Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2019 i The American Poetry Review

1. When Wendy Asked What We Dream When Wendy asked what we dream, I wanted to say war and drowning. Not drowning exactly, but the moment when the choice is made to drown or not drown, before the mouth opens. Instead I said I never dream of cats. But that night I remembered the cats I dreamed in New York: I’d been in a dark room sleeping, and a black cat appeared. I had wanted the cat to like me, feeling that if I were liked, chosen by children or animals, it made me popular and good in an invisible way. I had called to the cat, a male, in a soothing way. A man who had stood in the doorway imitated the cat, the way the cat would talk…

I don’t remember how to say home/in my first language, or lonely, or light—Kaveh Akbar Two months before my grandfather died, he asked me to read him a poem of mine. We were at Summa Hospital. In some room. I did not want to read him a poem—because my grandfather was well read. Because he loved poetry. Because, as a child, he did not like me all the time. Because I would interrupt his reading with my play. Because my Arabic was clumsy—Americanized—and I wanted to communicate with him, I did, but felt that I couldn’t because he insisted that I speak Arabic. Because trying to speak to him in Arabic was difficult—I’d forget words I needed to convey a certain meaning and when I’d reach for those words, they…

Paper Crown Outside, the cold is a kingdomsitting for a portrait, preeningits pale blue snow on its black branches.Weeks ago my child began a storyOnce upon a time there wasa Queen Mama and a Princess Papa.They lived in a big monarchy on a hill.A monarchy is an imaginary housewith real toads in it, they say,by which I mean someonesaid Marianne Moore borrowed the ideafrom something William Carlos Williamssaid in a letter. Marianne the magpieI think, she of the glittering eye.In a draft of his autobiographyWCW wrote that if we were lookingfor an account of the women (or men)he had slept with, we wouldn’t find it thereand then he crossed out the parenthetical.Somewhere there is a party full of crossed-out guests,invitation-only. I have this other ideaof a service that would deliver,…

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…

When my family burnt it all, weeven burnt the dolls. I writeabout this all the time, but have youever seen anything like it? A pitof ashes and dozens of porcelainhands, sprouting up like girlishweeds. So far in this life, I haveheard a number of unacceptable apologies and they have all begunwith “I’m sorry” and ended withOxyContin. It’s a shamethe Pennsylvanian landscapeis just waterfalls, coal, andpharmaceutical drugs. I wishthere were more libraries and lessviolence, but I have always been sopainfully hopeful. On Facebookyesterday, my sister’s boyfriendmessages, “she’s abandoned meat the airport, I don’t know whatto do” and I resist the urgeto tell him: that’s what she doesto all of us. Instead I write back,“Oh no!” There are so many waysto be angry at just one thing.I haven’t seen my sister in…

The Street Lights Flick On We know the rain must comebut it holds its wet tonguein the sky. We aren’t childrenso mom doesn’t call and we don’tout stay the night playing in halosof streetlights. We lock ourselves indoorswith screens. The air electric.We don’t even corner a bottle,talk of loss or luck. I missthe way I could talk. I don’t talklike that anymore. There’s too many wordsracing in wires, that damned rain hoveringvoluptuous as peaches. Words so tangibleyou could eat them, like any hungry human.Of course, the street lights flick on,and tonight becomes just anotheroverripe, almost vanished thing.And my boys, their mother callseach syllableof their namesinto gloam. Sphinx I send you the quiet wait of the Sphinxguarding ghosts beneath the sand whilethe desert heats then cools againin case you forgot they…

Cows calve, horses foal, goats kid, but women do not child.Another verb separates us from the noun of it, a distance betweencells that split in my body, my body, and her wet fur on my stomach.I spent all morning as an animal, all afternoon coveringthat knowledge up with dirt and sticks. I scratchedout a hole to bury my shame in. Someday my boneswould be gnawed at by something with fur. I tastedbitter adrenaline down my throat. I lay with youhaunch to haunch and rolled back my reason. Once our speciescould cooperate, we could drop bombs, invent plastic, extractfossil fuels, burn and burn. Books showed species that coulddecimate a herd. Our forward-facing eyes made us predator, butit all seemed long ago: before we’d transcended to theseinsulated rooms and screens. We studied…

You in Palazzo Pants You agreed to meet him in one of those cafés you imagined yourself writing in if you could afford to live in that city. He was also a writer, but older, and you wanted to know how to get published. Slip a picture of yourself in with your poems, he advised, as in toss your shiny coin into the fountain—heads or tails—before it tarnishes. You didn’t tell him of the internship you once had, in which the only thing that stood between the slush pile and the top editor was you in palazzo pants. And that the top editor, your boss, was a tall, ash-blonde woman who thought your post-it notes on manuscripts hilarious. You didn’t tell him this because you have only thought of it…

Grizzly She grazes in a meadow, sulphur blossoms spillingfrom her jaw.At this moment she seems so calm, she could be holyif what that means is something like beingwholly unaware of the good she gives,how even her rooting tills the soiland even her shitting ferries the seedsand even her bathing is a joy to beholdas I am beholding her this morningas she leans over a water hole, her shadow firstand then her reflection on the skin of the water,and then the splash as she enters, the pond opening,rippling, and the scritch as she scrubsher head with her paw, the great planetof her head that she dunks and raises, shakingthe water in wide arcs, droplets sprayingthe lens of the hidden camera. And nowshe climbs out, water rivering off her fur.And now she…

Submission Then the blue screech the lake bellowing my name over a crowd but I never felt found never knew that sharp peal of a bellTo be greeted hello by a warm group of friends who all look like me but for long years I have been litigating HellOnly to win any cold fellowship governed by the thinnest laws of bondage every angel peering at the one who fellHit the ground and didn’t move just lay there pillowing his head with his arm refusing to get up there’s no pillTo lead him back through decades of shame no yellow prayer to undo his losses so when the lake rises up and yellsFor him why would he not answer the cello’s note vibrating in vapor filling his pockets with rocks planning…

Clothed The treading, the treadle of work, the going backand forth between what-is and what-could-be. Metrying to keep up. Before dawn, but warmer today,and rainy, so this poem’s coat is mottled and splotchedas first light shows through its thin cover. Pulling thatover you, as you say from your sleep, Go out and live. I go, I leave you inside your pain-brocaded skin,the skin draped in sweat. Every morning you wake upclothed in pain. At night there’s no taking that offto put on a sleeve of poetry, no buttoning you up safewith one more murmured word. That won’t work. Sleeve Tonight, I lie in the dark, listening to a pulse of sound,letters in an unknown alphabet spelling out wordsthat come and go through a sorrowful labyrinth. And out of the corner…

I want to tell you a story about my daughter Jane Bell. Not long ago, she was nearly five at the time, we were walking to get the mail. Our driveway is long—about two-fifths of a mile from the house to the mailbox—so it is a substantial hike for someone with short legs. But the kids are always game for it. Well, the time I’m referring to now it was just me and Rache (our oldest) and Jane Bell headed down to the mail on a chilly windy day. The clouds hung overhead like a fixture with a bulb out, not looming or menacing, but something still to notice. What JB had noticed, though, was beneath the clouds: a crow and a vulture sort of circling one another. Now, I…

I’m watching a video about sad Asian girlswho reenact scenes from their Asian families:one girl plays the other girl’s mother,saying to her, “Why are you eating so much?”the bowl of rice and kimchi dishon the dinner table, and “I want to go backto Korea next year, so lose some weight,”and I want to cry, because sometimes,I too, am a sad Asian girl with demandingparents who want to go back to Hong Kongevery year, and sure, everyone’s gotfamily drama, but my mother ran offwith my father in her twenties—marriage,coming to America, away from her parents.And I know my mother misses her sistersevery day, separated by an ocean,or a flashback to when I was born:snowy Albany, my mother crying,begging my father to move back to Hong Kong,she missed her pajama stalls and…

The video game Assassin’s Creed: Origins follows an ancient Egyptian assassin named Bayak, and his wife Aya, who work to protect the people under Ptolemy XIII’s rule. Their son was martyred by the Ptolemic police state, and so the game follows Bayak & Aya’s quest to dismantle the entire state via a chain of assassinations. or was i the wind that sang the river -bed into gentlequiet & not the doe whose stone -soft tongue could trustthat water? or was ithe parted flesh which lies, nervelessbetween cartilage & skin beneath the nose’s wide bridge& not the steel that pierced it? that i could altarthe body’s topology& not forget its formershell— that i could unbecome with nail & steel withoutperishing in the crucifixion— when i bleed i bleed softas stone’s ripple…

What is required to be an authentically original artist is an inability to think conventionally.—Carl Phillips Jericho Brown, The Tradition Paperback, 110 pages Copper Canyon Press, 2019 The world is not fair. Ta-Nehisi Coates in We Were Eight Years in Power writes: “Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world.” Jericho Brown’s astonishing third book of poems, The Tradition, is composed of wild music examining the world’s unfairness, the horrific way humans are complicit in evil. Somehow he surprises us with a lush lyric; given his theme, the work is hardly dour or bleak. Throughout the…

Unreported Incidents Ray spit in my hand. Motor oilleafed on still water and he spoke over mesaying I waver when I issue commands.He kicked the drowned cat to shower mewith its pocket of brown lake.Said I wasn’t worth the fuss I madeshowing the boys their loneliness in the countrywhere trucks sink to boneunder the blue sound of electricity.Ray invented the game chop stick snakewith two branches he tosseda rattler at the back of my legs.Eventually he decided it wasn’t his job to help me.A circle of drunk men, burningillegally. Their faces sockets of cracked light.He laughed, go on. Tell themto call it a night. My hands were behindmy back when I asked, could you please.I turned to Ray. He smiled, reversed awayas one man crushed a cananother draped his wet…

To the Chicken Truck “So what do you do?”For the years I drove you,I liked that question; I was 23;the lives of the poets I likedcontained things like automotiveplants, box factories, donuts,pet crematoria, national forestoutposts. Kenneth Koch, alumnusof Walnut Hills High Schoolin Cincinnati, OH—fought in WWII.You were not quite WWIIas far as an experiencebut I put you in my first biolike a tooth under a pillowyou and the city in which I drove youpositive you’d be replacedbefore too long with books.An Isuzu LCF (Low Cab Forward)with a 20-foot boxand a reefer, the first timeI saw you it was on Barrow St.at Washington you were whiteas a whiteboard you were glossyand inviting and because you slepton the streets of Manhattantwo blocks from the Hudsonhooligans welcomed youto the big city (it was…

The things that made me feel pessimistic then are certainly still with us and more so: the destruction of the natural world, the really insane exploitation of the whole environment, the pollution of the elements, and an economy that’s really based on war and greed—we just seem to be heading straight for complete physical destruction.—W.S. Merwin, interview with Michael Clifton, The American Poetry Review (1980) 1. In 2017 Copper Canyon Press reissued W.S. Merwin’s book of poems The Lice to mark the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication. The news caught my attention because I have a personal attachment to this collection. I bought it at a garage sale in New Haven in the summer of 1991, probably for a dollar or two—not a high price to pay for a…

The Recluse The surrogate nothing incorporates inside this is a letter an outsideness symbologyimpish dark snarled at say years the weight look now the before and afterclipped onto the table night and a sense for clouds can imagine the feelingkeep thinking the sickness but it evades what part is visible or I am thinking ofprone to no answer say never sussed it out thinking damage waiting for itthe TV full of bloat bloated look at that man night my shirts in the closetthe feeling open up imagine being pulled into the sky the lonelinesswriggle itch rub ice letting the legs all the way out talk to me the dwellingcrush it it is sweet and fat the I am is clipped it’s a way of speaking every secondnot too fast just…

Correspondence from Madam Rachel, Purveyor of Eternal Youth, to Mister Walter Potter, Anthropomorphic Dioramist, ca. 1880 Most Splendid Immortalist: Herewith you have a letter sent by my solicitor, writtenin my final leapt year, my sliver of pound cake—the one meant to even off everything.I have chosen my undergarments for the first epoch of bloodlessness:the whalebone crinoline will reach you shortly. (I would nevereat a creature but am eager to be lowered indefinitely in.) The restof my costume I leave to your discretion; I have seen the perfectionof your kitten-wedding, the toms in their breeks, the kates in their mantuas—though I trust you’ll leave the Aquitaine hunting cloak for the feast of St. Hubert.I find I am concerned more so with pose: how should I be in perpetuity?What everlasting gesture of…

Totems on Bank Roofs There is no difference between a murdererand a sip of wine. Delight is stoppingthe flow of blood. Let lifewilt on the hand. Let crystalsevaporate. Everyone finds his position,dead or alive. The poet is a craftsmanwho makes social balance possiblefor an intangible presence. Souls kneelin front of a calf first. It also feelsan itching and yearning,but the calf is placed in warmsoapy water. Every animal hasits bunker. Only we are cathedralsin which memory doesn’t get lost. Gay Bar A black vulture crushes my bones.A white vulture in a photograph.Houses open their mouths, swallowflowers. Lightning doesn’t choose. I brushedthe spruces by hand. A car has a tire, a farmhanda whip, trash cans are falling. We havetwo natures. The vulture circles the belfryat Ptujska Gora. Gingerbread hearts, redblood, something…

When I clog my ears with cotton ballsall I hear is my weird brain rustling.It’s a knock-kneed diorama, flimsy shorewith tape and wisps the wrong texture,perspective lines all unscrewed,sea scene rustling inside my head.O crap existence. Fake landlocked,warm and weepy in the trade winds,in our lean-to. With you, my boyfriends.I’ll hug you half to death onmy parents’ sorry Scandinavian couch.I’ll construct you each a heartthrob shrinewith rosehip candles and lip slickand the most velvet of paper.I give and give. Sorry I’m not sorry.You can say one thing for me,I wear my jean vest wrong side outand make bitchy faces at the thunder,I strut out in the glare of thisexpensive hangover and theorange juice place embraces me,so why do I remain so unchosen?The wax ocean on the sick hot sand.It’s all…

Ambitious, i.m. Ellen Willis (1941–2006) yes, likely storyagain takes me in, full ridecomically uninformedthough I got St. Mark’s had longperformed itself, that little tea shopnamed after a Stones song (a guyexplained it to me) I’d frequentand pour my calories into makingrent but never really talk with Ellenbefore she died—her silence, absolutethrust my polite papering over mysilence into choking high altitude—but when I went to work for Bob she saiddistinctly there are things on earthbesides, what was her termpolicy papers, that might not have beenher term—cut short, the city’s gonesimulacrumLittle York, every greatcity leaves a little city in its wake,even Troy had it done to itand the hero as he passedthrough most complimentary,his way of nodding tosolidarity, that’s how he’d pressrenewal out of those migrants of hisand something like this toowas…