Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2020 i The American Poetry Review

I love you early in the morning and it’s difficult to love you. I love the January sky and knowing it will change although unlike us. I love watching people read. I love photo booths. I love midnight. I love writing letters and this is my letter. To the world that never wrote to me. I love snow and briefly. I love the first minutes in a warm room after stepping out of the cold. I love my twenties and want them back every day. I love time. I love people. I love people and my time away from them the most. I love the part of my desk that’s darkened by my elbows. I love feeling nothing but relief during the chorus of a song. I love space. I…

Little Domestic Elegies 1 When the backyardlight turned on I was surprisedto discover the air filled with snowso downy and silent it never quitereached the ground. When the light went out, all I could seewas the solid dark still full of that snow. 2 On our first cold dayin the new house the clear world beyond usbecame fogged by the handprintsof whoever had installed our windows. 3 The wind poured through the framed-up housethey were building next door. An emptinesslike photographic paper waiting for some not-yet-installed light to turn onand imprint it with the roomit has now become. Love Poem The purpose of the eye is to narrowThe world beyond the bodyTo a receptive point inside the body At the center of the retinaThe tiny fovea centralis clusters halfThe fibers…

Nocturna How slow is all of this dying? Across the county linea fossil in the making, off-road exhaling last lightin nightmud. A small cat in a steel trap. Pendulous sparrows preen. Holding on for the last bluedark nightwe ate fruited scabs off each other’s mouths. Howlingcalls out its own name. Who could it be for? A pale stray soul wandered into me as it wandered into you; we warmedit by ourselves. We could not undo the latches ofwhat had come before. So, we made it another day rot, refracting what was once life. Now with a clenched heart,from whose curl we understand fists: we know the deadare actually yellow sere of stars. What does it take to remove them from sky? All disorder is above, sightless.The planets mimic eyes. Or,…

The Minuses by Jami Macarty The Mountain West Poetry Series “In these quiet, careful, though searing and poignant poems, Jami Macarty turns her considerable powers toward the dissolution of a romantic relationship in a desert landscape that is at once sustaining and doomed. Here, a body is at one with earthly extinction and failed romance: ‘I am your time to go now.’ These poems are as full of heart as they are of a keen intellect. Exquisitely honed and crafted, The Minuses provides testament to poetry’s ability to speak the unspeakable, to not only survive but to carry on: ‘she’s off-trail but knows her direction.’ This is a beautiful book of courage and the power to live fully, and on this planet, through heartbreak and hard-won joy. — GILLIAN CONOLEY…

To begin with a definition: A poem is a text structurally constrained by the repetition of any language element(s). The continuum of poetic constraint is extensive, stretching from operations that a reader will find completely imperceptible to overwhelmingly obvious ones. When we think of poetic constraint, we usually think first of discernible language operations. Depending on our aesthetic bent, we might think of an Oulipo poem by Harry Mathews, a poem using a nonce procedure by Joan Retallack, or a poem such as Harryette Mullen’s “Dim Lady,” which constrains itself to sentences that hew to those in Shakespeare’s sonnet 130: Dim Lady My honeybunch’s peepers are nothing like neon. Today’s special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If…

Because I was too mean to make him a brother,my son has had to learn of hate alone.I told my friend I’d only ever wantedone child for reasons to do with the shapeof an arrow. But in truth I’m so disgustedby what I know of brothers, having given birth to a son of Adam, Isaid “enough.” One son is not a brother;he’s just a person. I thought this could mean hewould be free to indulge small pleasures likerubbing patterns in carpetunder a piano and whistling without being followed, but it appearsyou can only turn cursive R’s with your fingerin the window alone in the backseatfor so long before you need to stabsomeone in the hand with a real pencil.If you have no brother, that hand is yours. I’m talking here…

Arriving early at the limit of understanding,I managed to find a good seat—“The Day of the Sun”in The Long Meadow (Vijay Seshadri) When asked in an interview about humor in his work, Seshadri acknowledges that satire is an element in his poetry, although not a major one, but that it is “also a technical issue,” suggesting a certain hard-wired necessity: Technical issues are actually just masks for things that are fundamental to one’s own psyche. It is in my nature that if I make a large statement such as “Arriving early at the limit of understanding” … I’m going to find a way to undercut it rather than go any farther into it and try to do what, say, Rilke did. Rilke would start there, and he would move directly…

Saint Agatha holds her breaststwo jiggly vanilla pudding cupswith red berry nipples ploppedupon a silver platter. What I can’t see is the blood, the knife marks. This gory waitressing,her task for not consentingto open for Quintianus. Oh purr yeshe begged, but she was a closed clam. This is supposed to be a better ending:to be a carved Christmas turkeybut pure in the eyes of God. Once, I believedI could save a woman, called campus police when I heard screamingin the dorm next door, listenedto a lamp crash, a desk thrust over, thudsof a body becoming pocked with night sky’s worst ink. The door unlockedto a stranger in her underwear,her lip split, meat showing. Her assailantwas a bear, a college linebacker. She asked me to stay near her while she dressednot…

Overnight Your daughter returns to youwith three new freckles,the purple stainof a popsicle on her tongue.She gives nothing but what you gleanfrom slimmed features,sneakers gone old, the black holeof a backpack she shrugsoff her shouldersto race, unencumbered,towards her friendsdown the street. Just yesterday, she clungto the nape of your t-shirt,begging to stay. Just yesterday,she was yours, and you gave her away. As Plagues Go (after Natalie Shapero) As plagues go, ten seems excessive.Consider how the first darkened water to blood; the mighty Nile gushinglike a giant slit throat. That Pharaoh refused to relinquish his slaves, and continuedto refuse, says all you need to know about men + power. But you know whatgets me? That after each plague, when Moses demanded that the Israelites be released,God hardened Pharaoh’s heart to ensure…

I wake to the train whistle saying, what you don’t knowmight hurt you—with nowhere to ship the storiesI keep to myself. Somewhere in the middle of methey link end-to-end, blowing their whistle into steamin the cold air of things I know that I wish I didn’t.My mother is the engine, pulling the cargo down the line.Secrets hop from one car to the other—and some losses—a brother and a sister in the graveyard up the roadfrom my house, both named Baby, and two othersnever buried. I have a brother on his way there, made of ash.I know more about him than he ever did. Don’t tell,we often said, keep this to yourself. I go back in timeto quiet my brothers and sisters. I sing apologies to them.I hold them close. Forklifts…

Three Books (A Simultaneity) 1. May you be written we say, inscribed into the Book of Life According to Talmud there is another book for the wicked: inscribed and sealed for death, and a third for those in between the books where most of us live suspended, trying not to be swallowed by the past, dismembered by future, praying to be written 2. once was a book so largeyou couldn’t behold it—you’d have to marchfor miles just to read a line, the ink so richly blackit felt like falling just to lookand each stanza was not a roombut a state, and each poem a country of its own…Some days we could not tellwhat was the poemand what was the world When we felt the breeze,we wondered whetherit was someone turning…

The Free Library is pleased to present Monday Poets on a Monday evening every month, year round. Now in its 24th year, the Monday Poets Reading Series showcases a variety of talented poets with local and national reputations. Readings take place from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the Heim Center of the Parkway Central Library, 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia. Copies of the featured poets’ books may be available for cash purchase. This year we also will have two open-mic readings for those interested in presenting their work. For additional information, please call the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Literature Department at 215-686-5402. http://www.freelibrary.org/ Upcoming Events (All events are free.) Mon, February 10, 2020, 6:30 P.M. — Octavia McBride-Ahebee & Sekai’afua Zankel Mon, March 2, 2020, 6:30 P.M. — David Ebenbach…

Number two from the right was an angry drunk.Number one from the left always held the face of a dead cousin in her left pocket.The third woman placed fourth in a seed spitting contest at age six.The first one knew she was the prettiest.The fifth didn’t need to know. The child belonging to the one on the far right worked at the general store as a bagboy.The first’s daughter was too rough looking. She lived to be sixty-one. The second woman had no children. She spent five minutes picking the right shovel. It was as blackas her hands. This was not the first time she swung metal things from the waist. The first woman’s head-wrap was a dishrag she grabbed just before leaving.The second woman’s head-wrap was a gift from…

1999 Pallets of bottled water on the back porchwere one evidence of apocalypseor the demise of the way of thingsor lazily written computer code backin the 80s, when I was a boyand the nightly news was just about all the doomwe had stomachs for, whenwere there even ATMs, I don’t recall,I had no money, allowance was three dollars a week,and the future, when the worldwas supposed to end, in fire, in glory,in judgment and vague prophecyand Jesus and dominionand I don’t know what elseexcept that it was easy to imagineashes and blood and choirs that sang like a storm.That was easy. Still is, lookingup at the mottled eveningwhen my phone buzzes with warningsand kids on scooters go pastso sure of bones that will never, never break.Betray. Bend. Bruise.I should go…

Dear Reader, We’re so grateful for the support that our readership has shown the magazine and all the poets we publish. We hope you will join us, now in our 48th year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. In 2019, we published six outstanding issues representing the work of 127 writers, including John Murillo, Brenda Shaughnessy, Kelle Groom, Charif Shanahan, TC Tolbert, and many others. We published the 22nd volume in the APR/Honickman First Book series, Vantage by Taneum Bambrick, selected by Sharon Olds, and we awarded the 10th Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Maggie Queeney. Queeney’s winning poem, “Glamour,” appears on the feature page of the September/October issue. We believe that our mission to reach a worldwide audience with the best contemporary poetry and prose, and…

Limulus Polyphemus “Who you looking at?” —Fred Moten In class, I stared because of the blood going blue.The chalk that coated our fingerly teeth.The way we lapped each other (on the shorewhere the flowering). I gave away our location. Smacked my lips in the coat closet.Sucked at her teeth. We, on all eights, we had magicalinnards. Coagulated ground germ. We stood in the torture lights. Sandy liked to say in those moments: What the fuckyou looking at, in a rasp. Her smooth neck of coal coast.In the shells they brought in. Her, whose voice I can still hear.We sat still at that. In carapace, in book gill. The UV lightof her face in my face. We dodge at first, then the stainless plunge. I am overhear. Wanting you sense in…

In the classroom students are imagining screensthat feel like silk, like silt, fiery as kilns, off kilter.They discuss a future with stone walls that dissolveinto fog and reconstitute as universal organs, pulsing,a future with robot spouses who know when to cuddleand when coffee and when cancer ceases beinghypochondria. Cantilevered bridges swarming with livingconcrete that can heal itself before collapse. Algorithmsto predict crime and epidemics. In the classroom studentsare imagining a future so immaculate they omitturnips, dirt, tantrums, long aimless walks, lust.They trust the relentless process, don’t pause to mournthe prototypes twitching in their mass graves,last words a slur of diminishing whirs and forlornbleeps. Onward! They forget to eat, and when the tears splashonto control, delete, they try goggles until the plastic cupsfill with lacrimal fluid. Then they try bigger goggles.Perhaps…

To be brought from the bright schoolyard into the house:to stand by her bed like an animal stunned in the pen:against the grid of the quilt, her hand seemsstitched to the cuff of its sleeve—although he wantsmost urgently the hand to stroke his head,although he thinks he could kneel downthat it would need to travel only inchesto brush like a breath his flushed cheek,he doesn’t stir: all his resolveall his resources go to watching her,her mouth, her hair a pillow of blackened ferns—he means to match her stillness bone for bone.Nearby he hears the younger children cryand his aunts, like careless thieves, out in the kitchen.Kyrie We’ve passed the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic now, and mostly it was scientists and medical historians who noticed at all.…

Chance darkened me. Chance darkened me as a morning darkens,preparing to rain. It goes against its arc,betrays its clock-hands. The day was a dark-eyed giraffe,its unfathomable legskept walking. A person is not a day,not rain,no gentle eater of high leaves. I did not keep walking.The day inside me,legs and lungs, kept walking. My Glasses Glasses can be taken off.The world instantly softens, blurs.The pattern of carpetor leaves out a window,words on a page,the face in a mirror.Blurs,even the war that is coming,pushing its iron boat-shapeonto the sand of a beach not farbut not seen;even the silences coming,following the boatas a swimming dog follows its master.Lu Chi, poet and scholar,born into a family of generals,was executedin the 35th year of the Xī Jin Dynasty,after his soldiers’ bodiesblocked the Great Yangtze.The Yangtze…

Translated from the Greek by Aliki Barnstone I am the boy in a sailor suit.I amble magicallyin the sea forest,exotic birdsin my leafy hair,holding a tubato stave off feeling scared.The freighter is white,its smokestack tall. * Time was distilledin a gold goblet etched with my namegiven by my king.Father, is my mother his daughter?Am I his son?I began collecting shapes,colors on a black coat of arms. * I don’t need black,colorless design, the secretdivided from humanity.I’d like to rebuild from scratch,explore with my needleto the point of danger. I don’t need things to ward off fear—nettles, splinters, carnivores,or a vast vestment against the devil.I wave my fingers toward the beyond,make the forest come to me. This, too, is a kind of quest,a sensual adventure.Shall I change course?Shall ghosts enter the…

Boats Can Take You Now I know that nothing is closed—boats can take you through a ravine then outwhere oily weeds and plastic bags, cast-offs I sit in the sunI don’t know why this earth, why my body, why daylight,why bridge and its shadow over water, a shore where bird printsget lost in the slap of river, they repeat but they’re not the same I know less than when Iwas young, when the net, rippled and wet held me, nowmy self, less, my mouth and eyes, less— This time of year, trees bud outabundantly brief, pink and white wafers raining down, they’re boats sinkinginto earth, dissolving, conducting the black vein of cosmos, black veinthat repeats but is never the same I hear sounds the petalsmake in dirt, the dogwood’s hard…

HUMBABA My friends, who can reach heaven? The monster bellows like a river swollen with flood.Many are consumed in his fiery breath. My friends, who can reach heaven? Let us ask the mountain for a sign.Let us cut the spirits from the cedars. My friends, who can reach heaven? To be remembered a man must undergoThe ravages of the eight winds. My friends, who can reach heaven? No matter how tall he is, a mortal can never reach heaven;No matter how wide he is, a mortal cannot stretch over the earth.Therefore, may Shamash open before my feet the closed road EKINDU We climbed the mountain.It was enough.We chased wild creatures over the grassy plain.It was enough.We planted grain.It was enough.We drew water from the river.It was enough.We dreamed the same…

Galaxy Filament Of time evaporating, of my mother’s fingerrunning down my nose during the uncordingceremony, after she died, the vast sky,the Milky Way neighborhood,and me, and David, and the black cat growing tumors,rain falling, drops left over, puddles gathering,reflecting the baby birds, black millipedes droppingoff branches, white blossoms floating below cedar,sunrays bleaching shells, stop signs fading,a family of wild donkeys milling aroundan outdoor basketball court at noon in high heat,sargassum mats drifting from the horse latitudesinto Drunk Bay, flush with plastic waste andeel nests, washing onto sandstone rocks,a lost rubber raft cast ashore with a long towline dragging in the surf,chickens jump-flapping off trash heaps filled with twisted stair railingsand corrugated roofs blown off by 30 tornadosof two Cat 5 hurricanes, red dust from the Sahara Desertsifting toward us, nutrients…