Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2018 i The American Poetry Review

Prairie Erasure I Blazes travel the state roads. Entire fields ingrained in us—firesa house, a forest, essential in land and soil—set a purpose. II At growing season, leave dead matter aboveground. Future burners—side ditches. Dead matter, new plants—shells that need breaking. Never leave them. III This time we see plumes rising. Grasslands herds, hunted,go hide in falsified ash. Drip torch upwind—machinery itself. The guardians of us decide when to intervene. Anodyne / Plea Who objected when the truth disappeared or when the truth battered us & we pretended fear fell from the ripped pillow of our sky instead of rising from the one clear place of us. Where were you when madmen told us to die & blasted us into nothing. Were you downtown, a figure cluster watching yourselves stagnate…

Refugee, Walking Is the Most Human of All So long to the papaya kingdomsOf olden mothers, The shepherdess ignitingPeels of bergamot. Grief of chalkScribbles the form of anArchangel. Consider a pillow of mortars,How the rubble of hair Weighs dense togetherWith the pedestrian heft Of never coming back. Home is a sleeping whale.Consider an armor Of feathers, not to buffer the body from shelling, But to be hoistedAs a skyless meteor fleeing for An elsewhere chanceto land. You will come backTo rescue your footsteps. Towels spread on a roadAs if forming: timelineof cotton against A pillared topography. But this, the clap of hands in crisisShoveling out evacuees. Empty your operaIn the howling of the sea. The Shaman Asks About Yellow Rain Did the airplane knife the sky? Or did it arrive,Still…

Surrogate Drenched in the dampness from its mother,its feathers were flat before softening.It slipped through a fissurewhere the hens had slept. We could hear its peepsfrom where it had fallen. Aloneit stood, trembling before rejection.Father gave it to me as a new pet and I welcomed itinto the private quiet of my days.I cradled it in my arms, breathing dirt-scent,smoothing spindrifts of plume. I gave it a name. Watched it grow.Watched it peck rice out of my palmwith that animal-knowingthat consumed without injury.It would come running when I called to it, teaching melove with inhuman allegiance.Young friend, the wind conveys, even the best of our loves die.Opening my ears to the dark,now I listen for soft-pronged footfallson gravel. Call out to sounds of crackling twigs. Forgetting In late summer, by…

She Sells Seashells considering the life of Mary Anning If only I believed in charmsespecially in regard to the dragonfly and dragonfly nymph possessed by stone:to make ends meet, Richard Anningclimbed a local cliff with toolsto pry out spirals—snake stones— he’d sell to neighbors convincedof their healing powers. *** Daughter Mary was namedafter her departed sisterwho’d tossed sawdust on the kitchen hearth,inspiring flames to her biband burning her to bits. Me,I was instructed to so fear a matchwhen the lesson came to strike one I twisted, shrieked, and wept. *** The verteberries, sea lilies, scuttle andthunderstones had lodged in strata for millenniaabove the English Channel. Abovemy father’s rowboat the sky relieved its tormentbut for twenty years I knew no reason. *** As the high-tide withdrawsa shell burrows down with its…

When I say ex-stasis, ekstasis, exstasy, ekstasy, ecstasy: I don’t mean pleasure, bliss, passion, a blind union with an otherworldly entity wherein I learn some Truth. I don’t mean a total engrossment with an object, or that I am beside myself: enraptured, mesmerized until I can’t speak. I don’t mean Saint Teresa; I don’t want her deep, white folds. But I am reckoning and re-reckoning with what I don’t know, with what I can’t know. I am attempting alchemy, transference, to sublimate beyond a border of self—to be here and there at the same time. In a sense, that is otherworldly. Ecstasy comes from the Greek word ἔκστασις—eksta sis—formed of the prefix ek (outside or beyond) and stasis (“standing,” “position,” sometimes “static”). “static”). ἐκστα (eksta-) is the stem of the…

Too Jewish / shtetl kitsch Yes, I believe in generational trauma plusthat mix of pride and fear that 40+ years in patriarchydidn’t fix. I have a hard time saying no because you all are going to take it anywaybut I didn’t come to monologue that. Synopsis:I am worried all the time because of the tsar. Synopsis: I want to talk about my childhoodlove of Fiddler on the Roof. Sounds crazy, no?But I didn’t come here to choreograph how once I was so lost I couldn’t leave the apartmentand there was food trash on the floorand mice were enjoying the buffet and I wanted to die but didn’t have the energy.Think about how our whole cast of characterswould have thrived with some Zoloft to swallow. I pray to those pills most…

Central Park I’d like to buy one when I die,one of the benches not yet spoken for,not yet tagged with a small stainless plaque and someone else’s name.If they’re all gone, pleasehelp me carry a replica to the boat pond so I can sitand watch the model boats get nowherebeautifully, rented by the fixed hours I’m grateful not to be out of yet.Another flicker of love,an updated Triple-A membership, and a handful of Pilot G-Tec-C4 blue-black pens,what else do I need?Universe, watch over us.Boat, my poor faraway father says,as if my mother has never seen one. Boat, he says, and we say, Yes,aren’t they beautiful.Come winter, the boathouse here is locked up,the pond drained,except one year it wasn’t and my son and I convinced ourselveshis new Golden Brightcould sail across.…

I HATE CROWDS I’m an introvert. Most poets are. I’m terrible at chit-chat and networking. In group work situations, my ideas are usually too far out, so I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut. The only “team” sport I ever played in high school was swimming. Are you technically part of “a team” if you can’t make eye contact or talk because your head’s underwater? My aversion to groups may be why I deeply distrusted the premise of crowdsourcing—especially creative crowdsourcing, like people writing a poem together. How does it cohere? Isn’t a poem about capturing one person’s point of view? Who has the ultimate authority to edit it? Is it “mean” to delete terrible lines, as poets do to their own work every day? How about terrible lines written…

Because past the angel at the gate, oh can turn like that, go under, straight into poetry. Here’s the god’s honest: a moment of calm recently came to me, so close to sleep it was sleep. In my dream I saw a girl whose dark t-shirt read: All is Failure. Except “failure” was misspelled—part of the dream too—either “far-lure” or “fear-lure.” The words still blur. But thank you, whatever sent that. Because now I accept far or fear as the real F words, both part of lure and—most of all—that F as failure, as in all is failure, a triumph. I handsdown love that, everything made of failure, triggered first by failure, seen in its light, built—at least poetry often is—by one first failed turn of phrase after another, stanza…

The Enchantment When I said, to my mother, What was a goodthing about me as a child?, my mother’sface seemed to unfurl from the center,hibiscus in fast motion, the anthersand flounces springing out with joy. Oh you wereenchanting, she breathed. What do you mean—crazy? No sense of reality?No-no, she laughed, with many little notes—half a scale, plus grace notes—I don’tknow how to say it, you were just …enchanting. Possessed?, I asked. Brain-damaged?No, she smiled. There was something about you—the way you looked at things. I thought I got it:that stunned look on my face, in photos,that dumbstruck look, gaze of someonewho doesn’t understand anything.But a week later, I thought it had beena look of wonder, it was bemused pleasure.And days later, I see it—that lighton my mother’s face—she loved me.…

Junk Trees, the Bradford Pears, green-and-white globes of my girlhoodwhose smell I’ve tried to name for years, settling on piss, but walking by a row of them on my way to the grade school,I thought baking soda. Junk trees, those spring debutantes stinking in their crinoline, begin snowing when the snowis almost gone—only three more days of cold white once the forsythia opens its yellow stars, sign of not-quite.False spring, too, is junk, not science. It serves us right for asking trees to tell us the time. Junk trees, why?Because they’re frail? Because they’ll grow anywhere but not for long? Whatever we call them—bedwetters,crooked drunks sick on themselves, even semen trees— they lined the aisles of my growing up, a row on either sideof our street, and threw their rotten…

reading I reading what I write aloud is like speaking to you.words sung into the air. me. wrapped in the listening silence. II it helps that winter is over III at this distance I can see that you were as bound by your own periphery as I. caught inside that skin which is history unable to tear through lest you would bleed. empty out. loseall shape all structure. lose yourself. there are moments, of course, but not for you and me. IV you fade. taking yourself out of the action. I see you quietly slip around the corneryour own life even if with a little sadness V the ice cream truck plays its tune over and over and I can’t think. I miss you unbearably. I miss myself unbearably. but…

In the beginning, God wantedto be a comedian. What’s madein my image, but has no soul?he’d ask, and just stare at you,exchanging the idea of a punchline for something like endlessexhalation. He would raiseone eyebrow and ash his cigar.No laughter. Part of the issuewas the slight skew in the angels’sense of humor. Sometimesdozens would sit and watchthe obstinate waves battera glacier for weeks, only laughingwhen it calved and a shatteredhunk of dirty ice lunged freeinto the frigid Antarctic sea.Then they’d bray like donkeys.God took notes and tried usinga similar structure: the slowbuild that feels like boredom.Maybe good timing is toughwhen you’re eternal. Jokes,like most folks, have no ideawhat they mean until the end. Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, and The Iowa Review.…

Paper Crowns — After the New York Times newsfeed from the week of May 6–11, 2018 This week in which faculty members at the University of Floridashove black graduates offstage for dancing in honor of what is regularly denied them; in which Nordstrom Rackapologizes to black teenagers falsely accused of shoplifting; in which a woman says she saw burglars break and enterinto a home when in fact they were black Airbnb guests; in which two Native American brothers are pulledfrom a campus tour after nervous parents call police; in which two black men settle with Starbucks and the cityof Philadelphia over the absurdity of their unnecessary arrest; in which two black women are told to golf fasterand then the club calls the police; in this week, yes, the white mother…

I Feel Sorry for You Someone Saidto Me Over and Over Again:A Story in the Form of a Dialogue,A Dialogue in the Shape of a Poem If you keep saying to someone you feel sorry for them what are you doing to them? What are you trying to do to them? What do you think you are doing? And if someone says, no, there’s no need to feel sorry for me.Someone says, no, don’t say you feel sorry for me And then you say it again, this time, fiercely as if it’s without compassion, without the original compassion you thought you were attempting toportray but had not done a very good job portraying it. Or maybe it wasn’t compassion and that’s why it failed. But your right to say about…

Sky meets everything makes horizon liable for flight then plummets of grace Surrounded by people feeling nah there’s chatter I can’t make out half-listening to the dead The voices are calling & it’s rare when I am even half-ready Rain bangs against forest to get attention back Let’s not ask about presence & breathe absence in deep There are no trees where we live but today we’re somewhere else Amphibians talk syllable by syllable in the pitch of dark The sounds fuck w/the inner ear until composed into communiques for worse or for better Wherever we are let’s find a coastline to skirt alone Some things need to be said along a fluid border I stood still so long to protect existing ground but now the distance travelled from your…

What You Call a Thing Without the adventof Stockholm Syndrome,how could I havelearned to love myself so much? I’m asking Godand New York, can anyonehelp me? (An all-but-audible “or else.”) The captain’s chair:it’s beginning to smella little too much like me. Again.But there must be more punishing consequencesimaginable, right? I noticed,for example, you know the one, a boy prying his waythrough the trash piles along the river,looking a lot like the last timeI saw you, but blind instead of dead. (I dugmy own grave; I used itfor someone else). And there it is: When all you know is the woods,every controlled burn is a forest fire.Or it matters what you call a thing.But not for very long. Care Package I dredge my name out of the sand. What of it.I…

APZ Books The reasons a contemporary American poet might consider writing political poetry these days are too many to name. I would include the government’s attempt to silence dissent in the media, in the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, even members of Congress; to attack the research and consensus of scientists and science; to dismiss manipulation of our democracy as “nonsensical”; to question the integrity of judges and elected officials; to attempt to take away health care from millions of Americans, especially the vulnerable, poor, women, children, and the elderly; as well as to alienate, discriminate against, and deport immigrants, while banning Muslims from coming to this country. American poets might address festering issues that predate the current political situation, writing toward issues like economic dislocation for…