Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2019 i The American Poetry Review

And at times, didn’t the whole countrytry to break his skin?—Tim Seibles You strike your one good match to watch its bloomand jook, a swan song just before a nightwind comes to snuff it. That’s the kind of dayit’s been. Your Black & Mild, now, useless asa prayer pressed between your lips. God damnthe wind. And everything it brings. You hitthe corner store to cop a light, and spythe trouble rising in the cashier’s eyes.TV reports some whack job shot two copsthen popped himself, here, in the borough, justone mile away. You’ve heard this one before.In which there’s blood. In which a black man snaps.In which things burn. You buy your matches. Christis watching from the wall art, swathed in fire. This country is mine as much as an orphan’s…

I. THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNATURES 1.1 In trying to think about what art is, we might begin with the mind-clearing assumption that art itself is not a real entity, but a notion, an idea, a concept within which we group the real entities of “artist” (the maker) and a “work of art” (the thing that’s made). Which is no solution at all. For we’re still left wondering: what within “the thing that’s made” makes it a “work of art”? 1.1a Since words only mean what we agree they mean—the term “hatchet,” for example, ceases to mean anything if one person understands it to refer to a light bulb, another to the Sistine Chapel, another to the flight of birds—we must assume that the meaning of the term can only be…

Emma Mid-May, 90 degrees. Severethunderstorm watch.Outside of the subway station,teenagers hand out flyersfor a politician. This weekalready long, only Tuesday.Yesterday’s medical testsleft me nauseated & sickin bed. I missedthe poetry reading.I missed the concert, I missedyoga. A hidden costof illness: the things I spendmoney on but don’t go tobecause I can’t get out of bed.Emma sends me an articleabout the discovery of rocksformed from plastic.I send Emma an articleabout trees having a heartbeat.No one I know knowshow to function right now.Every day at least onenew horror in the news.Emma asks, “What keeps yougoing?” YesterdayPalestinian protesterswere slaughtered in Gaza.Today: business as usual.I have a meeting. I meet Erinfor lunch. I read my emails.I work on the report.I tell Emma: poetry,music & friends. The sky,a minute ago, sunny. Suddenlydark as the storm…

1. this unchanging landscapewith a lifelong birchwith the wind tugging at the treeand leaving it in placenow he knows that on the other sideon the back sideis a darknesswhere patientlyspiders hatch 2. serene pigeonswith rainbows on their neckare studded with feathersone after the other the arrow that grows out of usdoesn’t hurt 3. a dragonflydivining rod of amazementmade of emerald-sapphirewith a pair of huge eyesinflated with sightrises on the transparentillusion of wings it will freeze suddenlyit will hold time like a breathto rest for a momentto test eternityin the harbor of balancein its selfin a dragonfly 4. by their leaves you shall know themsaid the Lordand since thenby the cut of leafis expresseda maple stara poplar heart 5. a far-reaching flowerspeaks out loudto blind mothswith scent each in its own…

Happy and Free I should not have gotten the tattoo that saysMay All Beings Be Happy and Free on my left arm,running from the inside of my elbow to the wristin 20 pt. Verdana sans-serif type. My serotonin level that day was so elevatedthat it deceived meinto an optimistic feeling that I was finallyready to be pure. I have been happy in that way before and you would think I would have learned by nowthat I inevitably return to earthlike a leaky, gradually deflating helium balloon. Now I see that my great tattoo might better have beena customized sweatshirt purchased online for twenty dollars,that said Short Attention Span,or University of Repetitive Emotion. How quickly things pass. How long mistakes last.How unrealistic I am when left to my own devices.When I…

Ode to the Scallop I’m offered a Chinese scallop on a toothpickat a Botanical Gardens Halloween pumpkinsand a hundred friendly scarecrows event.Some kids play I am one of the hundred.I carve an Assyrian face out of a pumpkin.I make faces to make children laugh:Russian, French, English scarecrow smiles,I pull handkerchief seagulls from my sleeve.Drunk on Irish whiskey, I talk to myself,“Blind trees are in love with the sun,they have green eyes, teach philosophy,some are Buddhists.” I tell the barkeep,“If I am born again a bivalve,I’d rather be a scallop than a clam.Give me a shipwreck on the rocks,singular and numerous, please.”I speak to a kind lady scarecrow,“Maryrose, a scallop has a thousand eyesinside its hinged shell, each eye akinto a reflector telescope,the sort first invented by Isaac Newton.This cloudy night,…

Whose history I do not know. I do know I’ve been e-upbraided for my fast and loose spelling of Woden, the god whose last worshipper must have slipped under the sod during the medieval period, somewhere in the 10th century—imagine those bog-soaked desperate sickbed prayers. (Just put out of mind the Alt-Right’s current co-opting that archaic royal presence, his reputation narrowed, almost destroyed via their sick devotions.) And though that more recent deity Spellcheck, made to keep the world on track, alerted me dead wrong on the laptop screen, it refused to save me. “No spelling suggestions,” it archly stated, i.e.: not even going to try. Machines can be so callow. They adolescent-shrug with the best of them. It happens that I have rather a crush on Woden, the only…

Good Seats Ever wish you had a doppelganger? Me, too.Sometimes life just comes whammering at youevery day, and it’d be so much easier if one of youcould shop, cook, clean, and take calls fromtelemarketers while the other ate chocolatesand painted or wrote symphonies to rival Beethoven’s.This is called bilocation, which is not for everybody. Actually, it’s not for anybody, unless you’re SaintIsidore the Laborer, who had a reputationfor ploughing his master’s field even as he wasseen praying at one of the tonier churchesin downtown Madrid. You could also try beingsomeone else, as did Alex Miller, an itinerantmusician until he was hired to play the King Biscuit Power Hour show on radio station KFFA in Helena,Arkansas, which is when the show’s sponsor began billingMiller as Sonny Boy Williamson to capitalizeon the…

Lester Bangs Talks Scottie PSH (1967–2014) It’s not enough to say “sad,” alright,you need a flood. You need a linelike a serrated knife edgeto even get started, an anti-riff, likewhatever the violin that can’t keep its chin upcrawling out from under the worried trombonesays in the bathroom mirrorto “Kashmir” or “Should I Stayor Should I Go” or something, likeyou take a spiral ring notebook, right? andyou fill it. You fill it with lust and shameand real beauty and the feverish,trembling trust you get from puppiesor babies, anybody truly new, who knowswhat they need absolutelybut they’re half a planet from havingany way to actually say itbut they go and wail toward it anyway, rightthey wail with their mouths and their arms,their thighs, it’s a caterwaul attacked byanother caterwaul in the dark,…

Dear Reader, We are grateful for the support that you, a Friend of APR, have shown the magazine. We hope you will join us again now, in our 47th year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. In 2018, we published six outstanding issues representing the work of 120 writers, including Patrick Rosal, Deborah Landau, Khadijah Queen, Edward Hirsch, David Tomas Martinez, Diane Seuss, Li-Young Lee, and many others. We published the 21st volume in the APR/Honickman First Book series: Throwing the Crown by Jacob Saenz, selected by Gregory Pardlo, and we awarded the 9th Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Mark McCloughan. McCloughan’s winning poem, “Devotion (Reflection),” appears on the feature page of the September/October issue. We also lost our editor and dear friend David Bonanno, who was…

The Forty-Third Day with lines from “Ocean of Earth” by Guillaume Apollinaire,translated by Ron Padgett Today I got mad at a door I did most of the talking In the sunlight I sneezed & reabsorbed the sneezes I went to the room they suggested Let’s all look at loneliness together How many holes do I have I like my whiskey messy I kiss my wife without her diamonds on I like a jug with a sturdy handle The evening as it’s turning brown My bare ass bounces to the bottom of the sea I wrote an ode to Dillon I did not do most of the talking There’s a rat in the trash room Twelve minutes to twelve Either my body is a bullet That will not stop misfiring Or…

My nail cuts through the peel, sends a burstof oily mist through the sun splayed overmy aisle seat. The droplets movein tandem, refracting the light,and with the mist come bright citrus notesthat rapidly disperse into the olfactory systemsof surrounding passengers, interrupting their thoughts,stirring awake the man in front of mewho hours ago told his seatmate I’m takinga little Valium. If you need to pee, climb over me.He shivers, rubs his eyes. We speed into a knotof clouds and before we’re through he’s asleep again.Chipped ice sweating onto napkins mappedwith the country. An already-completedcrossword in the seatback. A gameI play with myself is to see how longI can keep the peel as a single coil, its carpetedunderside, its surface pocked like a teenage face.Each tear releases more droplets I admirefor how…

My year of graduate work in Cambridge, England was a somewhat bleak and desperate affair, coinciding with a bout of depression that could perhaps have been shortened or ameliorated if I had been assigned hard agricultural labor, a daily column of local news to fill, or double shifts as a postal carrier, rather than being given an apartment and a library card and complete freedom from all responsibility. I was in my then-usual attire and position—smelly pajamas, blanket over shoulders, cold oatmeal managed with the left hand and laptop managed with the right—when a mass email came over the university transom. The Cambridge Drag Hounds Club was looking for a “fox.” I grew up in rural Pennsylvania surrounded by deer hunters. Our yard, a former apple orchard with trees in…

Beauty’s Many Absences I stare at the wood showing beneath paintchipped from the doorframe, so many layers of lead. The man who nailed this together—the wood that meets the door, the ceiling—is long dead. Here, where the town sinks slowly with age,we walk with the shadows of carriages and match factories, cobblestones and lime quarries. We cannot possibly keep knowing,keep breathing the dust of the dead who came before. We must forget how the light, when it reaches usfrom some distant star, has already gone brown with wanting. Sanctuary My father and I sit before the sermonsin his study in the Texas apartment. I am 23, he is 57; my parents are Midwest exilesand there is no job after this church year— just applications. My mother has taken to crying,will…

How Soon the Trees Seven I’ll be. Then eight. Then nine. Ten is where I ends, ten is all, comes last. Ten is old enough to start my own, ten is when I leave. Start my home, find my mama, kai shi. I make a map. Inside my qi. The place the colors how soon the trees. How many soon? Ten thousand double-steps by a soldier soon. Kai shi. Today I am up before her. I sleep on that bed before. I sleep in the middle unless she comes to sleep too. I make room. I make room. It makes the gut ache hard to clay. A song the night’s a newer color. I thrum her sound inside my ear by laying close and then tighter. I lay until she…

To Whoever Is Reading Me after Jorge Luis Borges You are invulnerable.The only thing constant is change.Such repetition leads to nostalgiafor the present. Tense and timidyou recite this book by heart. Blindfoldedyou commit me to memory.The baldhead scallywag philosopherknows that man’s character is his fate.This poem—not alive, but the remainsof a construct known as will.Heraclitus is walking on water in Libyaor: no man ever steps in the same river twice.Be wary of how the translator twistsmy words, these ruins he interprets asalive. Why do you dread being forgotten?Know that in some senseyou are already dead. Self-Portrait of Librarian with T.S. Eliot’s Papers In the year 2020, T.S. Eliot’s papers will be unsealed.Let us go then, you and I. Let us take the dust inour claws, lap the hundreds of letters…

after Clarice Lispector Do you know if you can buy a hole?We could treat the hole with care Clean it out when it growsFull of dust and stuff I’ve been told the edge is nearWe could practice falling Or create jobsPurchasing and selling holes for a little More than we earned for digging themTo potential hole-buyers we would say Holes are great for looking intoShout into a hole and a hole Swallows your shoutHow wonderful they are for seeing through Burying somethingDangling your leg I see us performing our shtickWhere while you dig the hole I stand outside of it looking inSo that while we talk to each other Your voice gets fartherAnd farther away And fartherThe hole-buyers will ask what good What good is thisWhat use I don’t need…

Today I shall write about love.It hasn’t stopped drizzling all lifeI chalk yellow suns onto yellow linesrunning down Woodward Ave,go writing bright green rivers and 1000 hillsinto the dark damp gutter sky.I think about the petrified.The lost.The gunned down.Scribble us all into one perfectred blood painted wooden flower cart poem.I’ll just plant roses now under a wet lamppost.I heart rain.Ah there’s a pigeon poking around in the weeds and crosswalkdrenched and some tossed off smashed champagne.Me, I’m just a girl waitingfor the DDOT Bus 53.My legs are getting soaked.Tomorrow I’ll be more prepared for this.I’ll stick a thesaurus, a laptopin my waterproof backpack.Wear my parrot yellow waterproof slicker.I’ll sit in the middle of some wet cement and scrawlworld, won’t you be mine? Bonnie Jill Emanuel is a Creative Writing MFA…

2016 • Heather Tone, Likenesses selected by Nick Flynn “Likenesses is an origin myth, in that it attempts to create the world by naming it. But it’s too late in the game to imagine that whatever is named could simply be, without at the same time being—becoming—something else. Or many somethings elses…. It happens in real time … as one thing transforms, word by word, into another thing. How we are transformed, reading them.” —Nick Flynn 2015 • Alicia Jo Rabins, Divinity School selected by C. D. Wright “Alicia Jo Rabins’ poems bring together the spiritual, the surrealist, and the erotic. Their wild imagination and fierce passion are aroused by hunger of the soul, and they use poetic intelligence as a desperate hammer to break through the ordinary self, to…

in late photos, it attained a tropical effulgencesilver fronds blossomingeach pronging a different direction plants that flower before dyingmast seeds at prolific intervals horticulturalists explain the phenomenonas a form of speciateddice-throwing the seeds not finding skybecoming a forked beneficenceto rats and passing crows Warhol’s wig restedatop the samepocked circumstance in his final self-portraits,we see the face abraded by human weatherexposedat the surface it is the face that grows all our lives,the one that only emerges the closer we get to skull Warhol’s faceseeded from a bullet to the ribs pupils widening around usglance erasing our glance as if wefingering metal one foot from nightmare, even when awake in the final silkscreens,Warhol’s wig bledin colored wavelength red, blue gesture toward departure,toward arrival William Lessard has writing that has appeared or is…

The Heart Is Not a Synonym for the Chest What you called a cloud was not a cloud. I am in hell here. Hell is a partywhere I don’t sing, and don’t dance, and someone turns to me and says, “Youare a very pretty girl. Don’t ever forget that.” I spend all night tramping up and down the staircase trying to figure out ifyou really love me. Each stair a copy of the first and each of your words a copy of the one beforeit—love, love, love—above us an 18-wheeler on the highway bucks andshifts—fishtailing—and you think of me. I would think of you, too, bucking and shifting, but that is not my heart. That is my left breast. There is a photocopier at the top of the staircase. I…

See, the thing is poet, is that you’re failing.You’re failing at capitalism.You’re failing at “self-care.”You’re failing at feminism.You’re failing at activism.You’ve fallen deep into your addiction.Your despair spreads everywhere.None of this is your faultbut it’s still happening.The failure is the fracture is the opening.Like that infection that started in your elbowand moved to the depths of your being.You spend the night reading about a godcleaved in two so the dream demons come true.Capitalism is shrinking and the richhave gotten more violent.Capitalism could fail and win at the same time.Poet, this is called “crisis.”The swans and the trees and the birds are buzzing.They don’t care.They hum.Capitalism won.I went on a run.I am dumb I hum on my long run. *That hail is rare in South GeorgiaThat once my former colleague saw…

Ode to the Pitcher Plant In the Victorian language of fans // como se dice //come hitherI am the three-headed // head giver // Heather Heather and Heather be my Veronica Sawyer // but you’ll have to dye // your virgin hairlet me make you over // a quien le importa if they say // she’s a man eater// they’re not wrong about the latter // I expect a booty call laterfrom my whereforeartthou Romeo // come use my trellis as a ladder // I am pansexual // with omnivore vigor make you breakfast // the morning aftersee me wavering // waving my spade impatiently // for any lad or lass come shake that ass // booty-bump-a-bump // let me whet your appetitewith my siren waters // seamen // which…

1. ELIZABETH BISHOP “I caught a tremendous fish.” So begins, recognizably but not quite famously, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish.” Five words, four of which are remarkably plain: “I caught a fish.” Minus the one adjective, “tremendous,” the only polysyllabic word in the line, it would be so plain that actually saying it would seem like an attempt to ward off talk: “How’d it go?” “I caught a fish.” But “tremendous” is weird: rhythmically, it causes a slight ripple in the meter before the meter has even been established; and the word itself feels a little grand, a little long, ever so slightly out of place, maybe even a little unclear. By the end of the first line, which could be the whole sentence—subject, verb, direct object—all we know about the…

The rude girl is with child in the Instagram pic. It’s not her baby.She wears a costume conservatives may describe as exotic and revealing.I call her mi pana and mi pai. The baby pulls sequins off her bustier.But she’s not afraid she won’t shine. I was raised by her kind. She shows us how to celebrate carnival as a #badgirlgoddess, tantalizingly #wifey material, playinga benevolent stepmother with #milf appeal, takinga break from dancing to hush a child in her auntie’s laundry room. Over half a million followers like this portrait of Rihannaas the black Madonna. In it her voluminous hair is a halo, her dazzlingheaddress is a crown, a beaded curtain frames heras a domestic deity with a washing machine for a throne. Her breast sits ready to be clutched…

Born from the ice, he was born againand into a world, rough and cold, as unkind and kind as the onehe left behind on a day in fall, when he fell from the arrowlodged in his back, and someone came upon him to bash in his skulland finish the job for good. His murderer left him lying there, and did notrob the corpse, let him keep possession of his valuable copper axein reach of his newly useless hand, left his tools strapped to his body now cooling on the top of an alp.His last meal of grain and roast goat stilled in his gut. No animals cameto feed on his flesh, no people came to bury him. That night the sun setthen rose, and set again ten thousand times, and…

JACOB SAENZ Thursday, February 14, 7 p.m., Connelly Auditorium, Terra Hall Jacob Saenz was born in Chicago and raised in Cicero, Illinois. His first book of poetry, Throwing the Crown, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. His poems have appeared in Pinwheel, Poetry, Tammy, TriQuarterly and other journals. His poetry has also been anthologized in The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Year of Poetry Magazine and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. A Canto-Mundo fellow, Saenz has been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He serves as an associate editor for RHINO. CARLOS RIOS Tuesday, March 19, 7 p.m., Connelly Auditorium, Terra Hall Carlos Rios graduated from UARTS’ Program in Writing for Film and Television in…

APR announces the Tenth Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for poets under 40 years of age. A prize of $1,000Publication in APRMay 15, 2019 deadline A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning poem in The American Poetry Review will be awarded to a poet under 40 years of age in honor of the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets. The winning work will appear on the feature page (back cover) of the September/October 2019 issue of The American Poetry Review. All entrants will receive a copy of the September/October 2019 issue. Poets may submit one to three poems per entry (totaling no more than three pages) with a $15 entry fee by May 15, 2019. The editors of The American Poetry Review will judge. Winner will be…