Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2016 i The American Poetry Review

Do Work —after Max Roach (1984), Jean-Michel Basquiat Sunday night, the last swing of the week— 3 grips between the best click & reddest wink in the morning cartoons— & the electric was still off even though my mother was working at Fort Ben for the 6th straight day. & inside it—my first bit of black happenstance, the namelessness of it all, the crass powerlessness— our walls didn’t have enough meat left to keep the drumming out. Alone & nervous in the habit of broke kids in the dark, a chair braced against the door bent over itself like the “X” in exit. Everyone was hungry, WTLC on the portable radio— & I was an all-mouth drummer without a drumstick, collecting beats like scared breaths & a stomach ache from…

WORDS ARE A POET’S MEDIUM AND material—symbolic carriers of meaning and instruments of perception, so when the common coinage of words changes, the poet becomes hyper-alert. Inevitably, when a new usage arises, something has changed to account for it, something that undermines old assumptions— the way, over time, in a porous underground, a top layer will thin, a subterranean hollow become a sinkhole, and your house, once the safest place on earth, suddenly will disappear into it. From this is bred a radical kind of insecurity, a widespread loss of trust in what had been assured. In such circumstances, language, and what it signifies, changes. When did prisoners of war become “detainees?” When did torture become “enhanced interrogation?” When did bombing raids become “airstrikes?” When did our nation become the…

Doubled 1 The little boy was playing with a ball. It was rubber and purple and had red stars. He was so happy. It bounced and strayed, but not too far, like a cat. Was this happiness? Was this the happiness I sought, in my life, to define and have? I took it from him. By that act, simple as it was, happiness doubled in size. I awaited in spring by the empty tomb, and it just recently emptied. Tulips, pale and white, almost silver, broke from the soft ground and caked earth. I waited what would come next. A voice, echoing off the stone, issued, that was understood. I waited what was real, human or animal, that would come next from the tomb. 2 And when I am sitting…

Getting Stoned in the Mission, Waiting for Permission to Leave Abidjan Below the railing two Sisters hurried back into the courtyard to the squeaky well pulley. In and out for buckets of water. The brittle leaves of a vine from the veranda scratched against the wrought iron. A red flower is grown up through a nest. It marks a grave near the well. Make the flower whatever you like—hibiscus, bird of paradise. The Sister’s lantern did not send light that far. Let’s say it was hibiscus, and pushed through the mud cap of the nest. The embassies have warned: wait for reconciliation speeches before returning up-country, for the stack of machetes to be cleaned, blades wiped symbolically by the president’s handkerchief. Down the street, someone’s trumpet skips like a wet…

Arrest Sri Lanka The soldiers keep tapping on their guns, counting out the time, since they took away my father, wondering which words he’ll use for his story, the white day leaking into night, the heat groping from the walls. There is nothing much to see. Only walls, blank as one more curfew, the guns blooming around us in the night. My sister will not talk about this time, No one will tell this story, the captain leading out my father and my mother pleading for my father, for the world outside these walls, asking how this could be our story, this watchful line of guns. Her words falling time after time, a gecko calling in the indifferent night. There are no clocks in this kind of night. The hours…

Poem That’s Never Been to Jones Beach I’ve been at it too long, watching how the ice cubes are ordered. A cold turn. A touch on our fingers like knobs are pulled leaving a house. A dark house, because it’s late. Because the porch has no railing, perhaps, three chairs are positioned on the lawn, with boys in them who the cop cars pass at and after “should we look in the bag,” then the bag turning from vinyl to leather to open: three sacks. It back. Bring these things of drugs, a gun, unzip across the northeast, midwest, west itself, where friends of mine start their days in sweatshirts with plastic ties. They twist them, or more often they leave them be. This is the dream I want to…

A POET OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND COMPASSION, C . K. Williams reflects, in his poems, on the need and willingness to meet, engage, and be moved by the other—the very conditions of empathy. 1 To feel with the other—rather than for the other—you must suspend judgment, withhold assumptions, be willing to deconstitute and reconstitute your private truths, resist the temptation of constructing the other in your own image, embrace incertitude as you attempt to inhabit another’s way of being in the world. As Williams’s poems show us, this already difficult task is compounded by the treacherously thin line between inhabitance and projection, empathy and inpathy, with the latter mimicking or courting empathy while remaining invested in the importing of another’s emotions or problems into your own, as Leslie Jamison notes…

Exciting the Canvas That the moon causes tides seems too witchy to be science. The sea purging sheet iron, jeans, a jewel-eyed alabaster goat. Is that why I’m here? Everyone needs kudos, from newborns to saviors. Nora, nearly three, draws sunlight in golden bars, not unlike an Impressionist painter. I like to think of light this way, dispensed in attaché cases to illuminate as needed. The famous poet said write by the light of your wounds. A drunk flies over his bicycle handlebars, crumples by the side of the road. Performed pain is still pain. Some people born before the Model T lived to see man walk on the moon. To be strapped like that to the masthead of history would make me frantic. At parties (certain collapse at the…

Never a grave large enough, never a grave large enough Never enough powder to ladle over the face of the grave Never enough pine boughs to go sweeping and ‘soughing’ Never enough time to make a throat for all the vowels Never a wide enough mouth to crunch around the bones of the bird Never enough digestive juices to leach the crime from the bones of the earth For I am not the earth. Never a laugh shallow enough Never a crater on the moon blank enough for the bird of guilt to settle. Never enough grave maidens to prop up their chins on the Bridge of Sighs Which is a euphemism for their exposed collar bones, release the vowels Of the grave, the long vowels Of flora stinking in…

A Special Supplement La Strada This life & no other. The flesh so innocent it walks along The road, believing it, & ceases to be ours. We’re fate carrying a blown-out bicycle tire in one hand, Flesh that has stepped out of its flesh, Always ahead of ourselves, leaving the body behind us on the road. Zampanò, what happens next? The clown is dead. You still break chains across your chest though your heart’s not in it, Your audience is just two kids, & already there is Snow in little crusted ridges, snow glazing cart tracks & furrows Where you rest. And then what happens? One day you get an earache. One day you can’t breathe. You notice the old nurse wears a girdle as she bends over you, You…

I’ll Tell You a Story I’ll tell you a story before it emerges cleansed from us that is from sand quite well preserved like the skeleton of a plesiosaur under the gobi desert I’ll tell it still warm from the furnaces of auschwitz I’ll tell it still frozen from the snows of kolyma a story of dirty hands a story of hands severed it’s not in the textbooks in order not to dirty the white spots on the map of time and times I’ll tell you a history the unheard one that rarely appears at the exhumation of dreams my proof is a silence shot clean through that’s why I speak in a whisper I’ll tell a story But don’t repeat it List of Telephone Subscribers for the Capitol City…

Documentary from “The Houses Are Full of Smoke” (1987) One day, my mom came running said ¿How can it be, the dogs in the soccer field? So she asked for money to buy a casket. I didn’t know why, she’d seen so many like that. Neighbors tell me last night they took so-and-so found them in such-and-such place, ¿Who took them? ¿Who? ¿Ay por qué? I say. We’re scared, it’s getting closer, patrols grease their faces. Then, someone came running. They’d found her at El Playón, she was wearing shorts. Dogs. So many dogs. My mother never wore shorts. Mamá Pati Responds to Papá Javi after my mother I was seventeen, the valedictorian, and five months pregnant. Each time I thought of leaving you, I smelled your chest then the…

This is the here between howlings. Between sleep and shit. By and Bye. This is the longer by the wider, where the deep pile muffles the moans of floorboards and the lifecycle of hollering. Here, we’ve learned our best work is breaking what’s closest. Like ashes from the urn. Like Dorothy. But the game is to get away with it. To be the not-yet dead. To win, we must be the first to lie down at the threshold and peer beneath the door’s hollow body until the carpet brailles a name upon our cheek—someone we must find and kidnap, someone blind enough to translate everything that’s happened to us since. FRITZ WARD’S poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and many other publications. His manuscript has…

1 The night before their youngest child is born, a man and woman watch Oliver Twist (1948), name their only son Oliver. The family rejoices and for several years indulge their newest member, even though they are industrious refugees who previously celebrated nothing, even though they also have two daughters. The eldest daughter resembles her brother until she wakes up one morning from a dream in which he was a tyrant. Soon after, her hips widen, one lone hair grows in her armpit. Sometimes the daughter feels like a son and sometimes the son feels like a shadow—like hosiery, alienable—he says to his first grade teacher: “You can’t draw inside the body. So why try to draw what’s inside the body at all?” 2 If one has no brother, then…

Like a Blue Door Opening in the Distance Now that I’m living close to the river. now that my body is no longer a trouble, my bum knee hanging in the barn with old rusty tackle and yokes, my brain tossed with grasshoppers, my face melted in a silver spoon, I can feel the yellow light inside me, the hand coming from the center of my chest and the floating ring of eyes that frightens children and welcomes wolves better. Now that my throat is fit for cherry trees, I can spend an hour with the moths without flying into the flames to prove myself, maybe even have a sensible relationship with gravity, a little less howling, a little less plummeting into the roses so maybe I won’t go crazy…

Landscape with Thesaurus and Awe There are 24 synonyms for the word envy. And although one of them is hatred and one of them is lusting no one envies me. If I could just make it to morning without selling myself one day I might have some land beyond the ficus pot whose heart leaves leak their poison inside this slummy garage where I sleep daytimes in a city I’m sure I’ve mentioned before. I am furious for answers inside the book of words I stole from a stranger’s back pocket. You see, through the years when everyone is dying I remain clean. That’s why I believe there could be a God. There are 5 synonyms for the word redemption. and 46 for fear. One of them is chickenheartedness and…

There are more or fewer primates in the wild today than there used to be. There is more or less war in the world than needs to be. There is more or less shouting in my parents’ marriage than I want there to be. There is more or less sex in my parents’ marriage than I want there to be. There are more or fewer thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction available to dictators than there should be. There are larger or smaller discounts to be enjoyed at big box retailers than there used to be. There are more or fewer divorces than there ought to be. There is more or less graffiti about genitals than there used to be. There is more or less graffiti than we have good poetry.…

Family was the unit of measure for our people. We practiced CrossFit; we hung from ropes and jumped from boxes. We brought squash into the house and carved monsters into their rinds. We walked many miles; we suffered; we bound our feet in hide. Marriage was a four-day feast and an exchange of goods between households. The bride was captured in her bedroom and dragged by her golden hair to the merriment of all. When a woman gave birth, two women held her legs at the knees. A rope was tied around her husband’s testicles for her to pull with the pangs. Even if she died, she died silently, not like women now. If the infant couldn’t grip a pole on the third day, we left it by the river.…

The Other Side In the old ink and brush style of painting the brush can’t leave the paper until you’re done so that it’s all one long line that turns and turns and loops back, taking its time, and sometimes standing here outside the door as snow filters across the blue-black sky and I can hear you on the other side I can’t remember if I’ve only just arrived or it’s time for me to go. Autumn Not the moonlit gravel path but the cool air caught inside a stone for a thousand years. A Lishan Bell Old hermit like a crane nesting high in the mountains— Is he a sage? Is he lonely? In his hut he hides a painting of Xian within its ancient city walls. If a…

JUST AS THE TITLE OF THE POEM “SPRING AND ALL,” BY WILLIAM Carlos Williams, almost dismissively anticipates the archetypal musings that season begets before subverting those musings, so too do the first six lines of “From My Window” by another Williams from New Jersey, Charles Kenneth, cater to a version of Americana, Norman Rockwelllike, as the arrival of spring, “the first morning,” is announced by leaf-buds, crocuses, joggers, and “kids . . . playing hooky,” all “glorying in the end of the wretched winter,” before subverting its vision with the human wretchedness of war and wounds and the existential wretchedness of “a warped, unclear infinity.” That long sentence is almost as long as the longest sentence in Williams’ poem, though his sentence, splayed across six spillover lines, smacks less of…

To learn which side you’re on you pick someone to follow through the city streets then see how far you’ll go. If you enter the foyer, oy vey, then you are on our side. If you go into the boudoir, that far, you are on the side of the enemy. If you board the plane, you might find yourself a red name on a black list. If you feel only a terror of the domestic but not a terroir foreign, they have a remedy for that, but it can only be prescribed if you were wed in a way their instruments can detect and if you have never suffered from a similar terror before. They administrate analogy but we only want you to show us, through a stashpile of choices…