Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2016 i The American Poetry Review

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…

How the Story Started I was driven toward desire by desire. believing that the fulfi llment of that desire was an end. There was no end. Others might have looked into the future and seen a shape inside the coming years— a house, a child, a man who might be a help. I saw his back bent over what he was working on, the back of his neck, how he stood in his sneakers, and wanted to eat him. How could I see another person, I mean who he was—apart from me— apart from that? Magdalene: The Addict I liked Hell, I liked to go there alone relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone. The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then? I thought it was…

Grabbing Lunch in the Morgue It took three bologna sandwiches, a pickle, one slice of banana bread to get her ready for the families that came to see what happened to the relative they lost somehow, the bodies she kept chilled while they hardened, waited for the hearses, the morticians smiling, making bad jokes about the fat lady they dropped on the floor one night. The families come just after the Coca-Cola made her burp, opening the door to the cabinet so they can see how naked death is, none of the things we accumulate beside us, none of the failures, the prizes, the big houses, no thing in itself, while whatever memories they had are somewhere where dreams go and die. When peering eyes of parents wet, then burst…

Friendships Between Ghosts APR A Column Books Discussed in This Column Ventrakl, Christian Hawkey. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010. 149 pages. $17. Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz, translated by Claudia Keelan. Omnidawn, 2015. 131 pages. $17.95. Rilke Shake, Angélica Freitas, translated by Hilary Kaplan. Phoneme Media, 2015. 119 pages. $16. There are some transl ations that one needs to accept in concept to be able to read them well. A prime example is the Zukofskys’ infamous homophonic translation of Catullus, in which they prioritize music before meaning by making the English resemble the Latin in sound, rhythm, and syntax. To read such a translation in the same way one reads, for example, Paul Green’s Catullus would be a mistake. Rather, these two translations exist on a continuum of…

The Greek Vase On the vase, the two men fought an impossible war. The vase had outlived years of horror and hits. One was naked on top of his adversary; his adversary, perhaps too young, was half-naked. They fought like enemies, like lovers, motionless. No one victorious, no one vanquished. Nearby, strong bull-legged men waited. We only stared at the vase, at that eternity we will never drink from. The Walk The story was, perhaps, false. Marina Tsvetaeva walked under the frozen trees. Ana Ajmátova followed her. No one said a word. Silence reigned. Two birds destroyed by life, I thought. Beauty was near them; the high pine trees were blurred by the fog; the paths had no end. They walked alone, under the frozen tree, unharmed, no mention of…

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…

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…

That fall after the baby was born my hair fell out, not like antlers or teeth, but dark streams of worry down my arms. The scrawny city tree in the sidewalk next to Carl’s Jr.— I caught sight of it just as a wind whirled its leaves away. This is the new you, ready for winter and risk— branches that could flower or break. Jamie Asaye FitzGerald has published poems in Mom Egg Review, Works & Days, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from San Diego State University. Originally from Hawaii, she lives in Los Angeles, where she recently completed a manuscript and has begun research on another.…

Introduction Imagine a book of hours condensed into a book of minutes: That is the modest project of these dense, lyrical, oneiric, personal yet impersonal, prose poems. They locate the metaphysical within the domestic, moving seamlessly from philosophical speculation to aphorism to condensed narrative to brief love letter to prayer—all filtered through sentences openly thinking about language, about existence, about beginnings and endings, both large and small. They are not afraid to talk about God or Love, and their leitmotif might well be light. Gemma Gorga writes in Catalan, a Romance language with over 7 million speakers, mostly in the Catalonian region of Spain. Her poetic influences, however, know no borders. One hears a dazzling array of echoes in her poems: Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hans Christian Andersen, Francis…

(Begin with your father’s fear of flowers) Begin with your father’s fear of flowers or mom’s musical rants against money. Begin between serious and funny but say it’s beyond, not a slave to hours. Ignore what adulthood mistakes taught you. You can begin with what you know of love, The tall shallow power contest above. Read it backwards to find roots you ought to believe to pass as standard, but feeling’s more like thought, on paper even, pale songs. Put yourself in the downpressor’s throne, wrong as much as you are wronged. Try the ceiling eyed view of this roofless room. Down to earth judge by its ability to give birth. (The maid with no time to clean her own flat) The maid with no time to clean her own…

Travel Plans All these nights, I’ve been telling you things, mainly made-up things, aiming for your attentiveness and empathy and lust, and this has worked well enough, what with you glimmering to others about my victories and complexities, what with us waking bare-fleshed while mornings blared light through the shadeless panes. But I’m talked out now, and the reach of requisite is suddenly so fraught within you, your eyes looking breakably at me, your parted mouth the bay your former voice won’t find, and I’m leaving, maybe for a bar or a bus station, cheap drinks alone or a slow, third-class ride to another unremarkable town where someone else’s face will in a half-second glance give me the thrilling disinterest I need. The Former Us Remember when our bodies were…

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”…

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…

Three Kings Like us they have come a long way from their various elsewheres for reasons they cannot quite articulate, following the trace of a faint star into the diminishing distance. All their kingdoms could not suffice in this world of rumored miracles. They too must have traveled far from what they had known before, and always with the dim sense that all they wish to say has already been said, that the real life is elsewhere, across vast sands and under a scatter of stars, just born in a shopworn stable, still cauled and mewling, soon to be found and lavished with all they have to give. For them, like us, it would be impossible to return the same way they had come. The Book of Job The God…

Invocation He is a sailor Is I guess what I told my father He’s a sailor and he lives I said On the other side of the six-foot wooden fence At the back of the Backyard I talk to his voice Through a knothole A funny thing to say My father says and I say The sailor tells me the color Of storms and depths And gulls and the wind On the water in the light What it looks like When lightning Strikes ship And showers down Through the rigging I told my father And my father nodded I see it now across the years You muses who disappear Like the weary Beggar with the sign hungry Sent me slipping into a burger joint To get a hot chuck with…

Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems: 1950–2012 PART TWO “look at her closely if you dare” (1970–1981) APR Books Collected Poems: 1950–2012 by Adrienne Rich W. W. Norton 1216 pages, $60 hardcover, 2016 At least since the poems of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law, Rich had often followed moments of opening in her work by backtracking or looping around to retrace the steps; a private—maybe a secret—moment of reckoning would fail to assert itself in her personal or social life, a feeling of freedom from teaching in SEEK or found in public forums of protest and demonstration would evaporate in her domestic and interior space. This troubling stasis, registered in her work, certainly provided topics of discussion with her therapists. Meanwhile, fearful of making irreversible changes, the poet waited for something to happen…