Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2017 i The American Poetry Review

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…

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…

Books Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems Christian Wiman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016, 224 pages THE BIG DEVELOPMENT OF THE PAST TWO OR THREE YEARS, as far as American poetry is concerned, has been the rediscovery of a political accent—mainly young, partisan, realistic in mode, and affronted in tone. The spectrum of accomplishment runs from poets who merely watch Rachel Maddow to deeply serious poets of the caliber of Claudia Rankine who have taken to heart, whether acknowledged or not, what Ezra Pound wrote in a letter to Harriet Monroe in 1915: that “Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity.” The fact that American audiences are paying attention to protest…

We pass vast fields of brilliant yellow flowers, all the same height—safflowers to make oil to fry up cod for fish and chips? England still has hedgerows, I’m happy to report. “The English love hedgerows so much, they named their airport after it,” I tell Violet. “That’s Heathrow,” she replies. But is a heathrow a hedgerow? Looking out at the fields, a few lines of “Stairway to Heaven” enter my mind: “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed, now; it’s just a passel of the May Queen.” I can’t stop thinking of it. England is a place where awful pop songs get lodged in your brain. No wonder 48% of the English wish they could leave, according to the Daily Mail. England is the only nation with…

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Truth at my brother’s oil change shop is few customers and beauty is the woman who drives her car over the pit, accidentally steps on the gas instead of the brake, pinning a man to her hood, shattering his back through the window. Beauty can be broken, can be a crumbling hospital like St. James where I was born in the hallway because the doctor was too slow. Of that story my mother can laugh, but birthing my brother, she was knocked out against her will with gas. She woke to find bruises all over her baby’s head. Truth means that the doctors’ names are not part of the story. That after years…

If wavy glass feels old to you then sit down. I’m speaking from inside the lead curve, where black minerals burn to a shine like pissed-off soot suns. I was sure it was a boy. I thought I knew the sound of darkness, the slow leather collapse of a bat’s wing folding into itself, the swollen fucking of a cloud of them wrestling for space on the cave’s drapery— let’s call it what it is because that’s how death begins, by tricking your body into an arch, as if life will just tie a string to your spine and hang there, a patient pendulum bob, waiting for you to finish. No, inside the glass we see death clearly. First you feel limbs (which, people remind you, you only ever imagined),…

Political Poem it’s true I’ve worn your nightgown in fact I am wearing your nightgown lonely as I am these days it is almost like wearing you which I used to do so often and with such zeal as I recall my parents would hot glue my dolls’ clothes to my dolls so full I was even then of curiosity and yes lust did you have something like this urgent and wet as a lung? I never wanted you more than when we wept into each other’s T-shirts through an entire rodeo the gloom cancering up from the bulls to the clowns to us who would even want to inherit this kingdom now the lessness of it the acres of herbicide better we stick to our little apartments fasting until…

Dance Event I’m used to not getting the joke, maybe even being the joke. You may call me Schmedley. Once a parrot landed on my head and I dropped a birthday cake and still have the photographs of my now ex with that scuba diver. The thing about a Laundromat at midnight. The thing about spiders. The best thing about death is it’s a mystery so you can tell all the experts to go fuck themselves if that appeals to you and if it doesn’t, you may already be dead. Simple test: Approach a strawberry. A pulse is kid’s stuff. Dance in live ash with feathers through your earlobes. Converse with a sapling. Walk cloud. Mascerate in Cointreau. Estivate and call home. Feed a fever fever. Cradle dawn. Love everyone.…

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…

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,…

I Sang Mind Because I Could Not Sing Body What’s the use of remembering what anyone speaks? When our automatons still belonged to us, we gave them the idle cruelty of our attention, we tripped and shoved them while they to-and-fro-ed in their tasks. Sometimes we would throw a clear liquid on them, a temporary inconvenience of water. Sometimes we would throw a clear liquid on them, a corrosive meant to maim. We watched them stutter as they persisted at programs that had nothing to do with us. We broke every contract. Age hardened your hands into little wedges, shattered their light over tools that needed grasping. You remembered that on the assembly line you looked up and glimpsed the quiet bodies of doves perched side by side, roosting in the…

Wolverine Season “Oh, honey, are you OK?!” I asked the woman in the bathroom, soaking wet as if she’d just emerged from the shower. “Yeah—maybe too mush rum on an empty shtomach.” She wiped her mouth with her hand and left. In the sink, waxy red flecks of lipstick. “That woman over there just puked up lipstick in the bathroom!” I yelled in my friend’s ear over the Black Sabbath tribute band. “Write a poem about that!” she yelled back and smiled. We were up late for a school night— it was all part of the new regime. The documentary I’d just seen about death said rocking out is actually good for you. And rocking out to Sabbath? Dude, we were gonna live, like, forever on bones other animals passed…

When in New Cities When I go to a new city I like to walk outside naked and I like to wear thick wool socks and boots even in summer to keep the rocks and street garbage from my feet and I like to muss up my hair and maybe smear some of the ashes from the hotel’s fireplace on my brow and walking I like to bang a closed fist four or five times on the prettiest doors the ones that are freshly painted in wild unexpected colors and when no one lets me in because I’m guessing people in cities like this don’t let strangers into their homes I like to find the libraries of the nicest college and act like a complete crazy person yelling about how…

Dawdling through the mall with our mother’s money, father’s absence ringing in our ears, we were primed right out of being thankful for mere existence when an old friend bought brown heroin. Why? We asked her. Why? Why? Nothing happened. They got high. Mushrooms were painful as period cramps and distorted my face in the mirror. Ecstasy was more realistic somehow, but I never even tried it. My old beau knew a boy who went mad smoking jimson weed, screaming and writhing on cold tile this friend, but alive. Two hundred untreated Morning Glory seeds could send all of us into the green heavens of believing, but they are all treated. See package details: vasoconstrictor! Cold hands indicate affection. Cold hands indicate a problem with circulation. Back then I had…

Books Of Entirety Say the Sentence Ernst Meister translated by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick Wave Books, 2015, 192 pages I. “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno wrote that sentence, one of the most famous and vexing of the last century’s critical sentences, in 1949. He didn’t mean, as many have inferred (taking the sentence out of context), that the fact of the Auschwitz death camp had rendered poetry somehow morally beyond the pale and impossible to write (because too lyrically aesthetical for the grimmest of zeitgeists); rather, that the culture that created the conditions for writing poetry also created the conditions for Ausch witz. And one’s involvement with poetry, or any form of cultural practice, no matter how privileged or elevated, does not necessarily inoculate one from…

A sweating flowerbed where my fantasies are thinning. I’m a light sleeper, too many asters, taxonomies of sound. I’d come in blue wide leg JNCOs like I was meant to be. Curious, maladaptive, suffused with unrationalized hope. I’d listen and be with my people. No one is concerned with honoring success because the concept of success is gone. In the 90’s I knew a scene kid who dreamed about it on the regular. He had a reputation for coming to rave parties barefoot so she could be close to the rotating basslines her body swan diving into the mothership of a 4/4 beat. Morning in the trip-hop lounge he told me how it was gonna go down in the end. We’d stumble blinking into day and the music would keep…

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…

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…

A Special Supplement This interview was conducted on October 30, 2015, in Syracuse, NY, in the home of Bruce Smith and his wife, Jules Gibbs. When I arrived, Bruce was just returning from a morning jog around the local water tower with his redbone hound, Russo. A couple times in the previous month I had walked that path with them as he fielded questions about a life in poetry and picked occasional shards of glass from the pavement. This time, we sat in his living room with mugs of tea as the heat kicked in. A death mask of Keats sat on the mantel, Russo at our feet gnawing a bone. Knowing Bruce’s passion for jazz, I had cued up two clips of John Coltrane as a sort of invocation.…

Yes yes We love We lie over under or beside one another plunged into each other or we are younger and tiptoe around outside the house in the dark and look at each other’s doors without daring to ring the bell or we take a walk in the park in the twilight and are afraid to get started and want so much to kiss and be kissed or we are an old couple that can no longer drill a hole into each other yes yes we love and the King of Terrors laughs behind us the King of Terrors laughs and his eyes are jewels the King of Terrors laughs and his teeth are skeletons and we love and we hate we discover our husbands and wives with other’s husbands…

It would have come to life if I had touched it. I know it. Or I knew it. I passed the squirrel on a run one winter morning. The slow day was full of light, though my head, up until that moment, had been cloudy. My son had an emergency appointment with a specialist that afternoon to investigate an abnormality his ophthalmologist had uncovered. It came to nothing, thankfully, but I didn’t know that yet as I ran down our long country road. As I turned one of the many bends, which leads to a final approach to the biggest hill on my route, I saw the squirrel, dead on the side of the road but perfectly whole— no sign of injury: no tire-flattened back end, no sad bloodied head,…

Books Cinder: New and Selected Poems Susan Stewart Graywolf, 2017, 256 pages It ’s hard to believe this is Susan Stewart’s first retrospective collection. She has been a vital fixture of the American poetry scene—as a poet, critic, and translator—for nearly forty years. The handsomely produced Cinder presents work from her previous five volumes, in reverse chronological order; it also includes a generous portfolio of new poems. Reading it one suspects that her refusal to put out a selected volume may have been dictated by a wish to preserve the integrity of the individual collections, as well as the poems themselves, actually, all of which carry the mark of distinct care and focus in assemblage and poetics. After all, culling poems for the benefit of stocktaking—and separating the proverbial chaff…

At Night after Simic at night you might not sense the old hatreds of the city which could be anywhere rain-swept pavement turns to shining lakes of light or cars hiss coldly through brush-stroked intersections the people are stacked away into vertical burrows filled with pill bottles and screens insomniacs lie awake and share the blank stare of their many separate ceilings and children are taught to shoot the deadbolt upon first returning home and yet the city wakes each day and puts on its face and nods as if it is not a family gathered around the scrape of cutlery at a steaming evening meal pretending grandma never used scissors on the mailman and that father did not slip his hands into his niece’s blouse just this afternoon The…