The American Poetry Review July/August 2017

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin Aryans, Betty Crocker, Bettye LaVette, Blowfish, briar bushes, Bubbas, Buckras, Archie Bunkers, bullhorns, bullwhips, bullets, All cancers kill me, car crashes, cavemen, chakras, Crackers, discord, dissonance, doves, Elvis, Ghosts, the grim reaper herself, a heart attack While making love, hangmen, Hillbillies exist, Lillies, Martha Stewarts, Mayflower maniacs, Money grubbers, Gwen Brooks’ “The Mother,” (My mother’s bipolar as bacon), pancakes kill me, Phonies, dead roaches, big roaches & smaller Roaches, the sheepish, snakes, all seven seas, Snow avalanches, swansongs, sciatica, Killer Wasps, yee-haws, you, now & then, disease. American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin Probably, ghosts are allergic to us. Our uproarious Breathing & ruckus. Our eruptions, our disregard For dust. Small worlds unwhirl in the corners of our homes After…

The Kitchen Counter Today my student read a poem in which her husband lifts her bare bottom onto the kitchen counter and, in the next line, spreads her legs. The marriage has problems. They may already be divorced. But suddenly I am ruing the fact that no one has lifted my bottom to a kitchen counter. Not when my bottom trotted high and proud. And not when it began to eye the floor as if contemplating its future. And now, I’m going to die without ever being taken on those cold hard tiles. Don’t tell me it’s not too late. It is. My mother—when the old women in her condominium wished for the past— would snap at them, “You had your turn.” And I had mine. Making love on a…

Remember How We Planned to Get Married and Have Children? Remember that winter When you were still alive? The cold of outer space When the door opened And the warmth of our bodies When it closed? Remember the branches Out the window Black with ice And how you loved To read their runes Against the sky? How you hated When I smoked cigarettes And I hated When you smoked pot But we understood each other: I needed to breathe And you needed a way To tame the blue lines That shot out from your head Like an invisible Crown of feathers Only we could see? Remember how we planned To get married and have children? And then we didn’t get married Didn’t have children Six years later you left for…

Brionne Janae is a Southern California native who came to Boston to get an MFA at Emerson College. While in California, Brionne received her B.A. at U.C. Berkeley, where she was a Student Teacher Poet in the Poetry for the People class/movement. As an STP Brionne had the privilege of teaching, learning, and writing poetry within a “beloved community” inspired and developed by the late June Jordan. Brionne is currently an instructor at Bunker Hill Community College. Her work as a poet has been published or is forthcoming in Plume, Apogee Journal, Toe Good Poetry, Redivider, and Fjords Review, and she is the winner of the 2014 Muriel Craft Bailey Contest from the Comstock Review, judged by Kwame Dawes. Her manuscript was selected by Michael Ryan for Emerson College’s Best…

Flight plan I like to think I have a wing inside myself, and if a wing, that I’ve swallowed Icarus whole, wax and all, in the moment before the sun treats him as an equal. There’s a poem about him I love about a painting about him I plan to stand before before I die, flapping my arms until the docent comes over in his sturdy shoes and holds a mirror so I can touch-up my lipstick before kissing the splash Icarus made in the ocean going home. I have all these plans to make plans and all these desires to be brave about the fall awaiting us all, but I never quite get there, like a man trying to leap out of his tracks in snow. When he lands,…

The Year of the Goldfinches There were two that hung and hovered by the mud puddle and the musk thistle. Flitting from one splintered fence post to another, bathing in the rainwater’s glint like it was a mirror to some other universe where things were more acceptable, easier than the place I lived. I’d watch for them: the bright peacocking male, the low-watt female on each morning walk, days spent digging for some sort of elusive answer to the question my curving figure made. Later, I learned that they were a symbol for resurrection. Of course they were, my two yellow-winged twins teaching me to feast on thorns and like it. Almost Forty The birds were being so bizarre today, we stood static and listened to them insane in their…