The American Poetry Review September/October 2016

I’m fond of recalling how my mother is fond of recalling how my great-grandfather was the very first person to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on the second day. Practical Bought a bag of frozen peas to numb my husband’s sore testicles after his vasectomy. That night I cooked pea soup. I Knew a Woman Everything she had was better than everything the rest of us had. Not by a lot. But by enough. Married Love, 1 When we snuggle, my left hand finds purchase on his back cyst. My home button. Why I’m Switching Salons “We can put on a topcoat with glitter,” said the manicurist. “We all know how you feel about glitter.” Copulation Couplet —for the birds and other open-minded parties— Birds without penises do it like…

His eyes turn brown after surgery. Fear of doctors underfoot and how they fuck with you. If we sleep deeper we will heal faster. What else to do with myths but subscribe? In longing pursuit of clean, dry towels or something just as kind. Moonfaced as you slide your mother’s hands into the modest pile of jewelry your mother left behind. The Eggplant Emoji Means Exactly What You Think It Means All men are married. All men wear plaid. Plaid is an acceptable print for men to wear. All men wear shorts. All men love a good breeze. All men have read the Bible. All men know they have choices. All men understand art. Art is a vernacular with which men can speak freely. All men think but will have…

Reading Latina/o Poetry in the Summer of Trump The exchange be tween Donald Trump and Jorge Ramos in August 2015, in Iowa, underscored the peculiar dynamic that defines the status of U.S. Latinos. When Trump had the Mexican-American reporter removed from the press conference, his security guards served as apt stand-ins for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And when the billionaire told the esteemed Latino journalist to “Go back to Univision,” Univision served as a synecdoche for Mexico, which in turn serves the nativist imaginary as a synecdoche for Latin America. Trump thus undermined his appalling either-or metric for discerning the place of Mexicans in the U.S., whether or not they are citizens, as if to say: not only will I send back to Mexico the “rapists” and “criminals”—the “bad ones”…

I. Remaining only, As though a tree had fashioned calendars, Things to be written Slowly, cautiously if ever at all— Scent of his semen On her mouth, 1000 and more flowers Allow for music, The tang of distraction from violence. We savaged the boy, As he had savaged the least among us. The truth of flowers Sped from his wounds, becoming girls and soil, Atalanta, yes, After all these years her broken sandal Is a pure nation Whence I come to this extreme of caution. Spark of the nighthawk Begins a blaze of constellations, none So fast a runner. If my body breeds 1000 flowers, As does your body Lifted like a sweetened sponge on a spear Leaning in to kiss What? This flesh of ours is a last tasting…

We wore a garland wreath, but it was tight around our necks. We spun around, we took our trousers down, admired the searing brands that now our buttocks did adorn. (Our torsos and our limbs were shorn.) Instead of bone, they fed us fat. Instead of coffee, crème du lait. And what a meal our captors made! Before, the sinew like a floss, but now we were gourmet, ensauced. We like to speak about it with tined and tasty tongues. Though we were mauled when someone dropped the tongs, we knew we would soon be devoured, be part of a real meal. We had been hungry, we had been in thrall. But now we would not have to wonder when or where the light might shine from there, behind our…

THE LYRIC POEM HAS BEEN PRACTICED for more than four thousand years, and yet its history is still unfolding today. It is very much alive. It has been spoken, chanted, sung and written, compacted and compressed, expanded and enlarged. It has been pictorialized on tablets, inked into papyrus, typed onto paper, generated in virtual space. It is a non-utilitarian form of language sometimes put to utilitarian ends, used to build nations and to undermine them, to reinforce power and to protest it. In our era, it has been radically wrenched and questioned, turned and twisted, stretched nearly beyond recognition, reframed, reformed, hybridized, ecologized, politicized, erased—its difficulties are notorious— and yet it continues to speak from the margins, to move and tell stories, to disturb and console us. It engages our…