and the dogs all need their claws

clipped, that that’s all it would take

for you to feel it, but it’s winter

and the roads are closed, you don’t have

any clippers, and if you did

you’d cut your own nails,

which have pierced you.

The Hazy Part of ArtHe stood on the rocks

and fished

then sat on the rocks

and drew the trout

he’d caught

Beautiful pictures

they were, alive

in every line

Tangerine PeelWhat did the little tangerine do

to deserve to die like this?

I am a scalp of myself, skinned

by my own thoughts. Ah poetry,

god of molting turkeys, save

my brother from the truck, save

my mother from the fire, save

my sisters and fathers from the

dust of their own homes,

save their children from drowning

in love, save my friends from

going through the ice, save

all animals from starvation, and

those who have gone rogue, save

them too, strangers everywhere,

try to save them, my husband

and puppy. Ah little tangerine,

by all implications of the dictionary

you do not deserve to die.

Forgive me.

The FutureI may be wrong, but

I think I am an acquired

taste, said the saltine

laced with lavender.

And she was right, I

could not “go” there,

rush into her arms

for a surprising embrace.

Yet that very day a light snow

laced the smaller flowers,

all of them purple.

Spring! What Alka-Seltzer

is this? I bubbled up

as words hurried

out of my mouth—

O cracker, most intimate

of allies, when life is down

to a dram and a farthing,

even I, the open blabber,

will try anything new,

O future, O you.

Mary Ruefle’s latest book is Dunce (Wave Books, 2019). She lives in Vermont.

EIGHT POEMS

MARY RUEFLE


Poem Beginning to SoundMyself as echo, failed synonym

Disappeared music returns to my father’s house

playing against a white painter’s cloth nailed to the wall

(a flag was waving distantly)

(the perimeter wet with flowers)

Like a child burying favorite words in the sandbox

I filled the undying year with tasks

(I keep at it)

Planting fingers in the gaps between lines

I wrote notes into an opening

for he who departed in color, I knew only lightly

(across from the oil-filling station, rosettes of cloud)

It’s Saturday and I’ve made promises to remember the dead

Some circuitry ticking painfully in the forehead now that Uncle is gone

A needle-work of electrical wire passing

through the young heads of trees

Old books begin to bore me, their yellowing answers

Birds squawking poetry beside a rusty pond

and Uncle in my mind turning always

like the last abundant word

Poem for Feeling’s SakeMorning with a feeling to walk

Limbs churning through air and the traffic so polite

Where the past meets the day’s magnetosphere

a hectic body, growing older and more unknown

as the mood turns

Trees in the plaza boxing for sky

Something dry and melancholy rustling underfoot

I passed the sunburned outline of a vine against the garden’s pale wall

One bud in the neighbor’s gutter

the other reaching as it opened

Who am I to think about philosophy, money?

Reading books in my sweltering private factory

When the color of the hour was really gemstone chiffon

swirling in a giant god’s eye

When time coughed me up naked and dazzling

I was hungry for nectarines and heavy cream

Fish heads in broth, sprouted white beans

While up from here, past a cool starry nothingness:

infallible satellites roaming in description

their chrome rabbit-ears tweaking out human signs

Poem for ChoresToday his esophagus aches

The words choking a little inside their tubes

and swishing the blue soap

around yesterday’s bowl, light hums the attendant

seams of dust—

He coughs twice

into a shirt sleeve, the cat rustles

and shreds her papers

The mouse in the tub he released

with a blessing: until next time

In the interim the To-Dos in neon

went on and on

In the mind, terrain of neurotransmitters

or cobwebs? Stopping at the desk

to pluck an unripe word

All days he sits down with the sun

whispers to his lime

as he muddles

Sweeps the broken glass to safety

Polishes the chrome bits

I look for him there at the end

of a task: his pinky finger curled

up just so

A hook, or the enchanting sail

of his hand

now at rest

The comma before the rest of him

FOUR POEMS

WENDY XU


A Dream of ShandongFog grasping concrete

Some trees babbling into air

Why do I turn my head piously

to the sky?

Cranes of steel

and smoke were opening

their hungry beaks

Little sorrows arranged

on the stove top at home:

pills for Grandfather

Uncle’s tank of air

Cords of dust traveling

mischievously into corners

while I spin around

on a rock of my own invention

A servant to the black and white cat

that hooks into my shirt-sleeve

Her lavish ambivalence

I come here to think

and eat up another sky

To sit with Uncle

unbothered for a day

in the shade of a maidenhair tree

Discouraging intention

like a brand new thing

Nothing at all dark or lonesome

when he wakes

I write land-shy words to Uncle

as soft as mute wind

sailing across the tops of his hair

Wendy Xu is most recently the author of The Past (Wesleyan, 2021) and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry,yy Tin House, Granta,Poetry,yy The New Republic, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere. She teaches poetry at The New School in New York City.

Taneum Bambrick

Vantage

Vantage by Taneum Bambrick, winner of the

2019 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is

available at APR’s website, www.aprweb.org,

and at other outlets. Vantage was chosen by

guest judge Sharon Olds.

Taneum Bambrick is a 2018–2020 Stegner

Fellow at Stanford University. She is a

winner of the Academy of American Poets

University Prize, a Susanna Colloredo

Environmental Writing Fellowship from

the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the

2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest.

First Editions from Winners of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize

Heather Tone

Likenesses

2016 Winnerselected by Nick Flynn

Please visit our online store at: https://the-american-poetry-review.myshopify.com/

Maria Hummel

House and Fire

2013 Winnerselected by Fanny Howe

Alicia Jo Rabins

Divinity School

2015 Winnerselected by C. D. Wright


The Hawthorn

A woman thought

she saw Christ

in a tin pail of milk

on the barn floor

rain outside His face

blue as marble

in the predawn

milking what were His

keepsakes as a child

a stone maybe

stashed in the dirt

a conker like ones

boys collected for

fuel and left rotting

in heaps near

railway stations

during WWI the casings

reminded Him of

His mother the shape

her hands made

days she found

her temper—lost

we say—but is that

true? the woman knew

it’s always there

in the tree in the limbs’

restraint beneath

the shell the solvent

the hard dark

seed chemists rushed

to ferment then sent

to trenches men

cut from the farmland

a woman saw

Christ in the mist

fertilizer’s stale scent

come in through

the eaves come Jesus

in the sweet

hay dampening

The Monarch

Once, I was decorative, could

stand very still, quiet as a thumb-

tack holding up what was important.

I was handsome, too, in the right

weather, my heart like a pool of

metallic shavings, or the thoughtless

whirr of a curtain catching whatever

the pane let in. Is it true we worship

things made in our likeness? My face

in my daughter’s face, sharp as time’s

punch line: that she carries the youth

that was mine. I watch myself

walking the long blocks from fall

to spring, the schoolboys in filed

companies ignoring even my shadow.

Vanity’s a funny thing. The shelves

all lined with ointments and creams;

my mirror, like a hunter’s camera

set on a carcass, trying to game

the game. In captivity, elephants

have been known to grind their

tusks against the walls of their cells,

nights passed upright and swaying

as if to lull themselves away from sleep

rather than toward it. I understand

their defeat. As if happiness were a button

lost in the grass, not the protractor’s

dance on a graph as we try to connect

our lives’ little squares. For years

I mistook the Polaroid of my mother

holding me in the car as our first

together, but here we are among the wild

asparagus, high as bamboo, as though

no labor could break her. In the photo,

she commands a rake, while I wait, six

weeks to go in utero, my retinas

pulsing toward scraps of light.

My second pregnancy took years

off my life. Bedridden and hooked

to tubes, I worried my daughter

wouldn’t outlive the darkness of

the womb, her brain shedding any

synapse related to sight. In this photo,

all is fine—my father watching over

my mother’s shoulder beneath a sky

too blue to be true, which has something

to do with why, when my daughter

begins to cry, having discovered—

after coaxing it from its pupa—

the withered butterfly, I call its death

a trick of light. In her sketchbook,

we trace the proboscis, the compound eye

that would have tracked the sun’s

descent. We label the antennae,

the wings’ delicate panes. The monarch

wanted back its cocoon, I explain,

because the light was too much.

She fiddles with an orange crayon.

I push the mesh cage aside; meaning,

I do what my mother did. Pretending

abandonment is natural, I smile. And lie.

Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife and Two-Headed Nightingale,and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, an anthology of essays. Con-sulting Editor for Acre Books, she currently lives in Dubai.

TWO POEMS

SHARA LESSLEY


St. Roach (c. 1973)

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,

for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,

they showed me by every action to despise your kind;

for that I saw my people making war on you,

I could not tell you apart, one from another,

for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,

for that all the people I knew met you by

crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling

water on you, they flushed you down,

for that I could not tell one from another

only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.

Not like me.

For that I did not know your poems

And that I do not know any of your sayings

And that I cannot speak or read your language

And that I do not sing your songs

And that I do not teach our children

to eat your food

or know your poems

or sing your songs

But that we say you are filthing our food

But that we know you not at all.

Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.

You were lighter than the others in color, that was

neither good nor bad.

I was really looking for the first time.

You seemed troubled and witty.

Today I touched one of you for the first time.

You were startled, you ran, you fled away

Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.

I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

I heard Muriel Rukeyser read her poems aloud twice, once in 1976, once in 1978. The first reading took place in a long narrow room on the top floor of the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. She was presenting with Gerald Stern, who had recently hired me for my first job in Pennsylvania Poets in the Schools, and he invited me to tag along. I hadn’t been to many poetry read-ings yet—I have subsequently put in my ten thousand hours—and I was over-excited by the crowd. I recall that Rukeyser looked stately but not vigorous, and slightly tilted, I suppose, if you knew how to look—I didn’t—since shehad suffered a few small strokes over the past decade. She seemed grandly oldto me—she was sixty-three—and had a face shaped like an oversized heart. I was carrying my copy of Breaking Open (1973) because I loved her poem “Despisals.” I wouldn’t have had the language to describe it then, but I musthave intuited how it filters Martin Buber through Walt Whitman to come up with a personal ethos. It’s a sort of “I and Thou” for the American poet of difference:

Never to despise in myself what I have been taught

to despise. Not to despise the other.

Not to despise the it. To make this relation.

with the it: to know that I am it.

I remember two of the poems that Rukeyser read that night, “Waking This Morning,” where she refers to herself as a violent woman trying “to be non-violent /one more day,” and “St. Roach,”which was about to appear in The Gates (1976),the last individual collection that she published inher lifetime. After she read each poem that night, Rukeyser would let the page fall carelessly to the floor, and slowly the drift grew, like a scattering of leaves.

Ever since college, I have been enthusiasticabout the eighteenth-century mystic, the mad, religious polymath, Christopher Smart, who hadwrenched his piercing observations, his extensive reading, and his jubilant faith into one of the moststartling and unlikely epics of English poetry, Jubi-late Agno, and so I was amazed when Galway Kin-nell choreographed a group reading of the poem in New York at The Church of the Transfigu-ration, otherwise known as the Little Church

Around the Corner. There was a full house for the twenty poets and a choir from Holy Cross to sing Benjamin Britten’s setting, Rejoice in the Lamb. I remember the grand procession, all those poets who are gone now, the older ones I looked up to, who included Etheridge Knight, Allen Ginsberg, GracePaley, Philip Levine, David Ignatow, Allen Grossman, Nancy Willard, JaneCooper, Joel Oppenheimer, Harvey Shapiro, Thomas Lux, Vertamae Gros-venor, Paul Zweig, Stanley Plumly, and James Wright, who read the passageabout Jeoffry, Smart’s one faithful companion. I wish I could write a pieceabout each one of these poets; to me, they had a rumpled collective glow, as if a group of union representatives had ambled into a fifteenth-century Ital-ian painting. Here they were, the wiry and the whimsical, the burly and thelion-headed, some with high pipes, others with low growls, all of whom hadcome to give loving voice to the long dead, one of the great outsiders of Eng-lish poetry. It takes all sorts of major and minor figures—I don’t consider the categories meaningful—to make a national poetry.

Rukeyser was the last to take the podium—she looked more fragile now but still vibrant and undiminished—and what happened next was upset-ting, strange and magisterial. In one of Kinnell’s last poems, “Jubilate,” he described the experience of listening to her edgy soaring voice, in full song, swelling light. It felt as if the podium was trying to lift itself.

And now it became evident that our podium

was not rising, it was Muriel who was sinking,

toppling in fact, hauling down on herself

the microphone and amplifier and all their wires,

into a heap on the floor. From under this wreckage

her suddenly re-clarioned voice was heard: “Let Zadok

worship with the Mole—before honour is humility!”

And as we disentangled her, she sat up and scanned about

and said: “She that looketh low shall learn!”

Rukeyser had collapsed at the podium. There was a flurry of activity, everyone on stage lurched forward, Kinnell and Paley rushed to lift her, tohold her up in her jeopardy. Someone in the back wanted to call an ambu-lance, a doctor rushed forward, but Rukeyser was adamant: no ambulance!no doctor! She seemed to be suffering a stroke—she would die just two years later—but, for now, she wanted a seat so that she could finish reciting her pas-sage. She was a performer, and one did not quit a performance:

Eased into a chair at last,

she smiled: “Let Carpus rejoice with the Frog-Fish—

a woman cannot die on her knees!”

By the time Rukeyser came to read “St. Roach” during the Bicentennial year in Philadelphia, she already had a lifetime of poetry and social activismbehind her—in her case, as her friend William Meredith put it, you couldn’t wedge a knife between them. She was fully engaged in linking her personal experience to a larger social experiment, the individual to the community. “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry,” she wrote in the first line of thefirst poem of her first book, Theory of Flight (1935), and it was a mantra that tshe followed for the rest of her life. Rukeyser had strong Leftist commitments that drove much of her work—she was a political troublemaker—but she wasalso hard to pigeon-hole because was neither a proletarian poet nor a socialist realist. She brought a kind of romantic utopianism and modernist aesthetic tothe sensibility of the New Masses. T. S. Eliot may have disliked the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, but both poets shadow her work.

Rukeyser is a ragged modernist. Formally speaking, her poems were often rambling at a time when American criticism was clenching around the well-wrought urn and the sacred object. She ostentatiously included politics in her

AN APPRECIATION OF AA

MURIEL RUKEYSER,

“ST. ROACH”EDWARD WW HIRSCH


work at the very moment when New Criticism was intent on divorcing poetry from history, and her reputation paid the price. I would say that she also brought a messy irrationality into poetry in away that enraged poets who believed in tight form and rational control. It’s almost breathtaking the way that her work routinely pissed off some crit-ics, like Louise Bogan, who attacked book after book of hers in The New Yorker. I happen to loverrBogan’s poetry, which Marianne Moore describedas “compactness compacted,” but it’s precisely the opposite of Rukeyser’s Whitmanian free-versesprawl. It’s as if Rukeyser’s formal unruliness, her freewheeling unconscious associations, troubled Bogan’s mind.

There were always contemporaries whoadmired Rukeyser’s poetry, but it would takeanother two generations, forty years or so, for poets to start contending with her. We haven’t had many American poets with such a deep moralcompass, such a sharp historical sensibility, and such a committed social consciousness. She was unusual in the way that she twinned poetry andscience. She often hastened a poem because of her moral outrage, but she was also determined to bring all of herself into her work in a way that hadn’t been done before. She wouldn’t split her-self off into different roles and identities. “To live as a poet, woman, American, and Jew—thischalks in my position,” she wrote in 1944: “If thefour come together in one person, each strength-ens the other.” Three years later she wrote a nine-poem cycle for her yet unborn son that describedpregnancy with an honesty and complexity thatwas unheard of at the time. She chalked in single mother to her position.

Rukeyser believed that American poetry, “the outcast art,” had a crucial place in American cul-ture. I agree with her that poetry has been an essential resource that we have often wasted in our country. “American poetry has been part of a cul-ture in conflict,” she declared in her prose book The Life of Poetry, which is as valuable today aswhen she wrote it in the late forties. She goes on to define two essential features of American life:

We are a people tending toward democracy at the level

of hope; on another level, the economy of the nation,

the empire of business within the republic, both include

in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare.

It is the history of the idea of war that is beneath our

other histories. . . . But around and under and above

it is another reality. . . . This history is the history of

possibility.

Rukeyser understood that warfare has been inter-woven into our history, and she opposed it with a vision of democratic possibility. She said: “To be against war is not enough, it is hardly a begin-ning. . . . We are against war and the sources of war.”

Rukeyser spent much of her life opposing war and trying to imagine peace. She was concernedwith root causes and social imperatives. She didn’tview peace as something that automatically comes to us, but something to be constructed, like awork of art. It is something to be made, like love.Rukeyser was unusual as a political poet becauseshe was careful to locate the enemy within as well as outside of herself. It’s true, she argues, thatwe need to reconcile ourselves with each other, but we also need to reconcile our conscious and unconscious minds, sleeping with waking, “our-selves with ourselves.” There is a fraught psycho-logical recognition in her work that we are alldivided beings, that we not only need to unifywith others but also to make peace with ourselves. This is where a late poem such as “Waking This Morning” comes in. It’s hard for a violent person

to be “non-violent,” she suggests, when our days themselves are repeatedly filled with our country’s violence.

In the preface to her first Collected Poems (1978), Rukeyser argued that there are “two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the docu-ment, the evidence itself; the other informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep and sometimes—with strength of expression and skill and luck—reach that place where things are shared and we all recognize the secrets.” These two divisions of expression, two types of reach or ambition, don’t separate out so neatly in her work. For example,she was ground-breaking in the way she brought the documentary into American poetry in the1930s, especially in her long poem “The Book of the Dead,” which responds to the Hawk’s NestTunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. The poem interlaces her own experience of driving through West Virginia with a record of testimonies and memorials from survivors, whichare reportorial and gut-wrenching to read. Andyet even here the overall poem borrows a symbol-ogy from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a col-lection of spells and inscriptions based on ancient tombs and tomb paintings. These spells are “the unverifiable fact” and they give a dream-like or Jungian weight to the documentary evidence.

Part of Rukeyser’s achievement, in fact, was to bring the inner life to the outer one, to infusethe facts with a sort of visionary utopian gleam.What’s moving is the way she kept showing up over a forty-year period to right the record, to write about the Scottsboro trial in Alabama andthe Union Carbide catastrophe in West Virginia,the Spanish Civil War and World War II, the racial divide and the civil rights era. She protestedvociferously against the war in Vietnam. She sur-prised people by talking about the troubadoursof Provence and Languedoc and then declared,much to the dismay of some high school Englishteachers, that the Beatles were poets. She was not apologetic for writing out of the body and cham-pioning women’s experience, a womanist subject matter. When I was eighteen, I read her book The Speed of Darkness (1968), and its sexual franknessshocked me awake:

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis

Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt

Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.

The Speed of Darkness provided many people with a model of personal presence. A line in “ThePoem as Mask”—“No more masks! No moremythologies!”—provided the title for the first keyfeminist anthology of the early seventies. A ques-tion and answer in “Käthe Kollwitz”—“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open”—providedthe title for the next one. Rukeyser linked fem-inist issues to human rights. When I met her in the mid-seventies, she had recently come backfrom South Korea, where she had gone to pro-test the imprisonment and death sentence of the dissident poet Kim Chi Ha, the basis for “TheGates.” She had a sort of porousness as a storyteller (“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” she said) and registered the lives of other people on her pulse. For her, it was all personal. She said, “the emotional obstacle is the real one.” I like her impatience in the poem “Islands”: “O for God’s sake/ They are connected/ Underneath.”

Rukeyser got the idea for “St. Roach” while she was stuck in a Washington, D. C., jail, whereshe had been locked up for an anti-war demon-stration. It was inspired by a close encounter witha real roach. Rukeyser’s son recalls that she was a

fan of Don Marquis’ humorous verses and shortstories, Archy and Mehitabel, which describe the adventures of a cockroach, who had been a free-verse poet in another life, and an alley cat. There’s a touch of self-mockery here, a backdrop of com-edy wedded to politics. I don’t think we shouldshy from the fact that there’s also something dis-turbing about the poem; it’s designed that way.The frisson comes from designating sainthood to the lowliest and most disgusting of urban insects. Rukeyser plays on the fact that St. Roch is the patron saint of plague victims; he embraces inva-lids and others who are shunned. Rukeyser was a secular Jew and yet I hear Christian sourcing in this poem. For example, the prayer “Litany to Saint Roch” lingers somewhere in the back-ground: “Saint Roch, whose heart was burn-ing with charity, pray for us . . .” Behind this, too, stands St. Francis’s “Canticle of the Crea-tures.” Galway Kinnell was using the same model for “St. Francis and the Sow,” which he wroteabout the same time as “St. Roach.”

From the opening line, there is something odd and old-fashioned in Rukeyser’s phras-ing, “For that I never knew you . . .” The phrase “for that” is an archaic wording for the conjunc-tion “because,” i.e.: “Because I never knew you, I only learned to dread you.” Here, the poet is not just employing an outdated English idiom, she is also using the diction to elevate the roach and invoke an older, more archaic form of knowledge.Most of us who grew up in cities were inculcatedwith a primitive dread of cockroaches. That’s why“St. Roach” is such a decisive and unlikely praisepoem. I can’t help but think of it as a response andeven an admonishment to Kafka’s pained depic-tion of Gregor Samsa in “Metamorphosis.”

Rukeyser’s lyric proceeds by a series of ana-phoric repetitions. In the history of poetry, the strategic device of anaphora (from the Greek:“a carrying up or back”) serves as the organiz-ing principle for most catalogs and lists, as in theHebrew Bible. It is a joyous piling up of partic-ulars, which is why it was so useful to Whit-man, whose litanies are the basis for American free verse. Here, the free-verse rhythm is almoststately, the diction slightly elevated. The opening movement, a single sentence of eleven lines, estab-lishes the primary pattern:

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,

for that I never touched you, t they told me you are filth,

they showed me by every action to despise your kind;

for that I saw my people making war on you,

I could not tell you apart, one from another,

for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,

for that all the people I knew met you by

crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling

water on you, they flushed you down,

for that I could not tell one from another

only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.

Rukeyser purposely uses a biblical cadence toinvoke the despised roach. Christopher Smart provided a clear precedent in many of the most arresting passages in Jubilate Agno, which leadwith the word “For,” as in “For I am not with-out authority in my jeopardy” and “For they work me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded than others,” and:

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.

For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily

serving him.

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he

worships in his way.

Rukeyser brings Smart’s sense of jeopardy toher thinking about a common insect scapegoated


by terrified human beings. The language points up that there is something cruel and excessive inour war on these small indistinguishable beings,who are repeatedly targeted: crushed, stamped, scalded with boiling water, flushed down the toi-let. The summary of the cockroach as dark, fast, and thin brings the speaker to a realization: “Not like me.” This punch, which is delivered as ashort, indented sentence, turns the poem. What happens next doesn’t have precedent in Smart but comes from Rukeyser’s own ethical stance toward the world.

At this point in the poem, we understand whatwe have suspected all along: that the roach is both itself and a representative figure. It stands for other people, all the unknown and despised, the Other.The way the poet manages this identification is by bringing the idea of cultural inheritance to the cockroach. Think of Vietnam or El Salvador or any other culture that the U.S. has ignorantly confronted with our foreign policy. There may besomething outlandish about Rukeyser’s catalog as it applies to the cockroach, but something deep and even self-evident as it applies to other cul-tural heritages. Now the list presses forward with a series of conjunctions: For that is transformedtinto And that and finally intot But that. Each line is a unit, but there is no punctuation to stop the rush of knowledge, the shame of not knowing:

For that I did not know your poems

And that I do not know any of your sayings

And that I cannot speak or read your language

And that I do not sing your songs

And that I do not teach our children

to eat your food

or know your poems

or sing your songs

But that we say you are filthing our food

But that we know you not at all.

The psychiatrist Robert Coles said that thepoem “St. Roach” provides “a beautiful lessonin the psychology and sociology of prejudice.” Rukeyser distances herself from inherent preju-dices, she turns a cold eye on them in herself, asshe individuates the roach: “Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.” She specifically invokes racial difference in order to dismiss it as a bias: “You were lighter than the others in color, that was neither good nor bad.” The next coupletintensifies the speaker’s education in two simple declarative sentences:

I was really looking for the first time.

You seemed troubled and witty.

This characterization of the cockroach is whatis usually called personification, the attributionof human qualities to non-human beings and things, but I don’t think that adequately describes

what is happening here. Rukeyser is not so much projecting her own feelings as trying to describethe life of another being, which she is observ-ing, how it seems to her. There is a slight self-amusement as she reaches to describe the reality of an utterly foreign creature, someone she hasjust stumbled into, who interests her. The rea-son that this is not simply personification is thatthe cockroach also stands in for a human figure, the otherness of another person. She is attributing human feelings to a something that both is and is not human.

I’ve appreciated the last stanza ever since I heard it more than four decades ago. It has a phys-ical charge. The time frame of the poem changes from “Yesterday I looked” to “Today I touched.”The speaker has learned that we need to under-stand things not just intellectually but also bodily, by touch. Who touches this touches a man, awoman, a cockroach:

Today I touched one of you for the first time.

You were startled, you ran, you fled away

Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.

I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

In standing up for a lesser creature, Rukeyser is also speaking on behalf of all those who are differ-ent, such as Jews and women and disabled peopleand refugees. Rukeyser was bisexual, and I have no doubt that today she’d include everyone under the rubric of LGBTQIA+. The end of this poem is also just a beginning. Formally, the poem comes full circle. Rukeyser began with the statements, “For that I never knew you” and “for that I never touched you,” and now rectifies that ignorance. The last line progresses in three distinct parts: “I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.” Focusing on touch and knowledge, on knowledge by touch,

“St. Roach” becomes an unlikely quest and wis-dom poem.

I think that “St. Roach” cleverly inverts theNazi and Fascist symbolism of enemies as vermin. It also eerily anticipates the use of the term “cock-roaches” in the Rwandan genocide, where theHutu extremists justified exterminating the Tutsi people by labeling them inyenzi (cockroaches). It’s ipossible to dehumanize people by taking awaytheir individuality; apparently, it’s easier to murder people who are considered subhuman. It takes acertain sort of poet, but also a certain type of per-son, to treat a cockroach as an individual and sanc-tify an insect. It’s not an obvious move. It takes aholy foolishness, the kind of grave and comic riskyou find in Christopher Smart and William Blake.

Muriel Rukeyser was the sort of poet and per-son who extended her democratic vision to other creatures, other people, and stood up for thederided and detested. She wasn’t squeamish or territorial, she welcomed the stranger. She alsounderstood that she was living in what she called“the first century of world wars,” a time of crisisand global conflict, an unprecedented era of kill-ing, a nuclear world. But she didn’t lose her way, she kept her bearings, and stood her ground. She contributed to the aggregate. Her work is a tes-timony to the document and the dream life, and that’s why she opened the gates for so many others to walk through with dignity.

Edward Hirsch has published ten books of poems, including Gabriel: A Poem and Stranger by Night. He has also pub-lished six prose books about poetry, most recently 100 Poems toBreak Your Heart. His new book, In the Heart of Amer-ican Poetry, will be published next spring by the Library of yyAmerica.

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Strata

You don’t understand, he says, again,

from the backseat of the car, my son,

who only months ago, could not fall

asleep before whispering, first,

some secret in my ear. When I look

in the rearview, he turns toward peaks

in the distance, and when I ask him to

explain, shaking his head, he sighs as if

it isn’t worth the trouble. I had

the same words for my father, and one day,

cursing, pushed him through the doorway

with the full strength of the body I had

grown into. At forty-five, he could

have pinned me to the wall, but at

what cost? It’s a story we don’t like

to tell, though my son and I ride between

the rocky hillsides in silence until

he asks how long it takes to get

there, an apology in the sound

of his voice if not the words. I do

understand. Not long, I say, as we

drive through desert mountains that

have stood for six million years,

and which I thought in my youth looked

like the fallen bodies of giants, gods

grown over with yellow grass.

Rara Avis

A falcon, one of millions raised

for sacrifice. An X-ray

reveals the bird, un-tombed,

wrapped in linen, wings pressed

the length of its ghostly body.

Force-fed mice, sparrows, it

couldn’t expel the bones, the claws,

and died having eaten too much,

the stomach packed: feather and

fur, tail descending the throat.

One of many bred to brave

the dark with its king, beyond

appetite, nothing left

to crave, thus, heavenly, saved.

Pancreas

from the Greek,

pan-,

meaning “all”

or “whole” and

kreas, mean-

ing “flesh.”

A gland, like

a sponge, se-

creting fluids to

regulate blood

sugar, torr

break down.

Common

ailments include

inflammation (pan-

creatitis) ands

cancer (ab-

dominal pain,

weight loss,

jaundice). It’s

possible to live

without one, my

father says

on the phone, a

dryness in

his mouth, his

tongue sticking as

he tells me what

to expect if

he’s lucky. And

all day, everything,

no matter how

small, makes me

think of it,

hidden deep

inside me,

weeping. The bee

crawling in

blossoms

scattered on

the glass

tabletop. The sound of

a pitcher fill-

ing slowly

with water.

FIVE POEMS

BLAS FALCONERFF


Where It HurtsWhere do you go when you

forget who you are? You sit

at the window, and neighbors stop—

Pilar, the seamstress—to say,

Hello—Hector, Goodbye. Each time

a shop door opens, small bells

chime. In the morning, nameless

mountains rise, and at night,

I carry you to bed. Before you die,

you wake in fits of pain,

delusions. Mother asks where

it hurts. Here, you cry, and here.

Apology for My Son Who Asks to Live with Us ForeverWhen the car stopped in front of the house one night

after the long drive, my father lifted me

from the back seat. He’s awake, my brother said,

Asleep, my sister, their small shoes turning stones

on the narrow path. I didn’t open my eyes

but could smell my father’s breath, warm and sweet.

Is not, Is too—they argued as I floated like

a dream through the dark above them,

cradled under the great branch. The roots pushed deeper

into the soft ground. I was neither, of course,

and both. The sound of a key as it entered a lock.

The sound of a door swinging open. Closed.

*

We haven’t left the house in months, touching

almost no one else, and you fall asleep

holding my hand until your breathing grows

long and steady, your face soft as if

you’ve gone some place I can’t. My own

father lies in a hospital on the other side

of the country, and through the phone,

over the sound of machines, nurses, their

questions, his voice grows weaker, telling me

what he won’t. Like the day you dove

to the bottom of the pool, that stillness

on the surface, me holding my breath.

Or the summer my father, in a small boat

with the white sail and simple red star,

skimmed back and forth along the shore, where I stood,

waiting. Years from now, I’ll be telling you

this: Forgive me, Son. How can I spare you from

what I have not been spared?

Blas Falconer is the author of three poetry collections, including Forgive the Body This Fail-ure (Four Way Books, 2018). A recipient of an NEA fellowship and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, he teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University.


Our dog died in the ugly disaster

that is aloneness. She died on

the first floor, in my sister’s apartment

on a makeshift pad shifted halfway

from beneath her. And I caught the center

of her dying, the shake, the after-bit

tongue swelling from her mouth.

My girl. Good girl. She half-died alone

and finished with us there.

My sister and I rubbed her side

and she shook and blinked then blinked

no more but breathed a slow breath

as I rubbed her head then kissed her

forehead. Even in death she was mine

to kiss. She was not ugly. Much like

the story of the boy from school

who was shot in the head and lived to talk

about it and lived to hear us all talk about it,

the hole that needed the help of others

to close. And his neighbors around him looked

into the hole in his head as if slowly realizing

they’d all that time been watching a friend

climb from the vortex of skin-bone-hush,

the hole puckering like a fish and the head

it inhabited didn’t move, didn’t twist,

wasn’t dead but dead quiet. And I imagine

the hole like a howl from a dog,

like the diamonds in a chain-link fence

that let sight in but not the flesh. This

is the end, do not enter or take part in

what little you’ve been allowed to see.

Howl like a warning. Howl like a plea.

Do not pass. Do not step into this shape

in which everything ever missing takes shape:

the dead dog buried in the backyard,

the contour of sorrow that is any boy’s back

darkening then disappearing altogether

from the door on his way to school,

on his way coming back

but he must leave first. Everything

must leave before it comes back.

Even the trees

lining the one-way streets flanked

by liquor stores bright as the mansions

of devils. Even the trees must first catch fire,

drop their fire, stand naked in penance

as we rake their burnt garments to the gutter.

Yes, even wakefulness must go toward sleep

and sleep must wake. Even the body

leaves then comes back

as dirt, as a mind reeling into itself,

a brittle recollection:

Was our dog 13 or 14 when she died?

When I kissed her forehead, was she

already gone or still passing through,

the last bit of her dying mixing

with my sister’s breath, the vet appointment

of no use now. I closed her eyes. It’s no use, howls

the entrance wound but they fixed up the boy

who spoke another language for a short time,

the trees bowing to hear him better

beyond their dancing boughs, in spite

of their leaves that let in a little mothlight,

a little streetlight so that gaps of leaf-

shaped darkness gasped across his face,

mouth-shaped leaves on his face

and they spoke back to the hole, We too leave.

We all leave. Hush. You’ll come back. Lazarus.

Concrete Christ. A memory.

A haunting. A possession

like an illness, like a bullet,

like a dog’s eyes staring back

then merely open

with no looking involved,

like a boy’s head

babbling on.

Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, IL. He is the author of the books Mutiny (Penguin, 2021) and Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016). Phillip has received a 2017 Whiting rAward, the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2017 Lambda Literary Award, a 2021 Liter-ature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He currently teaches at Bennington College and is a member of the founding faculty for the Randolph College low-residency MFA program in creative writing.

THE VOIDVV

PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS


I’ve known Melissa Broder for almost a decade. Iinvited her to my first book party because I was a big admirer of her writing and I wanted to meet her. She was smart and funny and I could tell she wanted to know something about what any of us are doing here (which is also something I want to know). Over the years she’s become a real friend and I’ve continued reading her with even moreinterest. Her new book, Superdoom, is a selectedpoems, offering the best from her last four poetry collections: When You Say One Thing but MeanYour Mother,rr Meat Heart, SCARECRONE, andLast Sext. She’s also written two novels, is one of the few non-cringe voices on Twitter, and is at work on multiple projects in Hollywood. What I most value about Melissa is her kindness and how no-bullshit she is. It’s a combination that makesa great friend and poet. Here’s a conversation we had in July of this year.

—Alex Dimitrov

ad You’re one of my favorite writers and one rea-son is because your subjects are god, death, sex,and obsession. They’re more or less my subjectsalso and it’s probably why we’re friends. Throughthe four books of poems you’ve written, what haschanged in how you think about those subjects? I’m not really sure I’ve learned too much by writ-ing about them. If anything, I kind of feel like I know less and less.

mb I think the knowing we know less and less might be the knowing! The wisdom of knowing we know nothing. This leaves room for the mys-tery, and what I love about the poetic form is that it allows for—and celebrates—mystery: negativecapability, learning to love the questions them-selves, or at least, to sit with them. A poem is arealm where we can live in a question—and gen-erate only more questions—and that’s a complete work of art.

I will say that there is one thing I have learnedabout obsession (though not through poetry) and that is: the day after you have a romantic dream about a person, do NOT contact them.

Something I have learned about god (though not through poetry): god’s will is never urgent.

Love: love is a verb, baby. I want it to be a feel-ing, a drug, but it’s a damn verb.

Something I’ve learned through death: that Iam a person who will talk to a tree.

ad I’m glad to hear you say that. We seem to bein a moment culturally where everyone “knows” something and wants to tell us about it with a kind of certainty and vehemence that, as a poet, I am very distrustful of. I always think about those lines from Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” What do you trust and what do you distrust as a writer? And I’m also thinking of when you sit down to write, too, not just in the world. I don’t even trustthe narrative of my own life sometimes. Probably trust that the least of all.

mb One thing that probably should not be trusted is an author interview—or any public conversa-

tion. Like, I love that we are simultaneously talk-ing on the phone and texting each other about personal injuries we have encountered as of late (my father’s accident, half-year ICU journey, and death, as well as my resulting grief, and my fear of my own grief; the loved one of yours who betrayed you, and why it took you a long time to perceive it as a betrayal—because it’s more famil-iar for you, and for me, to feel shame rather than hurt) while this Google document bound for APR is being constructed, as though in a separate uni-verse. Even now as I synopsize our text exchange, I do it with the public in mind. It’s not the raw goods, which I suppose I must not trust are “palat-able” or “interesting” or “literary enough.”

I like that Yeats quote. I’m going to go quote for quote with you in trying to figure out for myself what I do trust.

When half-gods go,

The gods arrive.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wish I could just get directly to the gods, inwriting and in life. But for me as a human being it seems I have to go through the half-gods and their destruction in order to get to the gods. I don’t always trust that I’m going to get to the gods. Sometimes the destruction of the half-gods feels like the end of me. But I keep going. So it’slike my feet trust, or—in the case of writing—my voice trusts, or my fingers trust, even though I don’t.

Someone once said to me that faith is a muscle. And I think this is probably true in my writing and my life. You just keep going.

Oh yeah, also, I would say I distrust blurbs.What are some things you trust and distrust?

ad I also distrust blurbs and, to be honest, I don’treally read them. I decided after my first book that I never want another blurb on any of my books. There’s something embarrassing and who cares about it all, you know? I haven’t had blurbs for a while now. These last two books have none. I said to Michael, my editor, I just want a poem on the back. That’s it. I didn’t want any quotes from reviews or anything like that either. I guess that’s another thing I don’t trust. I don’t trust reviews. So little about aesthetics or what’s on the page gets said anyway. Literary criticism isn’t criticism any-more. It’s just like a PR sheet.

I was thinking, though, as you were talk-ing about our texts and phone calls and just how we are in regular life and not in interviews, that you’re a writer I really trust. Trust in the sense thatyou don’t bullshit. On the page but also at events and in general. I remember I flew to LA once just to read with you at some bookstore because I knew I would have dinner with you after. Andyou’re one of my favorite people to have din-ner with. I was going to ask you that really cliché question about dead writers and who you wouldinvite to a party, but both of us prefer one-on-one stuff and parties annoy us. Partially because every-one’s so fake! So if you could have dinner with

any dead writer, who would you choose? I would love to eat steak with James Salter. I remem-ber when you were reading Light Years and I wasjust waiting for you to finish it because that book changed my idea of what a beautiful sentence is. I couldn’t recover! I’m not even straight and it’s about straight people, not that it matters, but itwas just so beautiful. When you encounter an actual art object, something gorgeous and well-made, it’s such a relief.

mb Hahaha, I love that your blurb is your own poem. You are stronger than me. I just looked into my soul and realized it’s blurbs of other people’s books that I mistrust. I must confess that I suspend cynicism for blurbs of my own books, because—I’m insecure and external validation gives mefive to ten minutes of relief. But I think that if Ichose to live in a blurbless world—like, if I wasn’t asked by a publisher to pursue blurbs, or if I made the decision to just go poem or text excerpt on the back—then the five to ten minutes of valida-tion would no longer be a priority. I think the five to ten of validation is a response to the encour-agement to chase blurbs. When it’s blurb time, Ibegin from a place of fearing rejection—and soany blurbs procured are a relief. But I’d love to not engage in the entire blurb system, thereby circum-venting the fear of rejection in the first place—andalleviating the need for its relief by way of a blurb.

Light Years is a great work of art, as is A Sport and a Pastime—one of my all-time faves.

I like having dinner with you because you cele-brate both being funny and laughing—giving and receiving humor—and that is one of the few attri-butes that make the company of another human being preferable (on occasion) to being alone. Also simpatico; no small talk; straight to the vein.

I would have dinner with Isaac Bashevis Singer at an old New York dairy restaurant I used to love as a kid, Ratner’s, which is gone now. I’d have gefilte fish and creamed pickled herring, then feel shame re: the fish, because Singer was a veg, and I wish I was still a veg (and I could be, easily, butam still fucking with beef jerky). Maybe one day soon I will stop eating dead animals again. Singer would get the vegetarian meatballs, and we would share noodles with cheese and apple cake in honor of my Dad (it’s fantasy-Singer so he’d be totally supportive of my desire to make our lone din-ner together a food memorial to someone else, and he’d also give me some Yiddish aphorisms about grief that don’t necessarily relieve my fear of myown feelings, or even help me stop judging them, but help me to at least laugh at the fear and thejudging, and remember that I am part of a long line of fear and self-judgment, and that fear andself-judgment are probably the flip side of some positive trait, and that I don’t have to judge the judging so harshly). And of course, the hot Rat-ner’s signature onion rolls would be served. With pats of cold butter. I’d drink Diet Coke. I imagine he’d have tea and orange juice, but maybe he’d hit the Diet Coke too.

Do you know where you would have din-ner with Salter? And how about a dead poet? I’d have roast chicken and sex with Emily Dickinson, I think. In the attic room. Or just sex with Lord Byron, though it’d be an emotional nightmare when he didn’t text after (he wouldn’t). Would it be worth the comedown? Not sure. I feel like Emily could get clingy after, but probably only inan epistolary way—which is fine, because my love language is verbal.

ad I love that. You know I always associate youwith Diet Coke. Actually Coke Zero. I feel like more writers should be associated with drinks. Iwould preferably have a drink with Salter, actu-

A CONVERSATIONAA

MELISSA BRODER

AND ALEX DIMITROV


ally. At Temple Bar, which used to be on Bleecker and Lafayette but it closed at the end of 2017. That last week I was there almost every night and they were like, what is this guy gonna do when weclose? God help me.

I wanted to ask you how you chose the poems in your new book, Superdoom. It’s a selected, so it’s kind of like a greatest hits. How did you feel looking back at the four poetry books you’ve put out in the last decade? You’re writing novels now, you’re writing screenplays, you left New York for Hollywood though you’re the most New York person I know, honestly. Was going back to the poems strange?

mb May god help us all. So, yes, I moved to LosAngeles from New York in 2013 because of my partner’s health. We needed to be somewherewarm and more easily navigable for someone dis-abled. I was really scared to leave the New York poetry world and its context. Creatively, I feared that I would be wearing dangly earrings and sell-ing my poems on the beach by way of typewriter within a year. I had this dread that my poems were going to become the literary equivalent of a bad Jim Morrison mural. But I moved here any-way. I was able to keep my day job, and I had no intention of writing screenplays, let alone prose.

As I talk about in the introduction to Super-doom, I used to write poems in motion in New York—frequently on the subway. I’m a perfection-ist so I prefer to do my first drafts in places where I’m not necessarily “supposed” to be writing (like on the A train or in the bathroom at Cheese-cake Factory) rather than at a desk. I actually don’teven have a desk. When I moved to LA, I couldno longer write while in transit. Like, it’s just notsafe to be typing poems while driving down RoseAve. So I began to dictate my words while driv-ing, or walking, using Siri and a free notes app. All of my line breaks disappeared. The language became more conversational. It turned into essays. That’s how I wrote the book So Sad Today. Or itwrote me.

After I wrote So Sad Today, I had an idea for my novel The Pisces. It sort of came to me wholeon the beach in Venice. But I didn’t know if Icould write a novel. So I just tried it, doing what I had done for So Sad, which is dictating. I dic-tated three paragraphs a day as an experiment. It took me about nine months to write the firstdraft that way. While The Pisces concerns Sappho

and is hopefully at its best lyrical, it’s definitely prose. And I think it was during this time that mypoetry energies began to drift into prose. I don’t think I’ve written a poem that I’m happy with since 2016. I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write a poem.

I would say that the poetry collection SCARE-CRONE is my favorite book I’ve ever written.EBut it’s out of print. Meat Heart is also out of print.tSo after Tin House published Last Sext—my last ttcollection of poems, which came out in 2016—we talked about doing an anthology of my out-of-print work, plus the best from Last Sext. Alsosome poems from my first book, When You SayOne Thing but Mean Your Mother, which is somerr -times in print and sometimes not (and definitelythe work I feel most meh about—probably becauseit’s my earliest—and which appears least in Super-doom). Greatest hits!

The way we chose the poems was I wentthrough all of my books and picked my favorites. Then the Tin House folks did a comb-throughand picked their favorites of those I’d chosen, plus added some of their favorites that I hadn’t chosen.And we went from there. It was easy.

As for screenwriting, that came about as an off-ffffshoot of my prose. There was interest here fromdifferent production companies in optioning andadapting my work for the screen and TV. We kindof decided that I would be best to adapt it. Asof today, nothing I’ve written for the screen has actually been filmed—yet. Things are brewing and more will be revealed. But Hollywood isn’t like the book industry. If a book publisher buys apiece of work, they will be publishing it. If a stu-dio, production company, or network options apiece of work, or even commissions you to writea pilot or screenplay, there’s no guarantee it willever get filmed. There are a lot of “working writ-ers” in Hollywood whose scripts have all turnedinto ghosts. But they aren’t starving. They’re eat-ing off the ghosts. Personally, I love the ghosts!The ghosts have been keeping me in health insur-ance for a few years.

ad To me you’ve always felt like a poet evenin prose. There’s an overall largeness that I startthinking about when I read your work. It goesbeyond the self and beyond place and into thingslike death, love, the afterlife. Often throughhumor, too. And I was going to ask you, I mean, you’re so funny in life, but sometimes people who

are funny in life are not funny on the page. You are. How do you think humor helps you accessthose most difficult and unknowable subjects? I think it has something to do with the fact that humor doesn’t try to teach you anything explic-itly. It’s not preachy. And it often makes you con-sider the exact opposite of what you believe.

mb I get my sense of humor straight from myDad, who was dry as a bone. One time I went to an Irish mystic and we discovered a “shield-shapedbeing” in the soul globe behind my chest (don’t you love symbols!) that had been passed on in my family for generations, and I think that’s the sar-casm. Maybe it’s the nicotine addiction. Both are longstanding Broder family traditions. But I def-ffinitely use my humor as a shield; also as a sweet-ener. When you fear vulnerability (well, the rejec-tion that might follow a moment of vulnerability) and have a simultaneous desire to connect deeplywith others, humor allows for those two states to coexist. It’s a bridge. And as for considering the exact opposite of what you believe, definitely. Itend to live in a state of believing multiple thingsat the same time, I think. Or maybe disbelieving multiple things. Both. A gullible skeptic. It’s just how I’m wired. Infinite sides. Learning to love thequestions. Negative capability, baby.

ad The Irish mystic! I remember going to so many Bulgarian and Russian mystics as a child. Maybe they wouldn’t call themselves mystics. Maybe they were witches. Anyway, sometimes I really think those experiences had a lot to do with why I’ve followed poetry as far as I have. Whoknows if I’ll keep following it. But I wanted toend on something big, like we began, because Iknow we both hate small talk. What’s your favor-ite and least favorite thing about being alive? Myleast favorite is that we don’t know anything about death. My favorite is having the ability to experi-ence people through time and to actually begin tosee them, for whatever they actually are. Though sometimes you never see someone, no matter howlong you know them.

mb Likes: being in a flow state. Dislikes: fear.Also, want to hear more about the Bulgarian and Russian mystics, but we’ll take that offline.

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems and lives inNew York.

First Editions from Winners of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize

Laura McKeeUttermost Paradise Place

2009 Winner

selected by Claudia Keelan

Please visit our online store at: https://the-american-poetry-review.myshopify.com/

Ed PavlicParaph of Bone& Other Kindsof Blue

2001 Winner

selected by Adrienne Rich

Tomás Q. MorínA Larger Country

2012 Winner

selected by Tom Sleigh


Pompous Symmetryall the young Jesuses look the same // and that’s why I’m afraid // of deserts

// we’re obsessed with trust // we’re obsessed // with origin stories // the

guns I shot out in the desert // watching the saguaros // that ripped flesh

// and I couldn’t stop getting caught in moshes // take down the tall one,

someone always said // and that’s why // all the young Jesuses look the same

// this extermination of meaning // sticks to my hands // it’s the pompous

symmetry of desert towns // their false sense of self-reliance // that’s why

// I try to forget // how to build a house // I try to forget // saying I don’t

need anybody // out here in the desert // while tanks of water // trainloads

of supplies // roll in at night.

so that’s why I’m afraid // of deserts // and all the young Jesuses // look the

same.

Poem Written at Pete’s Candy Store Ending with a Line from “Ray of Light”There were days when it was so my turn to wear the black robe.

When it was “Pick on Me Day.” I got that. I got the chill between

what I heard and wanted to hear. I heard the oh-snaps

muttered behind each face on the L train to work. These were the days

when the worship of authenticity went way too far. Like the poet

who told me not to write about a “riot” unless it’s an actual riot.

These days people just send unsolicited dick pics to each other

and start podcasts. But back then we’d wear Doc Martens

and bling wallet chains over a blanket party. In another age

we wouldn’t rock the word “evanescent.” Like, ever. Unless

something was really evanescent. These days, when the radio comes on,

I want to tell each face I see yo, trust me, home skillet—tt

there are hella better jams than whatever this is. And I feel

there’s a riot inside my head when I remember this, how guilty

and out of breath I felt all the time. And I feel like I should have

sinned more, should have exhaled more. I was all like, no duh,

we are in the era between the two Elvises, someone just brought

their pit bull into this narrow-ass bar, and you pick this moment

to call for a Madonna marathon? You go, chimerical figurehead of evil

at the end of this poem! And I feel like I just got home.

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to BeBecause each word contains a world, we should use them and give meaning

to them. At times, we inhabit the same alphabets without anyone taking on

another troubling kingdom, but I would still condemn them for performing

under devil horns.

Because nostalgia doesn’t mean homecoming. Or flat melancholy. Or

compounded memories. We are not remembering the remembering. No

rose-tints. No 1979. No transitions between childhoods.

Because I can’t communicate from the edge. I can’t communicate wearing a

turtleneck. So tell me more. Tell me to flip off out of this town. Let’s get out

of here and forget it for a couple years. I’ll call back.

You won’t be glad to hear from me. That’s fine. I’ll call it coming close to

everything I wanted, which is saying something. Some years are just better-

sounding than others. That’s a fact. Go ahead and be a hot child in the city.

Go ahead and fuse whichever conspiracy you want to with each other. Up

and down has patterns, and it gets old, Sister Sledge.

Because I’m through with crying just for me, Action Jackson.

Because it’s more about worry, over whether you might get hurt. And it’s

those salad days you want the most. The salads that went with the song.

Almost reformed. Almost a house party.

Because we can’t look back to what we once were. We ache. We long. Then

we found heavy metal and stupid pants didn’t matter anymore. End of story.

Because I don’t look like a girl anymore if I ever did. Today is the day I

didn’t cry. You think there’s a difference between the devil and free spirits.

I’m not so sure.

Daniel Nester is the author of five books, including Shader. His newest book, Harsh Realm: My 1990s, is forthcoming from Indolent Books.

THREE POEMS

DANIEL NESTER


Void

After three weeks of being left to dry and set,

the two Eastern tiger swallowtails

I brought back from the dirt road

we hiked, both dead and broken

into pieces like the painted parts

of a small mechanical 20th century toy,

cleanly run over while puddling,

two males searching for salt and amino acids

in the sipped water that allows what drives them,

were eaten, all save the wings.

Of course, these are my favorites parts:

the sooty tusk-like stripes pouring

from the arched top wing, the velvety black

border on the bottom of both, and now

sadly, the thorax gone like Hepworth’s oval void.

It is the year of the hole says Henry Moore

in 1932. I am afraid it still is.

I mean, the year of the hole. I mean

1932. My husband, for our anniversary

bought a bought a Celestron SkyMaster 25×100

to scan the stars and all the blackness

that surrounds them. I watch him

watch the heavens. He decides which are planets,

which are satellites, which are fodder

for black holes. But it is too simple

to know where all the emptiness resides,

how these gaps can give way to something ravenous,

something that steals all of the light.

Aubade on Hawk Mountain

This is the time of year we sleep

with the windows open

even in the rain,

hoping the sill and floor stay dry

enough. Birdsong begins

before the sun

with what sounds like

a thousand voices, flitting thresholds

of consciousness in the trees.

Yesterday we saw a garter snake

sunning itself on the trail to Sunset Ledge,

and a dozen red trillium lined up

to salute the eastern sun, their petals

already pungent and corpsey for carrion flies,

what gossip they can tell of winter,

bulbs inches deep, nestled together

for months and months.

Still under the down, we are nude

and touch each other’s bodies

in the pre-morning light. Rain checks

our breathing and it is here I tell you

of my dream of collecting yolk after yolk,

so many a large bowl fills

with a hundred tinseled suns.

But we don’t see the sun

anytime soon, we exhaust ourselves

and return to sleep as the morning slips by

on young and impatient feet.

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared inrThe New Yorker, New England Review,w Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and the Acadw -emy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

TWO POEMS

DIDI JACKSON

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When did my brother become God-fearing?

Over the phone, we caught up

on the past few months: the protests,

Black Is King, and our side hustles.

I need to be more present. Communicate.

I’ve been so driftless,

living in sublets in temporary cities.

If the peace he’s looking for is a room

with many windows within himself,

I worry he won’t find me there.

~~~

From the window, I notice the men who always smoke outside the deli are

missing the loudest one today; Amazon trucks zip to and fro; and thin blue

masks are being swapped for thicker, more durable fabrics.

~~~

Bought myself a luxury this week:

body wash from a perfume house

run by Carthusian monks in Capri.

It’s so extra I couldn’t resist.

It arrived today in a beige and white box.

My skin doesn’t break out.

The bathroom smells of lemon and cedar.

I feel happy tonight, my heart open

like a clear window facing a port city.

~~~

Read an article about a Frenchwoman’s book party: as a girl, she lived with

her grandmother, a simple cook (“Do better with less,” her injunction).

She published recipes for endives and ham, veal and mustard, “soup of the

corridor,” and peaches in red wine. The book, a minor hit, is “perfect for

our times of post-confinement where we learned modesty and self-reliance.”

~~~

Restlessly ate almonds. Worried

about a cavity, I chewed on the left side of my mouth.

All afternoon, I watched clips of Sister Wendy,

shady and informative.

Of The Wilton Diptych, she said: “Imagine a painting of angels

wearing American flags

and you will recover some sense of its tackiness.”

In a painting of the Baptist I love, he pulls water from a reed

with his lips and looks almost alive

in a desert where nothing can harm him.

~~~

The ZZ plant on my desk, a housewarming gift, got fungus gnats

everywhere. Bowls of soapy water laced with sugar haven’t done the trick.

Setting them out, I felt like I was preparing a dinner party. I used to joke

that I had a monastic temperament. I could never be a hermit. I love a man’s

weight too much, a weight so different from a great book.

When I told my mother I don’t want kids she said “Who will care for you

when you’re old?”

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness, forthcoming from BOA Editions in Fall 2021, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions). He is a 2019–2021 Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford rUniversity.

DIARY:

SIX DAYS AA

IN OCTOBER

DERRICK AUSTIN


The winning author and all other entrants will be

notifi ed in Jfi anuary 2022. An announcement of the

winner will appear in the March/April 2022 issue

of The American PoetrPP y Review. For complete

guidelines, visit www.aprweb.org or send a self-

addressed, stamped envelope to:

APR/Honickman First Book Prize

The American PoetrPP y Review

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Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735PP

THE APR/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE

For over two decades, this prize has been jump-starting

the careers of some of America’s most vital poets.

Are you next?

This year’s guest judge: Jericho Brown

Submissions open August 1 through October 31, 2021.

PRIZE INCLUDES:

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Distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium

Open to all U.S. poets

Book publication in 2022

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Entry fee $25. Manuscripts, following guidelines format, must

be postmarked or submitted online by October 31, 2021.


Like many of you reading this, I mispronounced words growing up that I first encountered in books. These words gained a life of their own inthe quiet hallways of my mind. This internal senseof sound and language had a tendency to trump the world’s, at least for a while, forming a music that was more reliably vital and personal than our shared lexicon. This is why it delights me when my students rhyme Goethe withe both, pronounceennui as i anöoey, or say penal as an echo of l banal(which is frankly an improvement); they are giv-ing themselves away as autodidacts, and revealing the soundtrack of their interior life.

One of the first moments I recall this inner lex-icon breaking the surface was in the midst of a second grade read-aloud: I was relating the dull happenings of a turtle who for some inexplicablereason had decided to visit a café, a word which I pronounced with confidence and vigor, rhym-ing it with safe. When Mrs. Hoffman, who worecat-lady glasses and smoked cigarettes at lunch, corrected me, I smiled patiently and explained toher the machinations of the silent “e.” It’s possibleI used my own name, Mike, to demonstrate thealchemy worked by this quiet vowel. The pause that followed wasn’t long, but I recollect it as res-onant. When Mrs. Hoffman’s husky voice kindly insisted, I was dubious and not particularly accom-modating. My patronizing solution was to pick up the read-aloud at the following sentence.

A few years later, in fourth grade, I encoun-tered a word I still love, though it only tangen-tially exists. That is to say, it’s in the dictionary shorn of its acoustical moxie. It first landed on mymind’s ear as a sort of sonic mixture between gris-tle and e miser, with connotations of both, a verbrrthat meant someone had been swindled or duped. I inferred that the infinitive form was to misle, which in my head rhymed with sisal, with perhaps a stronger z-sound in the second syllable. Sadly, I had been misled. When I realized my error—a mere prefix? attached to a flat dead-end verb?—I felt cheated. Mízled had gone from peacock to dplucked fowl. The number of deliciously sinewywords in my mother tongue had been reduced byone. To this day I prefer my version, and occasion-ally persist in hearing it this way when I run acrossthe word reading.

In this sense, the mind of childhood is an inviolate space. It’s the sheltered pond where webegin to discover the world through our own reflection wavering on the water. (Yes, I’m invok-ing the myth of Narcissus and giving it a posi-tive spin.) Eventually of course we learn to look through the self to discover what lies beyond, but those initial years when we build a facsimile of the world made largely of our own imperfect pro-jections are, I think, precious. Given the negative connotations of the myth, this might seem a con-trarian reading, but anyone who’s ever seen a baby first encounter themselves in a mirror knows how much delight there is in that discovery, how muchwonder and incipient self-love.

It’s worth noting, too, that Narcissus’s reflec-tion was largely a function of meditative still-ness: it needed that shaded, sheltered grove; eventhe gentlest of breezes would leave its imprint on

the water. This meant, as time passed, the world’s exhalations marred (and corrected) a lot of my childish misconceptions and misreadings. But the reality (and recollection) of this inner world can be remarkably insistent, and it should be held onto. While the built-in narcissism of being a writer may be indisputable—the ego and self-involve-ment of proclaiming, I was put here to say something;listen up!—it is also fragile. A part of the poet’s job, I think, is to listen to and replicate the weird idio-syncrasy of how we “mispronounce” the world.

Lucille Clifton’s “why some people be mad at me sometimes” lives beautifully at this intersec-tion. Here is the poem in its entirety:

why some people be mad at me sometimes

they ask me to remember

but they want me to remember

their memories

and i keep on remembering

mine

Like so much of Clifton’s work, the poem has a way of sidling up, whispering its sly and cut-ting wisdom into your ear, then wandering off before you know what hit you. It contains inci-sive wit, honest music, an ability to glide through many different registers, an utter lack of preten-sion. There’s plenty to pay attention to here: Howthose nineteen matter-of-fact words are placed in tension with the title. How the enjambment of each of the first four lines hinges on “memories”and “remembering.” How that final line/syllablelands with a beautiful abruptness, yet remains unforeclosed by the punctuation of a period—a punchline, a concussion that implodes instead of explodes like the detonation of a buried landmine, allowing the poem to end, audaciously, on a word of possession and ownership.

I’ve always loved that the opposite of the word remember—etymologically speaking—isrr dismember.rrThe word holds echoes of violence, of scars andhealing, and remembering is thus a word that wants gto pick up the pieces, gather the bodies. Discov-ering this was startling. I can vividly recall the moment when I heard (sensed?) that old mean-ing lurking inside the everyday connotation of the word. It seemed to rise out of the depths of the pond of language and briefly kiss the surfacebefore flashing its tail and returning to the deep. Because this was a strangeness not projected, butdiscovered, its evocation of previously unknown realms restored a little of the wonder into mymother tongue that was lost with the demiseof mizled.

Clifton’s poem knows and deeply feels this dis-covered meaning: that our bodies and families are both made up of members; that in recalling the past, we reassemble ourselves and our stories in acts of resuscitation; that these acts will always beimperfect, unfinished. When done poorly, such areading might connote a crude child made of tur-nips, or Frankenstein’s monster. When done well, we have the makings of a mindful history stem-ming out of personal truth, offering a reading of the poem as a prescient and powerful nineteen-word demolition of the motto on those stupid red

MAGA hats, 30 years before they ever existed.This reading (coupled with the genius of Clifton’s stunning economy) is a big reason why this partic-ular work circulates widely on social media.

But I think it’s also useful to ponder this lit-tle poem as an ars poetica, where the poem is born out of a request—“they ask me to remember”—the classic desire that art serve as a mirror of the audience’s reality. That the poem closes with a sly refutation of that desire only makes it more fulfill-ing in the end. You’re not going to get what you want, the poem announces, eyes twinkling, turning themirror inward. You’re going to get what I want you towant, it says, tilting the glass to an angle that trues what we see. The reader is left turned around, with a set of fresh eyes, and bestowed a new man-tra, Don’t tell me what I think I want to hear. Show me what only you can show me.

In other words, the poet says: It’s not you, it’s me.I sometimes joke with my students that this

classic break-up line is a perfect distillation of the myth of Narcissus. How so often when we mouththe phrase “It’s not you, it’s me” in an attempt to be gentle, we’re unwittingly revealing the truththat we’d rather relate with our idea of who some-one is, our wavering projection, than with theactual person. Once the crush stage ends, and thearrival of the flesh-and-blood companion into therelationship serves as a sort of interruption, we again catch ourselves (almost) telling the truth: “You’re not who I thought you were. You’re you.” Sometimes, I even offer my students a little poem, as a distillation:

It’s not you, it’s me,

said Narcissus

to everyone

all of the time.

It’s a break-up line so eternal that, when I wasliving in Mexico a decade ago, it was one of thefirst Spanish phrases I was able to spontaneously “get” while watching TV. In this particular com-mercial, a young couple sit in a car, the man look-ing soulfully at his beloved, her dark eyes welling with tears, and he gently takes her hand and says, “No eres tu, es yo.”

The car door slams and the woman rushes cry-ing up the steps. We cut to him driving away thenrushing up his own front steps, a light glimmering in his apartment, where he flings the door open and smiles bewitchingly at . . .

. . . his new love, the enormous flat-screen tele-vision glowing on the wall.

It’s a brilliant bit, one that offers as succinct a reading of the myth of Narcissus as I’ve encoun-tered, and one that presents itself as a solution to the problem of other people.

But poets write to be read, yes? Maybe it’s more accurate to say we write to be overheard. If I’m being frank, the initial, primary, and in some ways sole audience for my poems is always andonly myself. I write to amuse me, to discover anduncover, to open, to crack and to creak, to fum-ble, to see how far in and down I can go. Thegreater audience is invited to merely eavesdrop onthe conversation, through publication—a word that means simply to make public—and I do evencc -tually tweak poems when thinking about this sharing, but mostly as an act of translation. If I go deep enough into that place, honestly enough, myhope is that you’ll find you there.

Poets are lucky to work in the medium of words, which though they have value cost noth-ing. The dilemma is how to make people pay with that most valuable of currencies, their attention, when using materials so mundane. It’s like trying to build a woolly mammoth out of mounded grass clippings, or being charged with making some-

IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S MEMICHAEL BAZZETT


thing wondrous and eternal from discarded plastic bags. And we must remain wary and intentional while working in the medium of a shared codifiedlanguage, in a world where institutions and gov-ernments and Mrs. Hoffman are always ready to coax us back to the fold, away from the splintered, the weird, the wrong. We need to re-member our not knowing.

It’s this putting-back-together connotationthat led me to hang this phrase in my workspace:Every time I write a poem, I remember / / that I’ve forgot-ten how to write a poem. It’s a reminder that writing,for me at least, must marry my unknowing with my remembering. It must reassemble—precisely, lovingly, delicately, obsessively—what I don’t yet know, and what I’ve known since childhood, before the hegemony of our shared tongue shushesit into silence.

SSTTANLEY ANLEY KKUNIUNITTZ ZMEMEMMORIAL PRIZEORIAL PRIZRIZEE

APR announces the Thirteenth Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for

poets under 40 years of age.

t A prize of $1,000

t Publication in APR

t May 15, 2022 deadline

A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning poem in The American Poetry

Review will be awarded to a poetw under 40 years of age in honor of the late

Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets. The winning work will appear

on the feature page (back cover) of the September/October 2022 issue of

The American Poetry Review. All entrants will receive a copy of the September/ww

October 2022 issue.

Poets may submit one to three poems per entry (totaling no more than three pages)

with a $15 entry fee by May 15, 2022. The editors of The American Poetry Review will w

judge. Winner will be notified by July 1, 2022.

See our website for complete guidelines: www.aprweb.org

Send entries to:


Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize

1906 Rittenhouse Square

Philadelphia, PA 19103

Coming Soon in APR

New work by

Cynthia Arrieu-King

*

Matthew Kelsey

*

Ginger Ko

*

Mike Lala

*

Paul Muldoon

*

January O’Neil

*

Elizabeth A.I. Powell

*

Jason Schneiderman


MenuOnce you’ve found your upholstered seat

and a slightly elevated vantage point

from which to enjoy the war, perhaps

you’ll wish to consider our menu.

The seared tuna with lemons, halved

and roasted on the grill, provides an apt

accompaniment to the sophistication

of modern combat. The ruby flesh nearly

melts on the tongue, the bed of arugula

and shaved cabbage serving as a welcome

bit of structure. Might we also recommend

a lightly oaked chardonnay to accompany

the drones hovering in over the desert?

Its slight muskiness complicates the aridity

of what is essentially insect-delivered weaponry.

Our marinated pulpo can be followed

by a salad of fennel, dill, and pine nut

that will lightly cleanse the palate.

When the concussion of distant artillery

thrums up through your espadrilles

nothing really hits home like our molten

chocolate gateau laced with bourbon

raked with AK-47 fire then served

in spattered clumps alongside the still-smoking

cartridge. That saltiness you taste

is simply a touch of your own blood

drawn quietly from your veins last night,

while you dreamt of other things.

The PlayScene one: a man pushes an enormous boulder on stage.

It is quite round, like avalanche boulders in cartoons.

His palms are grey and leathery from the pushing.

His muscles strain and twitch like cables.

A second man enters, stage left, holding a pale blue egg

in his fingers. This is the earth. The man crouches, extending

his arm to place the earth in the precarious dark, looking

as if he’s trying to roast a marshmallow without getting burned.

For the rest of the evening, the audience contemplates

this tension. The play is a comedy, but the punchline,

as is noted in italics in the program, costs extra.

When the house lights come up, a smattering of envelopes

is delivered to those patrons seated behind a velvet rope.

They open them to find cream-colored cards of thick stock,

perfectly blank. A rustling arises as the patrons turn the cards

in their hands, searching for a message; the sound

resembles wind through dead grass more than laughter.

EchoRemember when we used to

remember things, she asks.

And for a moment he looks

up from his phone. Yeah

he says. Then, gently,

What made you think of that?

Nothing, she says. It’s just—

Having memories was nice.

He nods and smiles absent-

mindedly as he scrolls.

Outside the snow falls

heavily into the lake,

ton after ton of silence

disappearing into itself—

Michael Bazzett is the author of You Must Remember This, which received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, The Interrogation, and most recently The Echo Chamber. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, which was named a New York Times Best Book of 2018.

THREE POEMS

MICHAEL BAZZETT

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december 9

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Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2, 17

Princeton University Press 11

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Turtle Point Press 18

The University of Chicago Press 6

University of Notre Dame 16

Warren Wilson College 14

Women’s Review of Books 25

APR Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize 36

APR Subscriptions 27

APR/Honickman Books 11, 13, 18, 21

APR/Honickman First Book Prize 34, 39

APR/Honickman Titles 21, 30


MARBLE RUN

FOR THE

INTRAMUSCULAR

CYBORGS

AEON GINSBERG

There’s the tension I’m feeling when I’m anxious and the tension I feel when I have to puncture.

I’ve always wanted to stab myself dead but at this point I’m used to the maintenance my body needs—

I have the routine made like muscle memory. I’m going to live forever taking care of myself,

I’m going to have to respect my body or die. Before medicalization there’s tension in the lacking,

and I do so want to task myself with a further need to care for myself like I care for others.

Offer me a kindness I’m quick to give away. There’s the tension of falling into the arms of anesthesia

and how I have forgotten again to prepare to be caught; the first incision that splays me open.

I don’t always tell the truth, but what I say is a version of it. If I can separate myself from my body

my body can last forever without me. Oh god, I hope I awake a new type of me.

I will wake up and feel okay about being alive and for now I will work toward that future.

There’s a role for everyone when it comes to bettering yourself, no one gets better in a vessel.

All of my dead friends are a flawless now. So I think about learning to shoot a gun

and about the right angle to fit one in my mouth. I will outlive my life flashing before my eyes.

The memories of my trauma feel worse than the trauma: assault, assault, assault, assault.

I destroy my body because I want to be worthless. If I had a gun I would have nothing left,

I would do everything to become flawless. One day I will wake up a better kind of robot.

Every modification exhausts me. Every step I take to care for myself is two steps back.

I emasculate myself in the eyes of a doctor knowing the ways that it takes a lifetime to heal.

I will bury the hatchet when I bury myself or when I find something more fitting to use

now that I am post-op. I might look better with a lance, sharp enough to pierce the tension.

I worry about my syringe being bent going through my skin. What happens now that I am medicalized?

Will I be loved the same as a new kind of robot? Nothing is perfect until you can no longer change it,

and I’ve reached the apex of my maintenance without dying. I perform on myself like clockwork.

My body is a fixer-upper, not a junker but not road safe. I will care for myself non-refundably.

They can never give me back what I have had taken; I cannot get back years of my life lost to tension.

I want to love myself while it is still possible to love—to care for my body like it is a stranger.

There is nothing to do but become acquainted, nothing to be anxious about once I break the ice.

Aeon Ginsberg (they/them) is an agender transfeminine writer and performer from Baltimore City, MD. They are the winner of the 2019 Noemi Press Poetry Prize for their book Greyhound (2020). Aeon is a member of the Peach Mag editorial team.g



and

The Honickman Foundation

are happy to announce

the winner of the

NNAATTAASSHA RAOHA RAOO

LatitudeLatititutudetudede

The APR/Honickman First Book Prize is an award

of $3,000 and publication of a volume of poetry.

Natasha Rao’s Latitude, with an introduction by

Ada Limón, will be published in September 2021,

with distribution by Copper Canyon Press through

Consortium.

The prize is made possible by the partnership

between The Honickman Foundation and

The American Poetry Review.ww

2021APR/HONICKMAN

First Book Prize


Casey Thayer is the author of Self Portrait with Spurs and Sulfur and r Love for the Gun, winner of the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize. His second collection, Rational Anthem, finalist for the Miller Williams Prize,is forthcoming. Recipient of fellowships from Stanford University and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he’spublished work in AGNI, The American Poetry Review,w Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago.yy

This poem is the winner of the 2021 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, an award established by APR to honor the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets.

REMINDING MYSELF THAT

WE ARE NOT REMARKABLE

SEY THAYER

Chasing monarchs in the milkweed

you say also, also, wanting more.

This is nothing unusual.

Other children in other gardens

are putting noses to horsemint

where bees hum in nectar they’ll turn

to honey. Nothing unusual.

The corpse flower, its purple spathe

an upturned skirt, stinks

of rotting flesh to attract beetles

and flesh flies for another chance

to bloom. I must remember

the dance of strobes in the swarm

of lightning bugs is not innate,

not a trick, as a scientist claimed,

created by our blinking. The flies

copy those around them until they

synchronize. There exists

an explanation. If I forget,

I’ll waste a summer evening

in the silence of a field’s

empty theatre edged by woods,

watching the spectacle

and thinking it’s a showing only

for me. Things die and are

replaced. Also, also.

Clouds pass as voyeurs on our joy

while you chase butterflies

in the garden. If I’m not careful,

I’ll forget to see as ordinary

the long miles the monarchs cover

every autumn to find us. I’ll forget

my indifference that meteorites

blasting the earth’s mantle

carried all our gold here,

that my wedding band

is extraterrestrial. We take in air

through the same passage

we take in water, it’s a wonder

we can still breathe. I do not

tell myself this. If I’m not careful,

I’ll want to do whatever I can

to save everything I see.

Documents

POETR REVIEW AMERICAN · 2021. 8. 22. · Stephen Berg (1934–2014) Co-founder Sidney H. Berg (1909–1973) Periodical postage paid, Philadel phia, PA, and at additional oi ces