Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2017 i The American Poetry Review

Via Dolorosa Somewhere in America, scientists have invented a method for measuring pain, running their fingers over the bleachburned hands of abandoned housewives. The standard unit of sorrow they call a dol, as in dolorous, or Dolores, the name of a young girl skilled at spilling tears down the buttons of her cornflower-blue cardigan. The new machines make us unable to feign heartache or holy prostration, but arguments are settled by those whose dolorimeters run cold. Some wear the devices against their arms as a kind of complaint— this has changed the way we breathe at 4 a.m. into sweat-soaked pillows beside our breathless bedfellows. In some cases sufferers have been sainted, known for their ability to hold their own torn organs in their hands like blood oranges, the way…

Night on the eve of an explosion, wow. That angel really blew the place up. He inspired paintings and musical compositions, all while floating backwards, stuck in flight. He said, take this and eat. Really eat. Magnify. Magnify again. The hornet is always only one with its genetic code. Small strands of even smaller pricks. They replicate until they are seen. One, two, three: infinity. Love and death are everywhere. KRISTIN PREVALLET (www.trancepoetics.com) is the author of I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time (Essay Press) and Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn (Belladonna Collaborative). The Boston Review, Spoon River Review, StoneCutter, and The New Republic have published her poems, and her book Visualize Comfort: Healing and the Unconscious Mind is forthcoming from the Belladonna Collaborative/Wide Reality in summer 2017. Prevallet teaches…

To Those Who Have Asked Anna To those who’ve asked Anna how it feels to know she’ll likely die Alone without her husband—meaning me— at her side for comfort as she Nears some future ending which may or not bring with it some late solace Though of course we never—any of us—know what awaits each of us alone No matter who might stand by us briefly though I know as you might here in my faux Venetian village by the Pacific where for two weeks more exactly I’m twice Anna’s age & yet young as I am to those who’ve asked Anna I have nothing to say Not lit by a luminous certainty I’ll be at peace only when those who’ve asked Anna Are at last each alone & left…

God didn’t consider us when he created earth by saying: become. We were children stuttering in the whispers of sleeping homes. We ran to schools enveloped by our mothers’ prayers that feared everything. But the head mistress shortened our lives with a quiet sentence: We’ll return after the end of the war . . . in ten days, In her Kurdish accent. So we remained, gathered in the school yard Wide-eyed, our souls bewildered and afraid. The days stretched and became years. We separated, boys to battlegrounds and girls to the waiting steps. My friends never returned. Their leftovers were gathered in wooden boxes decorated with holes of separation. My mother, like us, suffered from waiting. She sat beside us holding on for father. Who used to return a time…

The psychic capital of the world is a little run-down. Old wooden Florida houses, rain-loud tin roofs I can knock on a door, ask to be seen. Roadside chandelier, ragged yellow-green grass. See-through tulips tilt. All the trees lounge. The one thing I want to know & the guy in the house can tell me? That’s a cochlear implant, flesh colored circle like a rubber bandaid, but it goes inside his head, fake flesh into real. I’m outside your house, I said on my cell. You’re inside my head, he said. I could ask for a message from the other side. My son. The psychic said, He died because he was a burden to you. When I said, What? the question was air, empty-space for something else. I’d always feared…

Desire A desire is a root finding its way in the water; a desire is a fin coursing through all the extra of your ways. A way is a plaintiff. A point is all that rests there seething. The bow of the cart and the rutted road make their gauge. Are we now as before becoming? There is no price for this innocence. Set on the waterways a marshy entrance where the reedy plants open is where a boat slips through This is lotus picking stolen pastime and she looks into the water after the storm she looks and the jade pin falls The Subject Vanishes i Where we live in the bomb the sprout of the bomb is with us ii the sprout of our received believing—ourselves built in…

Distant Regard If I knew I would be dead by this time next year I believe I would spend the months from now till then writing thank-you notes to strangers and acquaintances, telling them, “You really were a great travel agent,” or “I never got the taste of your kisses out of my mouth.” or “Watching you walk across the room was part of my destination.” It would be the equivalent, I think, of leaving a chocolate wrapped in shiny foil on the pillow of a guest in a hotel— “Hotel of earth, where we resided for some years together,” I start to say, before I realize it is a terrible cliche, and stop, and then go on, forgiving myself in a mere split second because now that I’m dying,…

Quetzal The Federales may have broken into the apartment and killed five people because two were journalists. Or, the government of Mexico may have hired thugs to break into an apartment and kill five people including two journalists. On July 31. Or, before I wrote any of these lines, the governor of Veracruz, Javier Duarte, may have requested someone to contact ex-police to break into an apartment and kill five people, two of whom were journalists. That the murders took place is irrefutable. That it was not a robbery is certain. A row of pigeons squats on a rail outside the window. Each one Lazarus bearing a new weight that is lighter than before. My cat watches a spider cross the wall. She waits. We are more than two thousand…

The business of (business (The business of (business I’ve mentioned before)) (and my bills) (and mortality) (A license (for these brothers to be my brothers)) (if I want) (It was (pointedly) true how (the denial was depression) what I want) (is warmth) (Non-young) (My slang (is idiomatic)) (The business of years (and of hedging a future)) (It becomes urgent) (In her case tax advantage) (It would roll over) (It would (penalty)) ((If) I adhere) (all agents assemble) (the holidays swept) (Recall scant celebration) (Y2K in the car (a rainy night)) (the loss of it) (allow me (to interject)) (What about shoulder (separation)) (you (splinter) (my interest) (in)) ((anew) (I am) outside) (I am (for one) (other)) (The work (simple)) (The work (simple)) (The bullshit (simple)) (Limited natural talent (or endurance))…

Cottonmouth The man’s mouth unhinged. He said, I broke my jaw and it open likes this now. I heard the wet click of little bones unfastening. woke up before anyone else and walked outside barefoot to the chilled porch still slick with a thin layer of morning dew. There was a little coral snake asleep, coiled by a rocking chair. I wasn’t afraid this time. We were told the snake was the most beautiful thing God created until the snake wanted to be God or like a God or Godlike. (I’m not sure now.) It happened again—the same dream. I have seen three women give birth and with each contraction the mighty hips break and loosen, the leathery mouth of a snake. I watched as they writhed inside the all-consuming…

The Red Case After Still Life #11, a photograph by Cristian del Risco What nests things are, especially in the doze of storage. On the closet shelf, a black purse folded atop a bright red suitcase and beside it a yellow box for one of those old Brownie 500 Movie Projectors. It is their color confluence which has caught the need, exposed the weakness that is art. The eye’s edict of the scepter-lensed photographer commands we look passionately outside ourselves and coldly into ourselves, for every shelter betrays its urgent walls. This is the better part of native, nurturing nakedness. What roosts in possession? Who will beckon it to fly, find its kind, and prey upon it? Any armoire, the most disheveled bin, or the fittest regiment of ordered space…

Bonfire Opera In those days, there was a woman in our circle who was known, not only for her beauty, but for taking off all her clothes and singing opera. And sure enough, as the night wore on and the stars emerged to stare at their reflections on the sea, and everyone had drunk a little wine, she began to disrobe, loose her great bosom, and the tender belly, pale in the moonlight, the Viking hips, and to let her torn raiment fall to the sand as we looked up from the flames. And then a voice lifted into the dark, high and clear as a flock of blackbirds. And everything was very still, the way the congregation quiets when the priest prays over the incense, and the smoke wafts…

This conversation took place on April 6, 2016. RUTKIN You were just in Dublin, right? MULDOON I was. LR How was it? PM It was very interesting. It was the centenary of the 1916 Rising, Easter Week, so I was involved in a couple of projects there. One of the interesting things about being a poet is that much of what one writes is commissioned in some ways. It could be as simple as someone asking for a poem for a magazine, and one doesn’t have one, so one writes one, or something more formal, along the lines of what I’ve just done in Dublin. The main thing I did was the text for a piece that was composed for an orchestra and a chorus of about 1200 people, and…

The scholars are scurrying to make novel declarations about animals and animacies, the life of matter, the post-human We custodians of knowledge fracking our keen minds in the bowels of institutions, stirring up more beautiful worlds Look at that light—even shadows of leaves make it known that no archive will restore you, no text but those we cannot read In truth, archive always reminds me of vaginas; the way we talk of things generative though we keep feeling fucked The way we wax queer theory time and temporality, how your strap-on is a wish for elsewhere, a resource we can’t mine When I summon Gramsci talk of traces, I really mean love— that strip-teased bitch that dies in spring I confess, I am lost in philosophy bewildered and becoming still…

My friends unbalanced on the precarious edge myself precarious unbalanced a compressed system miles of blood I carry within me everywhere the phantom scent of orange groves everywhere following me even though only the pictures on the phone in my pocket identify me as a unique location different from the millions of other center points all the alive citizens only my case sensitive alphanumeric brings the monster to life marks me as a scene for thoughts & affections I carry so many ghosts inside me warm clouds exhaled into the night of this century vanished moments from within the haunted terrain I have preserved inside my borders my feelings reduced to binary by the times that I live in simple on or off the rough & gorgeous landscape obliterated smoothed…

I Know What Love Is What if the angels, with their conch-shaped trumpets, their dainty bows and arrows, don’t really give a shit about us? What if they gather in heavenly circles at the mouth of the clouds to stare down on field mice, on ferrets, on millipedes? We think angels take human shape because our ancestors painted them that way, but those were the same ancestors who toiled through the Dark Ages, who took a long damn time to discern that the heart wasn’t the seat of intelligence. I’d say they suffered at times from a lack of imagination. Sure, they fashioned rocks into the tips of spears, sure, they managed some empires, and sure, they figured out which knotweeds would dye the wool, which berries would pigment the…

SENTIMENTALITY IS BAD. WE ALL KNOW THIS. By 1795, Friedrich Schiller had declared the sentimental poet as “infinitely inferior” to the naive poet, who was founded on reality and truth.1 Victor Strandberg defined the term by saying, “The word sentimentality implies two particular transgressions against the modern sensibility: emotional excess and falsification of reality.”2 “A sentimentalist,” Oscar Wilde wrote, “is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”3 Arthur Saltzman says of the sentimental poem, “It is poetry of the bland pronouncement and the unrealized assertion . . . It is poetry that treats nuance and tension as so much tundra to be cleared, so as not to obscure common sight, common sense. Worst of all, it is poetry purged of necessity, of urgency.”4…

The Washington Post says that green burials are on the rise, as baby boomers plan for their future their graves marked with sprouting mushrooms little kneecaps crawling up from the dirt’s skin like Michael Brown decomposing into the concrete ending as natural product of the environment. Elephants are now being born without tusks their genetics having studied the black market DNA a spiral ladder carefully carved from wooden teeth of Founding Fathers. Never let a chromosome speak for you, they will only tell a myth—an ode to the survival of the fittest. Peppered moths are used to teach natural selection their changes in color an instance of evolution. Birds unable to see dark moths on soot covered trees. The number of blacks always rising with industry. Life is the process…

A Way of Saying Good-bye There is the sea there is the woman one or the other they come towards me cove after cove open perhaps in the broad churchyard of Sunday afternoons I hear them call but not in any old way they call but in a certain way perhaps an appeal or a presence or a suffering So I who basically in spite of many words come from many pages of many dictionaries when all is said and done have made use of just two words since the first morning of the world to designate just two things for all that was needed was to name them I don’t know if I love the sea or if I love the woman more I know I love the sea…

Books Magdalene: Poems by Marie Howe W.W. Norton & Company, 2017 96 pages, $25.95 hardcover After that, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out—and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means. —Luke 8:1–3 POETRY, WHEN IT IS MEMORABLE, OFTEN BEWILDERS. MATTHEW Bevis, an associate professor of English at Keble College, Oxford, recently wrote in Poetry magazine about how poetry returns us to our bewilderment: “lyrics are invitations to listen to something we can’t quite know.” Chiming in, James Longenbach writes of poems, “we want to experience the sensation, the sound, of words…

It’s an apple turnover, it’s refried black beans, it’s the dogs chasing squirrels in the yard, it’s a snail crushed on the sidewalk, it’s I just stepped in shit, I have to work the overnight shift, it takes ninety seconds to cook french fries, to pick your way through a blues, it’s the old crucifix that belonged to my Dad, it’s my Dad’s ashes sitting on the shelf, it’s the Mini Cooper I’ll never be able to buy, I want a fucking raise, it’s I want to fuck you right now, a blowjob in the car, a blowjob in the park at night, it’s your tongue ring that drives me crazy, it’s blood in my urine, it’s my Mom kicking me out of the house, refried black beans again, it’s…

Without her life were fear, and Paradise a cowardice, except for her inciting voice —Emily Dickinson, on her sister Lavinia We hear a laughing ghost with hospitable hands who sounds like she is pleased we are the only visitors to this yellow house today. We have fought in the car but made our peace on Route 2. When I die, come and find me. I do not want to be buried; you know that I am scared of suffocation. The ghost goes outside and waves from the lawn, cheerfully, holds up a kitten and takes its paw gently and it waves, too, hello. Your shirt is the color of Emily’s pocketed dress; we are walking this thin floorboard, the chance of being remembered. Even the most lonely have these gifts…

Half the Time I’m Someone Else What doesn’t begin With the unbelievable Softness of footprints In the wet Dirt of hard coming Rain Will not bring What we need— The always & everywhere Whirling inside The fun house At the forever Fair It is not proper To tire Of nightmares In the humid air Where afternoon becomes The remains Of a quickening fit Of a loveliness Wasp stung & swollen There is a gigantic stillness where the red door- Way wants to jangle II. The other face of the moon Is beech, juniper. A hand unseen By the other face of the moon Is maybe, maybe not The other face of the moon Is gnarled, a necklace of toes The other face of the moon Is not sure where— What…

IN A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL, ARTHUR Brooks mentions the Buddhist meditation practice of contemplating photos of corpses, with the partial goal of pulling the viewer into the present moment—there might not be many more of them. For the rest of the results of that meditation, he refers to “existential goals,” and another Arthur, KIeinman, shares what might illuminate that phrase in Culture and Depression: the lay meditator, taking up this practice that is part of asuba bhavana, revulsion meditation, uses his or her imagination alone, instead of looking at an image. The meditation then has that feature of sitting apart from the dead body, and from embodiment, finding a space in which to come unconfined from it—not “this will one day be me,” then, but “I won’t always be…

Why Not Say What happened. This terrible breaking, this blow. Then slow the dogwood strewn like tissue along the black road. No the busy pollinators the breeze in the pine shadows in the aftermath where I drove back there. And two bones of smoke lifting ahead along the shoulder in the high new green weed-bank running beside the asphalt. No I had come from my father. Nothing more common nothing more than such. I could not breathe for the longest time over and again. There was something deadly, she said, in it. Of the genus buteo, as b. harlani, as Harlan’s red-tail. Blocky in shape, goes the book, blood or brick red but white, I am sure underneath, white along its wing, which was not smoke but rising now one…

Love at Rest Love went down to wrestle death. Now resting in the current, love at best feels more like like. A certain hue of pre-dawn light, cobalt through an icy window, I could say I somewhat like, and almost call out her name. (Is this her bed I’m in or mine, or am I sleeping in my van?) Waking up from dead to numb, from utter night to shades of dawn, I like not knowing where I am, where time went, the short hand from the long. Then certain esoteric films, L’Eclisse, Mulholland Drive, I start to almost comprehend and feel the need to write again aimless like-songs in my head. Playing Time Look at Jesus, who tells adulteresses whom he loves to go and sin no more. Or…