Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2019 i The American Poetry Review

No Traveler Returns I was like you once, a sealed plastic bag of water filters floating on the sea. I thought my numbers proved my time and space on earth. I thought having children was a way of creating more love. I thought thoughts I was ashamed to speak in case they were what everyone already thought or in case they were unthinkable thoughts nobody would dare think much less say which would blow up the world everyone else had to live in if I said them. I muddled that distinction to extinction—pure silence not a piece of peace and a breathlessness not of wonder but blackthroat, choking on backwash. Once a wild tentacled screaming creature every inch a kissed lip of a beloved place, a true and relentless mind,…

Is this the first time that feeling comes, not at all frightening, but familiar to you? Your understanding of the water and its relation to the body, your being able to hold your own inside the enormous-unimaginable, to dive deep and come up far from where you started: when does it begin? Is it the day you step off of the last step in the shallow end of a neighbor’s pool up the street near the river, the water line shifting your vision to divide all that is in from all that is not in water? Or earlier, when you walk into the waves out front—an expression that means the water of the vast Atlantic Ocean that flows almost to your doorstep—feeling for the first time the relief that there…

Middle Life When I got upa dead beetle where my back had beennot a tick, should I be gladmy blood untouchedthe body’s sliding boardI don’t understandmy tongue feeling large for my moutha loose bone floating in the footreceiving impactthis being subtle and not so subtlethis evolvingmy restless squirrelsmy own exposed waitingfor what?homocysteine: a word as pretty as gossamermeasure of inflammationI listen toa hammock filled with windand where all of it goesand in a cloaked waythere is a dark river that flowsthrough a town named Christmaswe jumped from the bridge100 times, teenagers thenbacklit and yelping. With Toddler He tours the house with a grape popsiclenot breakfast not getting dressedgame of jump away can’t catch meshow me your listening ears show me red lighttry using the board game timertry using as soon…

A Good Life Of course sadness, regret, even cruelty.Of course the failures and the almosts.It seems that time will undo everything,though it’s possible to be magnificent, too,for days, even longer.What can I do but risk the lifethat flirts with fully being a life?I haven’t murdered anyone yet,but have a list. I’m hoping my angerwill be offset by defiance.If I’m honest I need to rememberto remember to be generous. The greatundo-er, however, has patience on its side,can out-wait a fire in the forest.The winning shot I made as a boyhas already slid into the reductions of memory.I’ll never be the same hero, and my teammatesnever again as joyous as I want them to be.And when it comes to her, my great love,and our early sense of ecstasy, time willlikely be relaxing…

Uppercase Delta When I say life is long you say spare meThat some clichés are clichés because they’re trueBut after my father died I donated my clothesIf you love me know me by that calculusBy the past lives of denimThe footprints on cashThere was no willI was left nouns & blood workI took a portrait of an orchidI’ve yet to hang though I know where I’d like to see it:In the Goodwill by the bowling alleyIn this new future I’d like to plant flowers in New Jersey * Dad do you remember how terrified I wasOf insects of them finding my inner ear?Just this once I let a beetleWander my topographyWhen I lie still like this it mistakes me for weedsLike it once mistook you for weedsWe’re keeping you alive…

Everyone’s an Expert at Something The more i learn the more i learni don’t know what the fuck i’m talkingabout. To someone who doesn’t carea fig for poetry they’d likely thinki knew a lot, yet in most bookshopsi’m lost, shelves heavy with the bodiesof forgotten writers. It’s relative.A president can say audacity ora president can say sad & both eatthe cured meat of empire. When i sayi carry my people inside me i don’tmean a country. The star that hangsfrom my neck is simply a way of sayingisrael is not a physical place but can becarried anywhere. It says my peopleare most beautiful when movingwhen movement, when our only stateis the liquid state of water, is adaptingto our container. Homeland sometimesjust means what books you’ve read,what stories you’ve spread withyour…

I’m on the treadmill today becauseI promised God that I wouldand on the television, in Florida,an indeterminate number of deathsat a large public high school andI think large enough to run a statisticalanalysis without compromising the normalcondition, the independence condition,the random condition, and what kind of curve wouldwe use to estimate if we could estimateon average the number of people whonever leave school like I leave schooleach day feeling the sun as if for the firsttime outside air like being resurrectedexcept not resurrected because that’sinsensitive or not Catholic like whatmy brother’s Catholic school is turninghim into. Today with the cross of ashes onhis forehead that he wiped off in homeroomto make a girl laugh like isn’t all this forcedsalvation so funny and like totally embarrassingand I am mad at him…

Quilt Not humble, a quilt takes credit for inventing cinema. Jump cuts? Sure—look: two shepherdesses evading rockets. And here’s rosefilled toile-land again. Other quilts at the bottom of the fulllinen chest running away from bad shepherds in toile-l and flip adjacent squares: stars & elephants. Some cloth taxis brag they devised city planning & graph paper. The suffocating chest weeps for the loss of its only key. Sontag Diary [ ] didn’t answer. I kept trying. That house: beautiful disordering. Bitter: smoking. Selfish: loving. Lack of wholeheartedness: great failing. I will be all right by this morning. It’s entirely safe to risk nothing but therefore bad: entirely boring. [ ] thinks one thing isn’t any thing. I think many things might be anythings. I was but am no longer nothing.…

We Turn Here If we don’t have to bring honesty into this,why bring it, or that’s at least what Ithink the question was, though what I moreremember is how it kept breaking—the question did—the way waves do,touching shore (one, that I shall be punished, two, that this is not yet the punishment) each wave eventuallyindistinguishable from the wave before. Wake Up The road down from everything even you had hardly dared to hope for has its lonely stretches, yes, but it’s hard to feel alone entirely: there’s a river that runs beside it the whole way down, and there’s an over-song that keeps the river company: I’m leaves, you’re the wind … I used to think the song had to do with the leaves’ confusion, the wind letting up, their…

The Great Lament A man I used to loveIs yelling at his girlfriend In a gas station in OhioIt’s not going to be this way forever She shouts at himThe smell of gasoline Sticks to her black sweaterBlack shoes and hair Thin thingI’m sorry God I hope someoneMakes it out of here Saint Saint Saint Death As Dymphna’s father gathershis men, a clam girl scratchesher wound under the orange lightblaring through her window. Later, the madman in the washroomwrings out the blood. Sometimes, when we love people We let them hurt us so they can feel betterSometimes this helps us feel better Until it doesn’tWhen a cord is a cut The split depends on the materialOf the thing If it frays then we have to get things in orderWe have…

That’s when bar napkins in Brooklyn were interesting,when answering machine messages meant somethingmore than an emoji of an eggplant or a peach. This hasnothing to do with baba ghanouj or the local Lebaneseplace that closed because it’s so hard to find help thesedays in the kitchen. My friend Nadine sent me OrangeBlossom Water from Beirut for my insomnia but it didn’twork like it should have. It kept me up all night insteadtexting you fragments of poems that were actually aninventory of garage sale items. A gold plastic participanttrophy. A snow globe from a place I didn’t want to visitto begin with. The sound of a voice clicking and clicking,a squiggling rewind. Remember these things? I would liketo visit with you in the way people did in the 19th century, with…

A kind of vertigo, a drug, an addictiona leisure activity, a diet technique, love or substitute thereoforigin: America. (see glossary)related to: ecstasy, art making, beauty pageants, huntingavailable in: spa blue, lapis blue, cobalt, capri, ceruleansomething is not an addiction unless it has a negative impact on your life(raw materials/ sweat labor/ freight)[to be most effective the costs must remain hidden]the binding of one person to anotherservant/ adherent/ disciplethe state of being so bound Judy Halebsky is the author of the poetry collections Sky=Empty (New Issues, 2010) and Tree Line (New Issues, 2014) and the chapbook Space/Gap/Interval/Distance (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2012). She is an associate professor at Dominican University of California and lives in Oakland.…

Earthward The shovels sing their songof hitch and heft as we walk the rows pulling potatoes and beets from the earth.Needled, bright, the sun’s resinous light flickers behind my eyes like dark matteron a radar screen. As you bend for what you’ve unearthed—Solanum tuberosum, of the deadly nightshade family, which is to saythe common potato in its jacket of dirt— your curls graze your face, the sweatthat bleeds there. You brush them back and leave behind a mark, a calligraphof dust that wavers its signature across the bridge of your nose.It’s then, as the sun steps between us, that I see your younger sister trailing you.Her faceless face, that I never met except in dreams, that even nowdrains away, leans to tell of the compact we made, and of her…

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS in Philadelphia 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 2014. He received a Universal Pictures’ Emerging Writers Fellowship and was featured on the 2016 Black List. He has written for Colony (USA Network) and is currently a writer for On Becoming a God in Central Florida, which will premier in 2019 on YouTube Premium. The University of the Arts’ Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the BFA Program in Creative Writing. It features acclaimed contemporary poets, novelists, short story writers, and screenwriters who give readings—all of which are free and open to the public—and meet with Creative Writing majors.…

Midnight in Iowa It’s 1 AM on the east coast and midnight in Iowawhen the Russian lawyer with a house in Newarkand an office in the city sends me an e-mail:“Your writing is so emotional yet so detached.It’s wonderful.” I respond without delay:“Dear Oleg, I don’t know how you got my e-mail address,but I’m glad you enjoyed my work.You’re not the first person to say it’s detached.If you only knew! Just before I got your messageI was thinking about the tattoo on my husband’s thigh that says ‘Fuck This Life.’We met for dinner a few months after he moved outand as he undressed back at the apartment,there it was, a stick-and-poke from a friend.It was almost Christmas,days later he surprised me with a treewhen he came over to walk the…

His condom rips.No and Stop moltin my throat,my Adam’s applea wingbeating,clipped. Fog billows inside my bodylike the San Joaquin Valley— it disseminatesthrough orchards, seepsthrough limbs,crystallizes boughsinto chandeliersbearing frostbitten fruit— it turns me apparitionlike Gabriel to Mary:The holy ghost shall come upon thee—God’s anointedsecretion, phantomassailant, his sacred alibi of bruisesaround my neck.Who will believe me?He spitsmy name: S——from Hebrew S——,from Latin S——: wreath,laurel,crownof thorns upon the bastard’s head.Su condón se rompe. No y Stop mudaen mi gargantala manzana de mi Adán un alabatiendo,cortada.La niebla se agita dentro de mi cuerpocomo el valle de San Joaquín—se diseminaa través de huertos, se filtraa través de las extremidades,cristeliza ramas en candelabrassoportando fruta congelada—me torna aparicióncomo Gabriel a María:El espíritu santo caerá sobre ti:El ungido de diossecreción, fantasmaasaltante, su sagrada coartada de moratonesalrededor de mi…

The Fire War is coming but my neighbors can’t believe it. I ring their doorbells and tell them: maybe not this May, but next June at the latest. They stare straight past me, at the maze of lawns, the sprinklers, a kid on a bike hurling the Globe onto porches. An old man invites me in and offers me macaroons. You look tense, he says. The armies, I recite, are facing each other in the Middle East. But it just reminds him of his childhood, which is mine. Didn’t I push him off the high swing? Now his mind has wandered, he begins nibbling the macaroon he offered me, all along the edges, revolving it in his hands rapidly, like a squirrel. The bombing, I say, happens at the speed…

after Marina Abramovic´ & Ulay It’s come to this:I want the arrow between us.My dear, what do youknow of blood? I forgetand don’t dream. My haunting:spring in abeyance. I’m theblack tie hunter and the unstartledprey. We fall awayfrom each other, like cut flowers,holding the trigger. Shelley Wong is the author of the chapbook Rare Birds (Diode Editions). She is the recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize and fellowships and support from Kundiman, MacDowell Colony, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Fine Arts Work Center, I-Park Foundation, Fire Island National Seashore, and SPACE.…

i. To make and remake one’s self isthe artist’s job, I believed. And so, in poems,I gave myself wings. But even then, I made surethe wings could not support flight, could notlift me to safety. Even my imagination failed me. ii. The first time I tried to kill myself, I swalloweda bottle of Tylenol, pill after pill, like the sacramentof communion, placed on my tongue. iii. You were supposed to save us. You weresupposed to help save our souls. Isn’t that partof the vow you made to God when choosingthe life you did? You must have forgotten that.You didn’t kill my soul. But you didn’t save it either. iv. I’m never late anymore, never late to anything.Because I still wonder if I hadn’t dawdled after practice,if I had showered with…

To attract congruence wavelength to sine reachingvirtue scented rosy blushing to blooma metaphor more than metaphorpurple to red adaptableleaf or blossomstem or spindlecotton floss guided through eyepressed through fabric stretched onto frameeach stitch a silo in western fieldsa foray into skin furred paws hold an acorndistancing to be held anothermore dear more aroma of leaf fadedays crispinginto October into creases around eyespromises and panderthe night opening just change Curling up coral pinked to silk latesoftening to sun and touchmiles of grasses brush in unisonprairie dulling to winter to strawshadow bidden earlier hoursbare feet soft under tableleveraging electric signals into songinto quiet rooms lit by screensI sleep in the waiting constancyconifer sex happens slowlytaking several yearsmodeling the slowest exhale imaginablerooting into downdrawn by degree across fieldsdarkeningthis sleepy breath this milky warm…

Upon first glance, it’s hard to conceive of much common ground between the poets Robert Duncan and Thom Gunn. Duncan’s cosmic, bardic, Whitmanian, anachronistically neo-Romantic poems and poetics seem light years removed from Gunn’s understated, tough-minded, often neatly metered and rhymed takes on such disparate late-twentieth-century phenomena as motorcycle gangs, Elvis Presley, acid trips, bathhouse orgies, and the decimations of the AIDS crisis. In an interview quoted in August Kleinzahler’s 1995 essay “Thom Gunn: The Plain Style and the City,” Gunn had this to say about his literary ambitions: “I’m not aiming for central voice and I’m not aiming for central personality. I want to be an Elizabethan poet. I want to write with the same kind of anonymity that you get in the same way somebody like Ben Jonson…

The Waiting Room We were in the waiting room of the hospital.Our son was still unconscious, still caught in the moment when he rode his bikeacross the street and the driver turned without looking. The brakes that didn’t brakefast enough. The impact before he even knew what was happening.Daylight closed its eyes. The windows were dark. We had no more tears to shed.My husband took my hand and said that when we immigrated, he imaginedwe would live in a house with a swimming pool. We would start our own business.Our son would go to good schools and make plenty of friends. He hadn’timagined this: the endless worrying, the fluorescent light hurting our eyes,the stench of sanitary wipes, the nurse saying our health insurancemight not cover all the costs. The Winter…