Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2018 i The American Poetry Review

And One Look at the homie,even when in a ganghe came home to crack Nietzsche, BeyondGood and Evil, Willto Power. Believing everybody dies at twenty-four,not seeing a future in pump-faking, even then.You ever try to read philosophy high?Gone to the hole and hoped for the foul,wished only to finish.After rolling joints in two Zig-Zags,after an hour of starching pants,he transferred trollies and buses.He’s going places.Look at homie, trying to fix himself. Thinks,out of repetition comes variation.It takes a lot of effortto looklike you’re not trying.It should be an air ballto go to collegeat twenty-one, the father of two, justto play basketball. Whenmost folks say they want to change the worldthey mean their own. And Two extra shots. Look at homie. Out pokesa neck tattoo. Winter couldn’t possiblyfollow fall’s fallals.Deck the…

IN TERMS OF GENRE, UNBEARABLE SPLENDOR by Sun Yung Shin is hard to pin down. It includes astute academic discourse examining Antigone through the lens of Donna Haraway’s theoretical text “A Cyborg Manifesto.” But it also breaks into lyric moments (“I am like one hundred electric eels. Our skin is an extravagant tongue, tasting everything…”) or scatters lines across the page. One piece unapologetically announces itself as “a story.” Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kathleen Rooney calls Unbearable Splendor “a strange and captivating hybrid.” Born in South Korea and raised by adoptive parents in Chicago, Shin uses the shifting form of Unbearable Splendor to explore riffs in identity. She writes, “Abandoned and then re-en-familied, re-kinned, an adoptee is many things, including, I would posit, both a form…

A murder of crows for the manywhose blood vessels will be shredby barrel bombs’ shrapnel—the intent to maimwithout exclusion. A murder of crowsfor each mother and father who pawns allexcept what will cover their backsso they may join the thousandsdriven into exasperated seasto shirk their turn at becomingcasualties. A murder of crowsfor the tiny bodies those seas swallow.And do you see? A murderof crows for those of us with eyeskeen yet uncurious. A murder of crowsfor those who cooperateand are slaughtered nonetheless.And do you see the sky? A murder of crowsfor those well aware of how easilyrights to a homeland can be voidedby militias adorned with flags and royalrifles. A murder of crows for thosewho have never worn a uniform but havehad war waged against them. A murder ofcrows for…

DANEZ SMITH IS A BLACK, QUEER, POZ writer & performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and they are a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. Danez’s work has been featured widely, including on BuzzFeed and PBS NewsHour, in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by…

James Dickey All my life I’ve written about poetry. As I enter the last phase of it, I change my subject from poetry to poets. Samuel Johnson never got around to writing The Lies of the Poets. James Dickey was the best liar I ever knew. He was driving me around in Oregon and telling me about being a fighter pilot in World War II. “One day I saw two Japanese troop planes lazing along, no guns, no armor. I shot the first one down, let the other wait. They knew what would happen.” Eventually he dispatched the second plane. “Killed a lot of men that day,” Jim chuckled. Almost everything he said was a lie. At first I was dim enough to believe him. When he told me a…

Fuckin’ Shit Up They’re fuckin’ shit up again.The guys in yellow hard hats.Right next door. They have their dinosaur teeth clacking.Their pink overalls juicing. They’re juicing upthe walls with jackhammers,jamming their knuckles through tile.I want to join thembut left my nail clippers back at the house.Lemme give it a go, I say to the foreman.But he’s a forewoman and tells meI don’t got what it takes.What does it take? I ask.An absence of self, she says.But I’m already gone, I say.The walls come down, the splinters of stone fly.You come out of your momma knowing how to bust your assor you come out of your momma in the fetal position, she says.I can’t figure out what is a who anymore,where is a when.I’ve fathered girls, I say.She says, The sun…

WHEN YOU SIT DOWN TO THINK ABOUT imperfection and where it is manifest in our lives, it’s hard to know where to begin. For instance, even as I was writing that first sentence, I was reflecting on what a beautiful summer morning it is here today—the steam from a wet July 4th night was rising off the meadow as I jogged by this morning, the blueberries at the far end of the yard just beginning to stop their blushing and be blue, cantaloupes stretching new-found arms across the garden rows. The kids, all up too late last night—sparklers and watermelon and friends—are slowly making it into the day by watching Netflix in the other room. But they were, moments ago, laughing and singing along to the tinny theme song of…

Apsara in New York by Sokunthary SvayWillow Books, 2017, 62 pages “OUR LANGUAGES ARE BROKEN,” WRITES SOKUNTHARY SVAY in her debut poetry collection Apsara in New York. This is not a judgement but an acknowledgement that our languages, our shifting oral traditions, and written language in particular, the language of record, have become tools for cultural erasure. Our desire to be read as legitimate and knowledgeable, these urges rendered into language have political consequences. Svay’s collection insists on preserving speech. Hers is a collection that combats forgetting ourselves, even when what is left to remember is forgetting. Working against the corrective impulse to make more palatable what has already been processed through multiple languages, Svay’s persona poems in particular require that the reader accept her speakers as they exist in…

In Dürer’s Engraving Adam gets three for his privates—a triplet affairas in poison ivy, as in the venerablebox elder. Eve, one wide leafor it could be a smashed, very sorry rose. I needbetter glasses. Engravingstake time. And still Adam looks at her—curious or just wary, was loveinvented yet?—and she, only at the snake wrappedsensibly for balance around a young tree.An apple. Sure, the apple,okay tempting enough, even as E and A stand therefully bodied and souled, not terribly young, yearsto build up such muscle (Adam), such flesh (Eve) thoughI can’t say they’re long in the tooth. Nary a toothto scare that garden. The rumor: no weapons, no way.Those creatures in the foreground or behind,oblivious or bored with each other as prey in whatevershaft of light for naps: a mouse, a…

For one thing, it’s on the air, you can hear music For one thing, it’s on the air, you can hear music,its sweet trance stretching between shelter andwreckage. In some region of the humanform an echo draws to a lilting end, but in another everything is prenote,pre-noise, pre-nerve, even the soundwe make before we make a sound, like theway we hear before we learn to listen: when we are more animal than human,more hunch and urge. Our primitive antennaexpanding. Bodies alive with omnivorousbrightness, skin creating its own sparked song that is part wave, part field fire. Part voice,vein, and sky scorch. Part echo. But all yours. Note: Title/first line by Kenneth Fields We tunnel through your noonday out to you We tunnel through your noonday out to you.The world shivers…

Changing the Subject In the kitchen, with the kids finally asleep,and news of another shootingin the space between us,you confess you think deathmight feel like giving birth, the bodyinsistent, having its way.You say you’d never been so at the mercyof yourself as you were on that bed,in that cloud-thin gown, and just the knowingit was coming: ruthlesstransformation.I have no good responseto ruthless transformation, and so it hangs therebeside a bowl of old tortilla chipsand black-bean salsawe’ve decided will be dinner. It lingerswhile a reporter frames chaosas developments; her shoulders rinsed in darknessand revolving red lights. I wantto kiss you. Build asylum inside you.Let our bodies changethe subject, the channelto cartoons. Before night pulls awaydown the flickering interstate,I want one ruined thing utterly redeemed: a deathtollrescinded, a swastika removed,my uncle’s melanoma…

At the Graveyard Now they don’t need a thing from us,However small: not even a cup of waterScooped from the fountain; not even a slightAdjustment of leg or shoulderTo ease a cramp, or an offer to read themA poem or two they used to like. And now they have nothing to offer us,Poor wanderers without luggage,Without maps or pockets.No blessings, no answers to any questionsWe can think of asking, no words of adviceBesides the words that we choose to lend them. Nothing to give us now or receive, and yetHere we are with our bright bouquetsAs if to say we still remember the lightLost when they left us, and the lightThey bestowed on us that we can’t repay. Nothing Nothing is more annoying than a stranger in townStanding forlorn in…

Poem for Cindy Sherman She set the stove to 450 degrees,waited 15 minutes, then stuckthe snowman’s bulbous headinside. Thick with the greyingdrudgeness of the season,the drudging greyness.Black the snowman’s eyes burned.Snow wears itself as a corpsewears its skin.As a mountain wears against the skythe sky wears into a mountain.Deeply in her cot she sleptthoughts unseen.Black the burn; come seethe blinding.Outside, slowly,the sun. Poem for Hilda Doolittle & Hilda Morley You made a pond for the moonand—dusk-quick,star-struck, silent—the moon made a mirror of you.I can’t get at itwith these sameold26 letters anymore,readymade words,telltale symbols.Out of sound,into music,the best songs areseldom sung. JEFF ALESSANDRELLI is the author of the poetry collection This Last Time Will Be the First and the essay collection The Man on High: Essays on Skateboarding, Hip-Hop, Poetry and…

River Hymns by Tyree Daye, winner of the 2017 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available in APR’s online store at www.aprweb.org and at other outlets. River Hymns was chosen by guest judge Gabrielle Calvocoressi. 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.…

Where in the great glare was I Under the sun I saw two kids along a long fencewalking and then fast to a cut, and then we allwere gone. I saw an empty delivery truck with its backopened as it sped away, twice in the same day.There was a side field under the sun and I could seethat the grass was wet and dense, with some night still in it.It had to be freshly cut, but there were no mowers or municipalground crews anywhere. A field in my nose, and even nownot a soul to share it. On the edge of Chinatown an oldercouple had just found a bench. They sat closely and lookedstraight ahead, one or the other patted the top of the other’s hand. I saw that the…

Ghazal I’ll never make my way to the pearly gates above usso long as the pious are preferred above us. Ahmed, Ahmet, Amadi begins a long line of skeptics.Will our malnourished hearts make a third world above us? Do the gods exist? Will we ever know?Not until we rise to the ghost world above us. In sleep, we scrape at boulders, dreams with no end.Will our belief in You, too, be interred above us? Who now points the barrel nudging our spinesas we’re ushered toward the afterlife secured above us? No need for weapons. Our hearts hold munitions:no doubt we’ve earned the rebuke assured above us. Apocalypse upon us in one lifespan, we are told.Call it blessing. Calling it curse. All terms blurred above us. Leave me here on earth,…

In the heart of a forest, a boy leans ona light-lashed horse. He’s not crying.The horse unhurt, just as a huskis unhurt. Lost in the forest, stroking the frosted skin of its muscular neck,he looks far ahead. Someone waiting.He thinks, Make our journey lasta little longer. Say: it was a small beautiful town. He was loved by friends.No, he says, he had only the horse. Horsemade of white threads. Pull them out,and the horse would lose its strength and collapse into a man. The ideais comforting. He could tell the horse,who is now a man, he is tiredand cannot go on. Born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan, YUKI TANAKA is currently an MFA student at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas–Austin. His poems have appeared or…

Listen,she says. I’m listening, I answerand kiss her chin. Obviously, you’re not, she says. I kiss her nose and both of her eyes.I can do more than one thing at a time,I tell her. Trust me.I kiss her cheeks. You’ve heard of planting lotuses in a fire, she says.You’ve heard of sifting gold from sand. You knowperfumed flesh, in anklets, and spirit, unadorned,take turns at lead and follow,one in action and repose. I kiss her neck and behind her ear. But there are things you need reminded of, she says.So remind me, Love, I say. There are stories we tell ourselves, she says.There are stories we tell others.Then there’s the sumof our hoursdeath will render legible. I unfasten the top button of her blouseand nibble her throat with more kisses.…

The Eyes Have Woods You woke with a line in your headYou tripped on a root realizationYou lost the path deranging itself from fact to conjecture & back againYou grew hairy with conflict through evergreen thicketsYou wore a cape inexplicably in the warm eveningThe woods resinous with amber terpenes & something starchy-sweet like gourdYou didn’t know where the trail ledYou didn’t exactly want to follow itYou forgot everything else thorny, dark as pitch, pulsingwith the mewling of the mammal snared in the loops of your chest Congregation at the River Late hours roll in sooty & untenanted,the ghosts gone wandering Woe’s plateaufeels plain like no terrain at all From somewhere beyond the reach of this pale lampa pack stirs hunched & rangy an evolving promisenot to spring Do you recall…

Saturday Night Special Pageant sash emblazoned on his chest,White Jesus holds a staff under his arm. Clean. Serene. Suppressing indigestionas Sunday’s sermon twists, a lodestone bomb locked in my gut, I contemplate still life—Still, life in portraiture may smuggle truth, if truth is where the bread invites the knife.We nurse our credos like an aching tooth. When I pray to the Lord, I dream Him movedin heaven: all ears dragged to the ground— black earth—I buckle in—steel tracks, bent, smoothed—The engine of the maker runs me down and God is both the table and the hunger,and I am both the bullet and the gunner. Praying: Combing My Hair, I Worry I don’t love you as I ought—surefooted, coarseas knots coiled on my head. Another snagin the comb-through, combing through more…

I. It took me four yearsafter having my sonto visit my mother in Brazilin the new condominiumshe had told meyou can actually gofor a walkoutsideat dawn As we walkeda symphonyof dogs in their electricfenced yardstook turns accompanyingus, the sky waspeach and pinkand blueand slicedby barbed wiretwisted spikes sprouted out of spiralsand pierced the darkening horizonlike the crown set on Christ The metal tinkledreflecting lightfrom street lampsfrom the low beamsof commuter carsand securityguards in buzzingmotorbikes Next morning, we walkedthe same route, the only routesecuredthe dogs came outin twosa little onefor alarm orlove orsomething elseto be protectedand a big onefor its thick headof muscle and jawbirds flew away from their barksand rested their wings on wirevines and yellowflowers intertwined with the fence II. Back in America, my friendtells us, as we watchthe…

Bad Election They were the worst until much worse came.To get high they smoked girls fed fury for days.Things repeat, but they are not the same. Blood was bad, here comes boiling rain.He sculpts his hair with the ribs of boys.They were the worst until much worse came. They butchered days, then this thief came,gilding his excrement and lying about rain.Thug. It repeats. It’s the ever in never again. Now old vile villains look basically sane.Let’s take a break. Rest here in stanza four.They were the worst until these villains came. Howl, howl, howl, said Lear to Cordelia, too late.Growl down greed and his henchdogs of hate.They were the worst, then the real worse came.Things repeat, but they are not the same. Waking Greenwood Cemetery Thirty years ago in the…

God of Wind Pearl HarborKamikaze,divine wind,so there’s nothing left to dobut ownthe sharp shapes of the wordand draw a prayer on woodand hang it with otherson a brass hook,then dip a ladle into a dragon’s mouthand drink.Marked by parchments,wheels afire,is it possible in this rough musicand spaceto simply do something,feel full of a moment,then let it go?There were puppet handsat the controls of the planesclipping lowover what we deem Pacific.Long veilsof smoke rose from wherethe deadand gunners gripped.Saliva pooledin the god’s mouthas he wonderedwhy we maroonin webbinglike creatures of sky and sea.I sawwhere the coral scorchedand boned over.I, meaning my body,which loaded itself onto a ferryfrom a coin-bright shore.The oil stillbubbling to the surfaceafter all these yearsshocked me,those tiny dissolving eyes,and I felt a hairof wind then, the hide of…

Galaxy Love by Gerald SternWW Norton, 2017, 124 pages Death Watch by Gerald SternTrinity University Press, 2017, 212 pages ON MARCH 21, 2017 ELAINE TERRANOVA HOSTED A READING and led a discussion by Gerald Stern and Anne Marie Macari at Arch Enemy gallery in Philadelphia. This collaborative review grew out of an email correspondence, regarding the reading and Stern’s latest work, between poets Ethel Rackin and Elaine Terranova. Ethel Rackin Gerald Stern ends his latest prose collection, Death Watch: A View from the Tenth Decade, with the essay “Death Poems,” in which he reflects on poems by Kenneth Fearing, Dickinson, and others. In his characteristic mix of the philosophically rich, the casually inviting, and the comic, Stern ends (as he began) by acknowledging the very impossibility of such a project:…