Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2017 i The American Poetry Review

13 Ways of Knowing Her 1. Mother tells me a bird is trying to kill her. I tighten. Memory her ticking eye, opening and closing. Snap on a dress, shell of her breath swallowing the phone. (Pitch.) The bird sings, kills her softly, minutely. Now my mother is trilling loudly, high with starling’s call. 2. Only at night do I know her solitude, halo of infomercials, her cramping cool and yellow leg, and somewhere outside, her husband, the unstruck bell of morning birds. 3. I try to ask her where she is. Your father took the car when I had an accident; I never drove again. The only place I can’t hear it is the downstairs bathroom; I’ve been here for a week. House of her body, animal in grief.…

We want to know. At once. Everything. And if it’s going to be boring, we want the truth replaced by lies. — William Gass, from On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like—but truer than the literal truth. —Vincent van Gogh We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth. —Friedrich Nietzsche The artist’s task, then, involves the transformation of the actual to the true. —Louise Glück, from “Against Sincerity” The artist’s imperative is to find ways to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. —Pablo Picasso FACTS AND A WRITER’S REL ATIONSHIP TO THEIR REPORTING and alteration have become slippery issues of late, in…

Inmate The kind of awake that feels like exhaustion. Sadness untended by tears. The way the car engine doesn’t want to turn over, so I’m always afraid I don’t get to leave. She said, “yeah I fucked her but I always pull out.” Said, “I go to Dreams with a suitcase.” Wondered, “Has a side jawn ever opened you up?” So I was always quoting her. It’s the concrete weight of the place, the overwhelming absurd guilt of it, the hyper resilient laughter and love within it, that demands more layers of meaning than we’re taught to. Like how I pretend I’m alone when I don’t want to be alone. How the days are shorter now, and one good night doesn’t promise another. She reasoned, “Trust ourselves? That’s how we…

after Yusef Komunyakaa It must have been ’98, my mom leaving for work, the first night she doesn’t kiss my dad goodbye. He closes the door softly, walks slowly to his office and takes a hammer to the keyboard of his computer as though desperately trying to build something, until the letters fly through the air struggling to form the words he cannot. I watch from my childish quiet, unnoticed, unsure of how much time passes before he labors over the scattered keys, scooping them up with small hesitation like a man collecting seashells, and striving to pop them back into place, to remember where each one belongs. I am so much like my father, and so I too fear love, how I will inevitably fail it, mishandle it, let…

—thank you, John Ashbery We packed Good Times into your satchel, and also notes on the auroch, that medieval cow. Don’t be so crestfallen, the bandoneon will be delivered after lunch, in fracture mode. We can speak tango, collage bricks and pavers, or stuff like that. Whatever. There are always dangers in translation, but gde je vetsi will get you something, in which country I forget. No, of course we don’t make up all our ideas, we’re just following the latest fads, Susie Q. Or plucking items off the conveyor belts in our heads; like Xian Mingles, God disposes. Goodbye, Cruel World—if you won’t sit under the apple tree with me, even in the breezeway built to your specifications—thank you by the way— along whose sides we planted hedges sparkling…

Lorca’s lips Clumsy, coarse of feature, it is said. One leg shorter than the other. Liar, about works he intended to compose, which he said were almost finished. Which he hadn’t even begun (like me, spiller of seed, waster of his little time). In mirrored cafes and at piano keyboards gossiper, debater, uncombed, untied. Carnal clown, answering the door in underpants, Luis Cernuda naked on the daybed, explaining “We were doing tumbling exercises.” Mooch, living pampered off Papa, until in ’31 he put on his blue overalls, making from nothing a theater of the people, sensuous, narrative, a school for weeping and laughing, like passing a consecrated host from one mouth to another and another forever. Weeper, who, told he’d be shot that day, asked the guard “Will I be…

CHUCK BISBEE, ARIZONA BISBEE, ARIZONA I love to paint most anything, but my favorite subject is the female figure painting of a naked blonde in a kitchen chair staring at a wall They’re vulnerable, but if they’re at their most feminine, when you see the whole body, your model is the inspiration for the painting, and the subject of the painting, all wrapped up in one beautiful painting of two nearly naked women wearing southwestern style shawls that expose their breasts; one reclining on the couch; the other on the floor, hand over crotch, a bull skull next to her leg I have hundreds of paintings of sketches of naked women with coffee stains on them When you walk into the studio now, I don’t have that much open space…

Son of a Nun There’s the front door Through which she never came, and the winter Coat she wore while pregnant with me. And here’s the mourning I fail To euphemize. My day-old head clipped From a polaroid and taped inside a locket. I’ve got no pet names or birthday cards Or knotted strands from a blond afro In a black hairbrush. But this Much is true: Had we ever met, I’d have kept even her bellybutton Lint and ragged toenail clippings. I have but her habits: ultra-tidiness, Afternoon gin and tonics, midlife Panic attacks. I keep meaning to frame A photo of myself, eyes closed, Simply to see what she might have Looked like in the coffin. But they say there’s no need. If I want to bring her…

Watch the squirrel clean its face until its hands are your hands, until the chemical energy of sunlight is gentle as a kiss on your cheek, don’t stop until the senators inside you go home to their creamed corn and televisions, their partners and dogs, until the two-way mirrors and oyster knives you hang from your optic nerves like laundry are taken by the wind, let it uncurl your eyelashes, let it carry you in its pocket like a mint. It’s all true— the weird sex thing, the yellow pills, how I climbed myself like a tree. Basically anything can hold itself hostage. The question isn’t Why? but So? Still, there are ways of touching without bulldozing, ways of washing a body without making the person inside it feel like…

The subjunctive is not a tense but a mood—uncertain, wishful, regretful. I wish I spoke his language better. We reach through a haze of no shared native tongue— in his cottony accent, he tells me how they came here as teens, built fires, smoked pot, got a little drunk, ran from the Polizei, clattered bikes down the hill’s narrow gullies, youth chronicled in shiny hieroglyphs on knee cheek palm. Subjunctive forms can indicate states of unreality. We conjugate our anecdotes this way— If that ad for a language party had been correct. If it hadn’t been raining. If not for that hot toddy. If not for my homesickness, the fire pawing at its glass oven door. If his friend hadn’t caught a cold. If the river hadn’t been running over…

Dirt Cakes My Grandmother’s body lives under an ash tree on an old church ground, her spirit can be seen making a maple tree’s shadow jealous. The church’s bricks absorb the choir’s songs, they flake Holy Ghost, If Trouble Don’t Come Today. I visit, fall on my knees, ask her how she doing? How long is her hair now? Does she still like it braided in front? Still like having her scalp scratched? What y’all doing in heaven today? She’d tell my mama don’t let a bird get the hair that falls out your head, they’ll use it to build a nest and you’ll never leave Rolesville. Dirt is the only thing I know that can’t die, it makes sense we would bury here, makes sense mama don’t want me…

Nay, then I’ll stop your mouth. —Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus LANGUAGE IS THE FIRST SITE OF LOSS AND OUR FIRST DEFENSE against it. Which is why after Philomela’s brother-in-law, Tereus, rapes her, he cuts out her tongue and tosses it, the bloody stump hissing at the girl’s feet. In my poem “Philomela,” I leave out this mutilation. Leave out, too, Philomela’s sister, Procne, who learns of her sister’s rape from the tapestry Philomela weaves. Leave out the death of Itylus, Procne and Tereus’ son, whom the sisters dismember, boil, and serve to Tereus for punishment, Philomela tossing the boy’s bloody head-stump at his father. Leave out, as well, the metamorphosis of Philomela and Procne into a nightingale and swallow, respectively, Tereus into the hoopoe that pursues them. Such details would be…

Spy The woman in the red dress who runs past me with a hemp sack full of tangerines is just the membranous summer wind. I pay her no attention. In a world reflected in glass even the mannequins look back at me with suspicion and if they didn’t how could I trust them walking their dogs on clear plastic leashes under the swampy lindens. The clown crossing the street with a makeshift helium bouquet of condoms is a middle-aged woman who by smiling adjusts her yellowing dentures. Her husband is the recently dead Czech dentist that washed up in the river with a living mask of young turtles feeding from his worried visage. She is rushing to the magistrate’s house, a lame stepson’s ninth birthday. They are all innocent is…

Ongoing Never mind the distances traveled, the companion she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite. Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none. Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences. Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her until the hard daybreak, and for months after. Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites. Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass. Stored generations of filtered quietude. And some stubbornness. Tangles along the way the comb-teeth of the mind had to bite through, but for what. She had trained herself to look for answers at eye level, but they were lower, they were changing all the time. The Hunt Ferried…

Until I was five I could only fall asleep holding my mother’s earlobe. A single crocus can melt a snow bank. On my desk I keep the jawbone of a deer. When I rub its three bleached teeth, it tells me secrets. How many hes and shes must one wade through to find a you? Funerals hum when they begin with a honeymoon story. Every portmanteau should house a stash of love letters jealously guarded but never re-read. Once on a high school tennis trip one of the Zabriskie sisters fell asleep on my shoulder. After she woke, I apologized for days, never mentioning the wet spot she left on my shirt. In the yearbook I can find her quick as saliva. I need a new pillow, my niece announced,…

School-Night Out in a Venn Diagram We stand in the sliver of shadows the circles from streetlights make. We are almost out too far, in a space barely safe and daring; ensphered in night, its creature comforts, a darker shade of night around it. Note Left on the Counter after a Science Fair Gone to hunt for metalmarks and milk quartz. Home eight minutes after last light leaves the sun. Look for fireflies—we have orange peel, book of matches. Late Winter after Art Class Papier-Mâché Outdoors a dungeon of sludge: March snow, March mud. Beneath us we lug our legs homeward, the weight of the day still on our hands. The Joy of Sex Too high to reach without a chair but low enough to read the spine and wonder,…

your murderers were the last to touch you in this world torpid song on repeat pulled down the rocky slope I hold the shirt you left behind the bottom was visible before the descent hours days months later your shirt is gone no I am wearing it covered in cuts layers of dust on my skin still confident in gravity still sliding down when up now feels too far away a spider’s web is made of digested fly brains wings hairs legs tears pheromones flies attracting flies after death dissolving us into the endeavor of love hold me to your song it is delicious death attracting flies like life hear you one more time in middle of night tooth it open love all unloved parts without pause Dear Ghost flickering…

In the Hands of Borrowers, Objects Are Twice as Likely to Break You said, Break the poem’s speaker halfway through and rebuild them. If there’s time, break them again. If there’s time, build me a house with so many rooms that we’ll have to plan where we lie days in advance. The joy in naming: analemma room, room of caviar and unbearable situations, room where we spontaneously combust. That’ll be my favorite, where we breathe in our own rising, where our water evaporates and returns as condensation on the window pane. My ghost drops by so often I no longer feel obligated to offer it our good coffee. Halfway through my second cup, a roach leg surfaces like a rotting mast. I’m so tired, it says, I’m so tired and…

Infidelectation Faithless as the day is to the hour, I am moving into a new body every second. Take. Bleat. Do this in severance of me from me, in reverence of you as you swoon me, cocoon me in untimely & iterant devotions. Body. Blood. Man who thinks His flesh transforms guilt into grace, without a trace of lust for this never-lasting life. Nictitating eyes that just won’t quit strobing my face back into my face. Lashes stroking the space between us, what will close, but not like an image of promise encircling skin encircling bone, but will last only until last is another sound that cannot be made sense of. I do not worship the covenants birth brought us into. This and this and bliss have no affection for…

Self-Portrait with Sick Bacchus You climb a tree to eat the day’s fruit until the boughs crap out because a body must test the air to be art. Braid legs with branches until the sun dulls. I am no docent but so much depends upon proper diffusion of light. It’s not the moon, though it pursues you. It’s how faces in paintings are lit like dead relatives in dreams, their eyes pairs of dark gems. Caravaggio painted over several of his apostles before giving Bacchus those sick eyes, that crown of vines. We like this kind of art, but to buy it would cost us everything. Like hearing the story of our own afterlife: once the stars pull out and frost hits the field. Honey crystallizing in the jar. We…

Overwinter Under a microscope, snowflakes look like blood cells, half-formed arrows spreading in every direction away from the heart. Here, they whirl around your head like little clouds, catching in your hair, your mouth, among your pale eyelashes. In a next life, the silk from spiders could mend bone and bad plasma. All winter, instead of not knowing, you would be wrapped tight in a cocoon. Every stage of snow would pass: first powder, then ice, then nothing. Spring and you would hatch forth with baby-hands, every lesion inside you cured. The negative of sleep—your body in impossible wholeness, living as though snow would never fall again. Binary i. I have been wandering from room to room in every house we’ve ever lived. I drift down a staircase frozen with…

The University of the Arts’ Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Creative Writing program and features acclaimed contemporary writers who will visit campus each year. These distinguished poets, novelists, short story writers and screenwriters will give readings—all of which are free and open to the public—and meet with students in the Creative Writing major to discuss issues of craft and the writing life. THE UNIVERCITY OF THE ARTS in Philadelphia SIOBHAN FALLON Thursday, September 21, 2017 6:30 p.m., Connelly Auditorium, Terra Hall Siobhan Fallon is the author of You Know When the Men Are Gone, which won the 2012 Pen Center USA Literary Award in Fiction, a 2012 Indies Choice Honor Award, the 2012 Texas Institute of Letters Award, and was listed as a Best Book of 2011 by…

The American Poetry Review is happy to announce that Tyree Daye has been awarded the 2017 APR/ Honickman First Book Prize for his manuscript River Hymns, chosen by this year’s guest judge, Gabrielle Calvo coressi. The book will be published in September 2017 and will be distributed by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium. TYREE DAYE is from Youngsville, North Carolina. His poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Nashville Review, Four Way Review and Ploughshares. He was awarded the Amy Clampitt Residency for 2018 and The Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award in the Fall 2015 issue. He is a Cave Canem fellow.…

LIKE WALT WHITMAN, HIS MAJOR PRECURSOR, GALWAY KINNELL was a poet of wide-ranging sympathies, deep immersions, who threw himself into the flux. He, too, was “mystically physical.” He was socially engaged and identified strongly with people in trouble, the fraught and suffering, the injured and dying, the wounded body politic. He was keenly aware of the non-human world—he wrote some of the finest animal poems of our era—and defended the rights of the earth in an increasingly technological time. He was obsessed by transience, the need to live in our bodies, and relied on personal experience to try to transcend the self. He found a way to incorporate a humane politics into his large, inclusive, freeverse poems, many of them in sequences, and often adapted a religious vocabulary— one of…

The University of the Arts in Philadelphia—home to The American Poetry Review— offers a BFA in Creative Writing program, providing an unmatched opportunity to focus on the craft of writing in an inspiring and unique artistic environment. At UArts, young writers of poetry and short fiction collaborate with musicians and illustrators, filmmakers and graphic designers, sculptors and actors, in the heart of one of America’s most culturally vibrant cities. The University of the Arts has a formal affiliation with The American Poetry Review, which is housed at UArts. Our Creative Writing faculty includes working novelists, short story writers and poets. For more information, please call (215) 717–6049. The Univercity of the Arts uarts.edu…