Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2018 i The American Poetry Review

Passover Lamb Within the painting’s real frameis a secondary, painted frame composedof flowers—roses, white lilies, salmon-tinted poppies,and the blossoms of fruit trees. Inside the floral frame, she’s painted another frame,this one nearly black, and elliptical, with an angelic head,as if carved there, and wings, painted at the top. Two clustersof grapes, one purple, one green, flank the head, seeming to balance the illusory frame, the grapes so ripethey appear ready to drop from their stems. Within the false frame’sfalse window, we see the Passover lamb, prepared for slaughter.It’s painted prone on a black, petal-strewn board, the legs tied together at the middle jointso that the pointed hooves fan out from their bindinglike the sepal at the base of a bloom. The lamb’s curlsare perfectly rendered, as are its flanks, and…

I MEAN OVER THE COURSE OF THIS ESSAY to make some probes into tempo, one of the least discussed properties of poetry. By tempo, I mean the speed or slowness of the voice that’s awakened in the audile imagination of the reader, bent silently over her book. The tempo of the poem is what she seeks to reproduce aloud when she reads the poem to an audience. My hope is simple: to lift into light certain techniques and principles by which the tempo of a poem is established and manipulated. My focus will tend to fall on the uptempo, as in the last roughly sixty years American poets have made marvelous advances in that area, affixing more recognizably quickened speaking tones to the page than at any other point in…

Bush vs. Gore Both fifth grader and go-getter, what I know of politics is red and blue markers and a blank, fifty-state map. Bill Clinton, blowjobs, blue dresses. CTA buses that don’t quite run on the safe side so we drive by bystanders standing at South Side stops. Daddy’s daddy stays speaking on howHarry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces; Harold Washingtonbe the mayor in Granny’s house like always-forever. In my family,ballots bang blue like cliché gang colors since there are no partiesin Chicago, just machine, jackasses, a lineage of Bridgeport crooks,but these suburbs be a different beast entirely: mayors managed bycity managers with Godfather-logo-like puppet strings, clubhousepolling stations, well-maintained yards mowed by uncompromisedaccents—¿mexicano? Si. Basically, it’s the wildwild west out here—you’d be surprised what bullets folks shoot offat…

THANKSGIVING WEEKEND, A SNOWY quiet night, and I started to think of him, how he hated the holidays. And also how he’d just had his fortieth birthday a few weeks before, and I’d emailed, but knew I should have called. So that night I tried to call, but the number didn’t work. And then I realized it had been so long since I called, maybe the number had changed. So I went online, trawled the internet for his number and found instead the headline of the police finding his body, the medical examiner determining it was suicide. He’d killed himself just ten days before. Eventually I tracked down his mother who recounted additional details; his body had been found in the early morning hours at the bottom of an embankment…

I WAS ON CAPE COD—I SAW A BOY ON THE beach—he had a fishing pole he was sort of walking around—and he had a kite attached to the fishing pole—I guess so he could hold it up—and so he could reel it in and let it out—and he looked like a little English boy with his shorts—and even now I just sort of picture him like two old etchings drawn together—the kite flying above him out of the picture—I walked around reading Cape Cod—that being alone—and in actual space—that actual space and sand and water—all those bodies washed up on the beach in 1849 coldness—vastness and presence—kicking sand around and looking out at the clouds—the sense of form that finds itself constantly re-articulating in them—flying a kite you provide a…

We, Said the Wren I didn’t know vampires taste like Gatorade. Nor did I know hair’s madefair with weeds, milk thistle, and lambs quarters. Where our mouths came together, blue roots. I was marooned in bird pathology: raptors and free jazz, until I swappedmy name for your face. We bit eyeholes into wool caps, traveled over a bridge of braids hung over ariver, yellow reeds, my window, smeared with sap from the old plane tree. Sow. Deadhead. Knead. Status Report After years of digging my tunnel I reach my neighbor’s foundation. Frompicks and shovels to laser drills. Progress is a beautiful thing. Alas, the object of my excavation moved not long after I began burrowing. I don’t feel the same about my new neighbor. Not yet. Should I collapse my…

Dearest Thanatos, Not, I’ll not kiss your lionlimb, not lap back the rattle in my ribslike a lone pill going to powder in an orange plastic bottle. Not, no not sing anymore of the wretchand wrestle. No more ministers to drive words through my wrists and leave me for the patient circlesof scavengers. No. You didn’t kill me. Not because, some days—yes—I wished for it but chose a differentcourage. I stopped asking the mirror for a dream and opening it like a door. I wished to welcome backfeeling, that whole mansion of trembling rooms, wished to break every window, let the light storm through.On my knees I wished for tempest, for rack and screw. I asked for churchless pleasures to disturb my numbcomfort, wanted lick and wallow, wished to swallow…

Parable My son can’t keep the story straight.“Is he going to come into my room?” he asks his sister warily of Santa Claus.He is so young he routinely needs to be reminded what to believe in.Santa is real; aliens are not real. “Aliens could be real,” my daughter says.“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I say. “And Jesus is real,” she says. “Zeuswasn’t real. That was a myth. But Jesus Christ was a real man who walkedupon this earth though he was the Son of God.” I guess she’s made itto the New Testament in the 100 Bible Stories for Kids she boughtwith her tooth fairy money. “Sure you want that one?” her father asked, and she heldthe book tightly to her chest. God, sometimes I can see the privacy forming…

Like a collage, I wrote, the bruised wordsShampoo the hair of the dog. Or likeThe simile eclipsing the thing it is likened to,Which remains unnamed. The feast isNear enough to watch but too far to reachBy foot. To up the ante, we get an echoOf Keats’s last poem or a quote from Rimbaud.The key repetition occurs here. We feelWe have been riding the A train since 1965.Rides, ceremonies, rites. What’s the point?Yet it bothers me, everything I haven’t disclosedFully. I still read spy novels and get crankPhone calls. I’m like the guy whose wifeYou see on TV wondering how to getMy collars clean. Tell her I’m somewhereElse—Paris, Texas, for instance. DAVID LEHMAN’S most recent book is Poems in the Manner Of (Scribner, 2017).…

Indian & Colored Burial Ground We buried Uncle Keith in Nondaga Cemetery,the old Indian and Colored graveyard where Haleyshave been put in the ground since Carlos bought himselffree of slavery. A crab apple had just come into bloomnear Keith’s plot. With each breeze, a snow of petalscovered the turned-over soil while we told stories.I remembered playing basketball in the driveway.Keith was wall-eyed and crippled by hard living—he didn’t hit a shot all afternoon. The best storycame from Keith’s days working at the VA Hospital.One night his friends set up a corpse to spook himwhen he walked into his shift at the morgue.Spook he did—back through the door,his high-yellow face losing its last traces of color—and didn’t come into work till three hours later.After the service I stayed in a fleabag…

Wolf No costume, Red Riding Hood, ever could disguisethis jaw, this brush-like tail, this tongue. By now you must be married to a woodcutteror to a woodcutter’s sonbut I am still entangled in the forest of your hair. Come back;get me out of this nightgown, and I’ll show youhow to raid a chicken coop,how to step around a snare. Only stroke my face againas if it were one of the remaining wild places of the world.Does it make me a donkey, eating shards of apple from your hand?I’d devour every grandmother in the worldto get back into your basket. Look at the savage bramblespasted through my fur. Don’t tell me that my enormous teethdon’t frighten you anymore.My enemy the moon looks down at me like a cauterized eyeas I creep…

After Cortázar I’m fine with the kind of love whereyou shoot me with an arrow decoratedwith a plastic model of Mars set on fireby a rag soaked in gasoline, so I canfollow you into a cave and backlightthe image of hands pressed thousands of years ago in red chalk—the first time people wanted to be remembered. My friend after years of living in Montana pulls everything outfrom under the hood of his truck. We burn leaves in theyard to stay warm and he complains about oil on his plugs,then it’s a non-sequitur about living in a cabin his boss ownedon a thousand acres outside Lewistown.How he could shoot deer with his .30-30 from the kitchen window.One summer all I ate was deer. We talk about the time his engine stopped…

Dear APR: I have great respect for Donald Hall, but I feel it is important to correct a few of the factual errors in his brief memoir of James Wright in an APR Supplement to the Jan./Feb. 2018 issue [Vol. 47, No. 1, pages 23–26]. Hall’s “Selected Poets” is part of his forthcoming A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety: • Wright died at the age of 52, not 53. • The title of Wright’s Complete Poems, published in 1990, is Above the River, not Across the River. • The Bly farmhouse in Madison, MN, stood a few miles from the South Dakota, rather than North Dakota, border. • In research for my biography of Wright, this is the first time I’ve heard that Wright “in the morning forgot everything…

I’m not afraid of you or the black sun.I’m not afraid of the colony of ants in my ceilingor the displaced persons sleeping in my treehouse.I’m not afraid of the rain depluming the clothes from my skinas it pelts down hard as hail, hard as a hammer, hard as the shellof a musk turtle overturned and unable to right itself.I’m not afraid of the dove-colored smoke moving in the airin the pattern of a cry for help; in the pattern of waving goodbye.I’m not afraid to be ejected from the opera house forsinging along to the aria about the woman about to hang herselfbecause her lover won’t convert to her family’s religion.Or because she is dying of scarlet fever.A friend today saying Crazy how the venom stays in the body…

Monte San Salvatore, Switzerland All I can think is what happens if the cables snapand we slide down this striped Swiss mountain made of oceanic quartz on its edelweiss-covered face.At the amethyst peak is a lightning museum where you can bolt a bright coin of knowledgeinto your neck like the pale green monster of classic horror movies, back when no bloodwas ever seen, never pulsed or throbbed on screen. And the lightning collector has notseen action in ages, no arcing low to engulf a tree in flame because most lightning herecatches between clouds. Our kids play back home with their grandparents and what have we done—first we dared eat the finest risotto, drink wine over a white tablecloth before noon, and nowwe are sliding up a mountain to see about…

Lunar Mansions It matters where you are born. In a barnmeans you are the holy star. Meteor child. Jesus was the first bomb. Where are you fromis a question I field too much. Once I said Vietnam and the white man said I fought there.I loved the country. I love their people. That’s the day I started to lieabout my birth. In the stable the horses kicked me from their wombs.It was exactly like finding a baby in a haystack. It was snowingin Michigan when the priest exorcised me from my mother, said: there is goodin you yet before placing a prayer for the ground. Blessed America,there is good in you yet. The moon doesn’t have to bury any children because the earthcarries so many bodies in the soil. In…

1. Las Ánimas I María Delfina, María de Jesús, Maria Luisa We are threeunlucky stars. We areunlucky three, the wardens whotraded their bodies for cells, their soulsfor the honor to be the brothels’ unholy trinity. Men will judgeas easily as they willlove. And history, so male in hiscruelty, will write his fiction down in blood.The true travesty is that his words are louder than ours.Don’t be fooled.Listen carefully. Embeddedin the falsehoods is our story. No, we arenot innocents. But we certainly are the monsters men created.If we’re to blamefor something, it’s for makingmen first, and then quenching their thirstfor the feminine limbs that taught them such affections. What miserycycle, what wheelof misfortune that shriekswhen it spins, unspooling the threadof our carnal sins. Oh fathers, oh sons, what a hell we…

Toska Days a cascade of whatTrolley clatters thru a grimy warmth Hours filled w/whatDimming light as stabilizer What you call me in the darkisn’t what I am & that helps me floatabove the moment Is that what anyonemeans by role play? Men point out the moonlike we haven’t been conspiring this whole time. Like I haven’tbeen right here, renegotiating the terms of my objectificationLet me give you the highlights reel That’s not how time works,but still I say not dtf,spiritually drained You say that’s sweet,thanks for sharing No equivalent fortoska in this tongue so I gape & gapeat anonymous greenery bursting from a neighbor’s porchBirds flicker in & out of view w/nothing to tell. I can’twrite what I can’t identify. What happens whenyou want to assign meaning for protection, absolution,to…

My wife no longer wants to hear from meon this, how the emptiness of take-out coffeecups or suitcases in even the best series or filmsuggests a more pervasive hollowness. Methodactors pretending to sip hot liquids from obviously empty cups unmasks a world bereft of surfacetension; it violates the necessary suspensionof disbelief upon which all such versionsof vicarious truth depend. Vacations taken withempty bags in tow depress me in the same way those drinks decorated with paper umbrellas maymock the irksome myth of privilege and plentyin actual life, though this, it seems, is just a gardenvariety failure of unintended irony—a bit likea voice-over track applied to clarify the obvious. Let’s return to the physics of emptiness, the necessityof weight and its relationship to gravity. Jesse Pinkmanoffers a welcome counter-claim, the weight…

The Second Arrow Someone once asked Shunryu Suzuki Roshiwhy there’s so much suffering in the world. He said, No reason. The Buddha said that sufferingis the first arrow— injury, injustice, old age, illness, death. But it’s the second he said to beware. It might be tiny or even invisible,with one of the three poisons glistening at its tip— anger, delusion, greed.Their tiny barbs fasten like ticks. Flags in their three colorssnap above the empires and encampments, the towers of the rulers, high floors aglow, and the blanket-and-cardboard towns, the nests of the fallen in doorwaysand under trees where the air is gray with sufferingbut the flags are bright. I’m building a bonfire of second arrowsto ignite on the occasion of my awakening. Meanwhile, I come here to swing on long…

Other women don’t tell you mother is born from “a thick substanceconcreting in liquors,” like the whiskeythey tell you to rub on new gums or the red winemy mother told me would help his forming heartgrow stronger, Look how resilient you turned out, she says,not knowing she too comes from “lees” or “scum” or “wasteof skin,” probably from Middle Dutch modder“filth and dregs,” what’s left of us afterwe’ve been named, but also see mud, found in manywords denoting “wet” or “dirty” or “damp” or “moist”and other women tell you how they hatethe sound of it, without explaining why, that wordbetween the thighs, how they would rather comefrom Old Irish muad for “cloud,” would rather look upin wonder, counting cows or crows or clowns, imaginingtheir bodies too can change back just…