Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2020 i The American Poetry Review

—Dante, Canto XXVI But if the truth is dreamed of toward the morning—El Paso Although it was really last summer’s song,all this summer Despacito played on as slower then I turned myself to gazeupon Juarez. The summer everything hurts my eyes, a dozen Thai boys tweezed frombeneath the surface, the picnic table shirts of those bold Croats, even words sprayed belowthe bridge I walked back across: Sabes el camino? Do I know the way? Donde?Wolves change rivers. A swallowtail lingers. It was summer all morning & all night& soon it would always be summer so I point us toward the far sea & meanwe approach the ocean like returning. And going our lonely way through that dead land—Salt Flat We approach the ocean like returningsoldiers, arms open wide, or we…

Survival Gown Beneath your skin, a floodof glass is surfacing. It means I stayalone for years during your weekin the hospital. You breathe like rosehips crushed, mouth too muddy to believe. I’m one to talk.The stylist asks if I want my liesto show through. I wade intoa flooded pass. No doctorsattend to me. I dream your departure,parting my hair into a disguise.The angles here are husks of sunthat melt and run off the roof edge. My secret: I’m afraid of being leftwhen this is over. When nothing is left. In my next life, I live with a dogin a valley painted blue. She sitson my lap while I eat salmon, peach, artichoke. She licksthe plate clean. For years I woreany dress thrown my way, loved anyone I saw crying, livedin…

for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its contradictions—you, the shyest person we hardly ever knew,the solitary we hardly ever knew.You the fatalist. Your favorite sentence“It is what it is.” (Yes, it is, it really is.)Only the negative constructions pertain with you.Nothing to allegorize or ring changes onwith you. Nothing occluded. Nothing with whichto make analogies or metaphors.Never not meaning what you said, never not transparent.Never could you have been like this river,acquiescent to, and companionable with, Earth,supple, reconciled, patientwhile trapped between the high banks,narrowing itself, widening itself,sinuous through the industrial places—slag heaps on either side, coal barges booming down its waters—and…

I Took the Drugs marked sleep for sleep and the drugs marked joy to trudge through grief and the yellow drugs to crack my Vaseline smile, ooze trickling the length of my spine, the hair on my arms electrically charged. The stop-my-legs-from-fidgeting drugs for blood-dipped dreams, the stop-crying drugs that left me hazed in a hangover for empty weeks, the taste of copper licking my lips. The drugs for side effects, the drugs for drugs, bottle-shape they shoved me in, body of sludge. Call me the corpse of corpses, the undead with a pharmaceutical edge and a head full of mud. But I believe, if I believe hard enough, if I am a believer on my knees, the pink circle by day, blue ovoid by night, white pearl for when…

Books The Galleons by Rick Barot Milkweed Editions, 2020 Paperback, 71 pages, $16.00 Whatever the truth is, to speak it is a great adventure.—Louise Gluck Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously proposed: “What can be shown, cannot be said.” He seemed to be saying that the visual differs from the verbal, and that so much exists beyond and above mere articulation. Naming and labeling all day long can’t fully capture the amplitude and complexity of the world. Thus what I tell cannot ever show you everything. I was reminded of this finishing Rick Barot’s The Galleons in the time of the 21st century’s worst pandemic, with over 100,000 dead in the U.S. alone, and in a time of the death of George Floyd. In this time of broader protests against racism of…

After the Wake I look to the tree line & already the leavesare ripping themselves away from their mothers. It is only August but I am already rising earlyfor a crisp moon, smoking in the rare chill of a shaded patio. My breasts have begun pickling,the fat rounds provoked by the idea of cold exposure; syncopated assertions that the season upon us is ours.Soon I will have a glass of whiskey & suspend myself over the streets, throw my laughter into the woolen night& undo the ties holding me together. A ghost of a woman, I will be allowed to fall apart. Finally. Foreign Bodies You cannot tell methere is nothing wrong with the weather.Scientists discovered a new species of blindflesh-toned fish flushed out from a holein the earth of…

*featuring Minnie Riperton* today i kissed a strangerbecause the vibe was right i felt his heart pulsethrough eye contactand lawd i got stuck starin like lalalalala lalalalala lalalalala la la la la la minnie keep singing to mebecause your notes are almost as high as mi— stop readingstoplooking—stop pressed between a rock and masculinityis the hard placeyou keep reading me this boy feels like unpackinga new durag and finding a new way to lay my edges down. make me play lovin’ youwhen it’s not spring timebecause your kiss sits in my stomach like a seedwaiting to stickits roots into the ground. springtime. grow withinme like all of the seasonstranscreating a universe just for two because lovin you feelslike when moses parted the red sea and the israelites never knew godwas…

Old Stranger When my lost carbon steelknife turned up as ifit had never left the drawer—dark haft, trio of nickel silverrivets like moons of Pluto,thin blade stained as before—I breathed, spoke to the empty room,reached for the old stranger. Touchedits whetted edge. Alive, it couldchange tomatoes to glisteningdiscs, basil to little hills, drawblood from meat. It rakedjoy onto my plate while the gauzethat wrapped my cut, reddened. Whisper Not for jazz pianist Fred Hersch I’m straining to see, desert sky dark,left hand on the wheel, right handturning a knob & suddenly I’m inside apiano, inside your contrapuntal mindwhere glass shakes on a high shelf as thesubway comes. Spider swings her spinneretsinto the wind, crisscrossing tungsten silk.The future is unforeseen. Nerves stutter,stepwalk down to the guttural cellar, left handargues with right,…

Coded Messages (Architecture 2) The purpose of being alive is to carry a sequence of code.And so, being adopted, I’m part of a plot, a sleeper cellin enemy territory, quietly working against the systemfrom within. It’s fall, I’m on an ancestry website signing up for a DNA kit,because this is what adoptees are supposed to do at some point.There are several to choose from, flow chart questionsleading toward cousins, health risks. Two versions of the story,because versions of stories are how we get to tomorrow, and everywhere aroundis a pretend grave you inhabit bit by bit. I’ve chosen “cousin,” then,as we have to choose something, and cousins are decorative,and I want to know, more so than heart disease and northern Europe.I’m in my 50s. None of these stories will matter…

Three hearts beat in the octopusbut I have noneto spare. I won’t let this one witherwithout you. I’m fartoo selfish to grant youyour wish. No,let me disappear, first,after yearswaking each morning with a chest openthe way a trenchmight open after a quake.It’s takenthis long to see the fault linesbetween usare nothing from an aerial view:mere foldsin a topography so hugewe’re renderedinvisible, Each footbridgeor trestlewe construct along the impassablewill simply becomethe soon-to-be forgotten remainsof fabled civilizations. Note: “I Would Prefer to Die Ahead of You” takes its title from “Something Like That” by Nicanor Parra. Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry…

Peaches pulled off the trees, tender and warm.Lemon juice and ice water in a bowl,boil the skins off, drop in the cold water. I am here. Flour dusting the table, fills in the knife scars,deep into the grain of the cypress.The table is one leg lower, from when the house leaned in. Peaches macerating in sugar on the counter.I roll out the pie crust: flour, lard and salt.My hand is cut, stinging from the flour and lemon zest. Roll, turn, roll, turn, fold over, roll, turn, roll turn.Fold over and over. Not too much or the dough toughens.Roll, push down, roll, roll, roll, and then cut carefully and lift. Pies are easy, Jeanie told me. Easy as pie.I touched her purpled hand and she winced.Wrists are fragile, love, at this…

Museum She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR HAND, but it felt wrongTo call it HER HAND, now that it was gone, now that there was not A HAND at allAnd that HAND was like THE MOUSE I killed, once, by sealing it in a Ziploc bagAnd its mouse trap, too, and its smear of glue, hardened around its legsI can’t kill THE MOUSE, I thought, but I thought, I have already killed THE MOUSEI squeezed out all the air I could, after a few minutes it lost…

The first time he stared down a barrel it was his fingers cradling that clot of steel, and I do mean stare down, because he was sitting cross legged, the pistol was in his lap, he watched both his thumbs flutter around the stiff trigger. It was very awkward. Through thin shorts, he could feel the pebbled grip press heavily against his dick. He was very awkward. He remembers the long whitish stalks of summer grass, swaying around him, broken under him, itching his shins and thick thighs. He remembers an overwhelming sense of boredom, and intuits now a lack of imagination that makes him pity that boy even more. Water is colorless when seen from the air. Odd. The patches the eye sees grow baroque as they pass upside-down…

In the bedroom where they slept,there was a window that wouldn’t wholly close,so when he would wake in the middle of the nightand could not return to sleep, he would listenuntil he could hear the sound of timeinching forward, which he’d come to knowas the sound on the street belowthat each car made as it approached, from a distance,and the sound it made as it grew distant, like a pencil trailing offacross a page, though in the moment the car passeddirectly beneath the open window, what was strange to himwas how it always seemed to increase its speedand hurry past, the way as childrenhe and his sister would hold their breathand quicken their pace where the paththey took to school turned and took thempast the cemetery gates. Grady Chambers is…

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…

The Beginning of the Beginning Who decides where a river starts? When are there enoughsources, strong currents and water wide enough for its name? In Colorado, the Chama begins in smaller creeks and streams,flows into New Mexico to form the Rio Grande, splitting Texas and Mexico (who decided?) and moves deeper south. I thinka few of these thoughts by a creek on a beaming hot day, as water rips by in rapids propelled, formed in mountains far above.The water icy even in this summer heat. People grin some false bravery. They sit in tubes and dip into the tideand are carried away. I think of drowning. Of who sees water as fun. Who gets to play in a heatwave. Who truststhe flow. Migrants floating in the Rio Grande haunt me,…

Not enough beds, enough sponges and clean rags, enough pillowcases. Not enough hospitals. Fifty thousand patients, in a city with a population only half again larger than that. Not enough shovels, neither time nor room to bury the dead. Not enough chaplains, orderlies, nurses, surgeons. No autoclave to sterilize the surgeons’ instruments until 1876, no proven germ theory of disease until 1881, no rubber gloves till 1889. This is 1863, the dome of the Capitol still incomplete. It’s strange how a city under construction can look very much like a city in ruins. In the commandeered larger spaces of new buildings, rows of cots occupied by young men who wore either color of uniform. Bandage and wound, scar and stub are their uniform now. A few will occupy these beds…

One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitchen, airport, elevated train, last week, two months ago. We thin out and make room for what we read or write. That trouble orbits the oldest stone in us, back where quietude hides. And poetry is in there with it, our own trouble gene working overtime to pick up its sound and shape. Which is to say not too long ago at a gathering of 30 or so who loudly laughed and talked, a guy I hadn’t met seated next to me—mid-50s I guessed—seemed to cherish…

i. AFTER READING A POEM BY GEORGE SEFERIS, I MADE DINNER Houston, April 2019 The coarse and leafy stalks, like memory,Began to soften in my hands. The kaleMassaged with olive oil and salt. Silently, You sat on the couch as if in grisaille,Scrolling through the twitter of the state.A fragile, bluesy cover song was scaled To minor on the stereo; the last lateLight of afternoon cast behind closed blinds.Earlier, we walked in truncated Circles through the park up to an inclinedVantage point. Falling water pooled endlesslyBelow a blinding, glassy skyline. If we squinted, we could almost seeThat vague dizzying sway of a tall palm tree. ii. BIOPHILIC DESIGN: A HOSPITAL WALK M.D. Anderson, Houston, April 2018 The vague dizzying sway of a tall palm treeAnd the clear bitter current of…

Form Is the Shape of Content Today in the taxi I picked up a guy on Madison Avenue near 45th Street around noon. He was going to JFK. He was on the phone talking about his safari to Kenya, his deals selling a gold and silver mine, etc. The Pope was visiting during the UN General Assembly, so the traffic was unusual. Along the route he hollered: “Fuck!” then “This is fuckin’ unbelievable!” and finally “My flight is at 1:30! I’m fucked! This city! Fuckin’ unreal!” When we got there, around 1:00, he thanked me for keeping cool while he was screaming. I thought of the fishermen on the boat Daigo Fukury? Maru that moved under the mushroom cloud 80 miles from Bikini Atoll. They heard the explosion seven minutes…

Benefactor Margot Berg and Robert Epstein David Hariton Jonathan Katz Terri E. Moreland Ava Seave Mark Stein Bank of America Patron Linda A. Richardson Sponsor John Carswell Helen W. Drutt English Ruth Fine Adil N. Godrej Steven Korman Anne Marie Macari Alicia Ostriker Supporter Andrew Anway Bridget Barnes Ellen Bass Robin Becker Kenneth Boockvar Dennis Brennan Ira Brind Ann Butchart Henri Cole Carter M. Cramer Michael Crippen Brian Cronwall Paul Cummins Susan Davie Thomas Devaney Carolyn Dille Jennifer Flanigan Valerie J. Griffith Robert Hass Robert Hasselblad Jane Hedley Brenda Hillman Ditta Baron Hoeber Jill Holmes Sue Howell Elizabeth Jacobson Jasper Johns Kenneth Jones Joann Karges Claire Keyes David Kirby and Barbara Hamby Mildred Lane-Berg Dorianne Laux Dr. Richard Lenon Dana Levin Robert Lynch Jill Mancina James McCorkle Richard G. McGuire…

Portrait of America as a Friday the 13th Flashlight Tour of the Winchester Mystery House And it’s down another corridor—Keep moving, keep up,the guide telling us again. It’s easy to get lost in here.Folks go missing all the time.—weaving our wayto the ballroom that inspired Disney’s Haunted Mansionwith its parquet floor & ivy-laced words scrollingcustom stained glass: Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts.Some believe, we learn, she used this space to mourn& atone for her family’s guns while others thinkat each full moon she’d strike a chime & summon spiritsfor a midnight feast. This organ was donated to the house,& it’s hard to find a good organ donator. To complete the gag,all we needed was a cued rimshot—badum-ching—piped inabove the sounds of rain & thunder playing throughoutthe house on…

Stone is tenderto lichen.Lichen is tenderto the earth and its otherinhabitants. What areyou and I tender to? When a black holeswallows a star,it must do sotenderly, sincea universe hingeson tenderness. At midnightyour candle burnswith tenderness,dream-like in an ambervotive, its flameflickering tenderly. Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet whose poems have appeared in Poetry, Mantis, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Oxford Poetry, The South Carolina Review and elsewhere. He is the author of the debut collection Doomsday Bunker, and co-editor of Queerly.…