Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2020 i The American Poetry Review

Catalog I was only eight. Not the driver, but I wasthe one who begged for the cats. Our father,so allergic he stopped breathing sometimes,gave in. So long as I fed them.So long as we kept them in the garage. Outdoor cats we called them. All I wanted was a body, different from mine, I could love.Regardless of limits. I have failed so many people. Other animals, too. Sometimes, I think I will make a list. In case I’m ever askedto explain where I went wrong. In the hills, behind our house, a classmate found a frayedcollar loose around a set of small bones. I seedisasters everywhere I look. Which is whyI am recounting the facts as calmly as possible. A coyote, probably. Those were the days before we settledwho of…

Night Sea after Agnes Martin We had a great timewalking into oblivionbefore dinner unburdened by the windof tinkering conversationa glorious glut of being shut upby implied continuumspun off in ultramarine pieces though I don’t thinkyou can imagineeven a particle of vastness I’m not able to tell you anythingreally, but this is the realthing—a picture, an interior cinched in a net whereevery thread makes youits maker so twisted by subliminallyilluminated gold triggershow far you are the flux remains grittyand stutters blue uponblue endless cells a suffering wave is notabout nature butknown best in the mind once there was a gridand in it two loversevaporating and the sea said one feels as thoughone is a panic in completecertain darkness one has made someterrible error generating formsin sand some hades that we have…

at some point my translations at some point my translationsand my notes flew directly to my ear another dayalone in these white chairs I rest on sandan island rests upon the waterI remember all the kinds of wind the light could makeif I walk by different streetsthe gardens I could hear the floweringI mostly work to the last minuteI hear skin and bonesat some point on the patio the bread arrivesand the washing of our hands Before the rose Before the rose is born and the bride is buried Before the body breaks into roses In the rushes and the reeds slap your lips Gulls circling the pier calling hunger In your throat the night sky filled with all the stars of the cosmos and your small yard and you…

I got all my jeans from Walmartuntil a girl giggled to her friend,“Does he get all his jeans from Walmart?” Now I import them straight from Japan;spun on vintage Levi looms.The thighs come in a little tightuntil I break them in.Only takes a couple months. I look fabulous.Everyone knows.Everyone says. On the street the other dayI passed a guy in big, husky Wranglers.Poor bastard.I turned around for one more look.He looked so comfortable. Tao Tao is a writer living in San Jose. When he’s not writing third person bios about himself, he also writes poetry, code, unsolicited epitaphs, and long, rambling jokes with no punchline.…

Gobble: a song of climate change As I roll three buckets of waterin a wheelbarrow down the driveto water grass above a retaining wall,a wild turkey crosses in front of me,nervous, edible, a male, yo bro,we’re a team. The grass is dying, so am I,so’s the turkey, yo everything, we’re a team.There’s a drought, the sky is naked,everyone can see it not raining,how do you offer the sky a glass of water,a turkey a glass of Wild Turkey,how rude, yo bro, let’s get wasted,go team. I’m wondering if we’ve killed the sky.The grass says yes, turkey bro doesn’t know,the water table (and chairs) says duh,science—fun when it explodesand plays with nematodes—is getting stonedand nodding its head, yo facts and figuresand test tubes and interferometers, we’re a team.I’ve heard turkeys are…

I told my daughter the story of how my frienddied. Almost ten years ago now. How he fell off amountain in Hawaii. And though the story mademe cry she wanted to hear it again and again.And again the next day. “Don’t worry mama,”she said. “He’ll just turn into soil and grow a newfriend.” This is what I told her when I put theflowers she loved so much into the compostbucket when they had wilted and dried and begun torot. “Don’t cry sweetheart,” I said. “They’ll just turninto soil and become food for new roses.” His name meant a wreath of flowers.And though I wish that life for my daughter would bean unbreakable halo of blossoms,I tell her—There will never be another Garland. Anisa George is the Founder and Artistic Director…

Singularity for Suhanni Even among stars she’s a dazzlerthis three-year-old, doe-eyed, brown dwarf Spunky as sparked hydrogen she orbitsthe kitchen in Black Panther pjs or revolves past, breezily ballooningher pink princess petticoat electrically, eclectically radianteyes two blazing sunspots erupting with mischief and mirthblack hair a nebula of tangles combed into a constellationof rainbowed-bead-bound braids circling a dimpled sphere of faceglowering or aglow petulant or persuasiveShe is diva-licious She is revolutiona seed-speck of dust layered in light and shadowlike a black pearl, light years ahead of us She brings you one by one her galaxyof dolls, inviting you into her world The attraction is irresistibleThe point is always her singularityher being celestial leaving you eternally star-struckas stars do Winter Melon Soup For the children of Noy S.H., 90 The day you…

Entreaty Now after Joanna Klink, for Mary Oliver Go out barefoot to the car for what you left,for what you didn’t have enoughhands to hold.Go out as a soft offering for gravel.As a practice swing at walkingfarther and farther from the comforter,from the sighing waiting bodyyou hold when you want to,from the steady windowpane shadowcast by a night so brighteven minor constellations get to speak light.They are furnace-ready pilot lightswhen the rest of the power’s gone out.They are all the failed matchesthat couldn’t get the cigarette lit,a persistent sign to go back inside of your life.To make each night a ripe stone fruit.To split and pull the pit from it.To bite the flesh of rest and let it drip.And when you have made a messof yourself, to know there were…

Biopsy Pantoum I am waiting for biopsy results again—in the mirrored room where time stalls.Knowing women are always at the mercy of men,even after I get the results, it will feel like my fault. In the mirrored room where time stalls,I stare at the same insipid face.Even after I get the results, it will feel like my fault.I walk the treadmill, regretting what I can’t erase. I stare at the same insipid face.The longer I carry my body, the harder it is to tend.I walk the treadmill, regretting what I can’t eraseUntil I die, this worry will never end. The longer I carry my body, the harder it is to tend.Knowing women are always at the mercy of men,until I die, this worry will never end.I am waiting for biopsy…

“When You Swim, Make Your Whole Body Like a Lung,” Says My Wife Rose on Our Honeymoon Yes, let the body swell and contract with the waves, which I tryto remember when I follow herinto the sea, not heeding the ambulances in me as we skim aboveurchins, their million arms. At dinner later, over spaghetti carbonara,and tiny silver sardines also soaked in oil, we talk about how there are some peoplewho are both afraid and uncurious and never leave their homes. Othersare very curious about the world, but sometimes afraid. I think but don’t saywe are equal parts curious but me, more afraid. My strokeis sloppy so she teaches me how to frog my legs and arrow my armsand every day I swim a little farther, above the spines.I like…

When my father brought out a large beam of plywood that my brother intended on using to make a crossbow and crashed it against the back of my thighs, I heard my mother scream, you are responsible for your own body. I turned my head back and saw the bend of the plywood, the bend of my father’s arms, ready, tinted teeth grinding and blending with the sawdust. I heard the wood speak to me then. The wood told me about its time in the East: about its cousins and how they loved to practice contortion; about the shape of the most beautiful logogram it had ever seen, and how it had always been jealous of paper for being the canvas for a thing that could somehow encapsulate even more…

By and large, political poetry—poetry responding to national or global events, poetry of “engagement” or even “witness”—was not the norm in the United States through the 20th century. When it was written and when it was read, critical reception was hostile. Are these assertions controversial? Surely, it is too much to say, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti said at the time, that poetry before Sept. 11, 2001, was B.S., and that everything after was A.S., but he was right in saying that 9/11 changed things. So was Amit Majmudar, who, in his introduction to Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, writes, “As it did to so many of my generation, 9/11 broke a stupor that should have been broken well before” (xiii). So was Tracy K. Smith when she recounted her experience…

Luxury Tax A fig in your drawer. A descant, a signet ring. Your indexfinger once you’ve chipped all the polish. Yes, you say,a pair of them in with the silk and the lace. A Windsor knotone-handed. The piece you bought for your husband. The platein your wrist, how it’s thicker in the morning. Cheesecake.Pannacotta. The poet fled to Montana, nursing the goutin his leg. Flowers for your table. The granite has thicker veiningthan the marble, of course. Her name like forty flounceson a dress. Jacquard. Knifepleats. We thought you’d goneto Florence for the summer. A house exchange? A smallerdog. The outlet sells different goods than the flagship. A cordsnaking away from it. The hours you supplicatein your green dress, in your girdle. Sat on your heels,your lips a bow, and…

i was a child greedy in my skin hungers my stomachnchurned by festival meat the lamb in the courtyard with its necklace of rope gone & in place of a memorypools of its blood in the dust where i played barefoot with the cousins wearing the small boys’ alallahfor which i cried until mama habab sent for the tailor crisp pinstriped jalabiya & its smart striped trouseri took great care to keep it pristine & cried on days it was taken from me to wash twisting on the linelike my truer body now i am the farthest i’ve ever been & the fabric tears canopy of fig treesarranged in place of mothers i face homeward & feel once again that i am longing for my uniform to returnfrom the water…

This is what power really is: the privilege of ignoring anything you might find distasteful. —Oksana Zabuzhko “Language, any language,” observed the young poet Oksana Zabuzhko, “is the capital love of my life” because “nothing else has the power to synthesize music and myth, two things without which the world would be a totally unlivable place.” It’s a credo to which Zabuzhko has remained faithful across time, even as the young poet evolved into the mature fiction writer, polemicist, and activist who is without doubt the most influential literary figure in Ukraine in the last half century. “You’re not really a woman,” reads the epigraph to Zabuzhko’s Clytemnestra, immediately underscoring three central aspects of the poet’s work. First, she’s an inheritor of the Western literary tradition, grounding many of her…

We woke to life in the 80s. The air dyingfrom industry & industry dying. Train brakesgroaning to a stop & that singular scentof horses, their muscular lather & manuremoving down river to Mississippi. Our grandfathers chain-smoked Viceroys in the house& we developed asthma before vocabulary,read books & held our breath, spelledbut didn’t speak. In our bodies, humidity thickenedinto an argument with speech. When we joined our fathers’ households they trashed our plastic bagspacked tight with medicine bottles & inhalerscurated over the years by our mothers, who smothered usour fathers said, mumbling something under their breathabout being a man. We were daughters. We were Black & so, sons too. They vowed to make us stronger,big-lunged, lit our cigarettes, handed us grip-pleatedpaper bags in place of pills. In the 90s springtime,we suffered…

I should say something about wateryour feet cold in it hunting for dulse onan afternoon turned hotter than expectedthe boy puts a conker in the walk archive & the season turns from shellsa coast becomes longer the closer one looks at it—you turnme inside out with your mouth & the boy with a crab in his handleft his heart in a fish & in his hand a fishhook & beneath his feetseveral feet of air between his body & the working wharfI take the photo from far away so the girl is just a speckle for scalenot herself but rather a landscape marker in the intertidal where we arepermitted to fish fowl & navigate the law is unsettled as to whetherfowling includes birdwatching the image is my daughterher hands overwhelmed…

APZ Books Anyone Will Tell You by Wendy Chin-Tanner Paperback, 76 pages, $15.95 Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019 “Don’t look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in the eye, good and bad,” said Henry Miller. This form of courage, in poetry as well as life, is rare, and yet it characterizes the wonder that is Wendy Chin-Tanner’s second full-length poetry collection, Anyone Will Tell You, beautifully. The speaker of these elliptical, spare poems is both subject and object, mother and child, mourner and celebrant—and in each poem, she proves herself capable of not just witness, but intervention—into the most complex forms of political and personal subjectivity, domestic life, aesthetics, and ecodevastation occurring in our world today. Chin-Tanner’s poems function as load-bearing walls, and, in their delicious and generous ambiguity,…

Black Woman on a Plane, 21st Century Minutiae in a bowljerry-rigged handin need of a drink, The flight attendantsaid, “It’s on me,” I must’ve lookedlike I needed one. Such a rough climb,wobbly as the sunduring Leo season come to find outa brand new planeis hot to handle. The first breath:crucial, coughs. My favorite pathof looking winds upwhen I’m in the air, there’s no wayto vacuum seal deathup here I suppose, even though I’ve neverfelt the urge to buya traveling pillow. If something develops,if our machine defects, I’ll ask if I can holdthe hand of the womanwho gave me a drink. Then it’s time to landlike nothing’s happened, the captain standingat the door with his crew. He’s younger than I am,a baby-faced white boy. We don’t know his name,or where he…

Throwing the Crown by Jacob Saenz, winner of the 2018 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available in APR’s online store at www.aprweb.org and at other outlets. Throwing the Crown was chosen by guest judge Gregory Pardlo. JACOB SAENZ is a CantoMundo fellow whose work has appeared in Pinwheel, Poetry, Tammy, Tri-Quarterly and other journals. He has been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship as well as a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He serves as an associate editor for RHINO.…

Reader, I remember the midnights. The hour’s stark cleaver—new year from old. A stranger’s clove-tinged mouth, that kindling. Now I’m sleeping on the couch. We haven’t kissed for a week (some winter bug I shouldn’t spread) but I’ve resolved less pity, less sorrow. Remember, reader, how one glance could burn right through each scarved layer, touch bone? Tomorrows upon tomorrows. Embossed bralettes. The rough knuckle tracing a hipbone while you sidesaddled the chilly fence? Enough—it’s untidy, trawling youth like this. So what if I watch our neighbor step into her gleaming dress after we kill the lights. We had a glass of wine. There are branches of eucalyptus inside a glass vase and my husband is dreaming his same dreams. The years are carbon paper. Jubilee—who could say it with…

In Life My Husband Helps Put a Woman Back Together Again Her arm was in the other roomwhen he arrived—not with her bodystill breathing in the livingroom. In and out of consciousness.And blood of course.But not as much as you might expect.So he retrieved the arm—lifted it into a bag full of herfreezer contents(paramedics do not carry ice—it would melt).This made him think of lifting his dead catafter he hit it with his car as a teenager:still warm.He vomited then,but now he is a professional.But still there’s something alarming about a pieceof a body completely separatedfrom that body,which is somehow still surviving.An arm thought to be cut off by a lovernow on the run.Detachedbut can maybe be reattached.Modern medicine and all.Most things do not get to my husband.He brushes off…

The Trees of Kraków I was naked in bed, where I panic less,reading, and wanting to go somewhere funnext summer, because fun will help us age. Let us go to Kraków together,since I know a little Polish,I know the word “cupcake” in Polish is babeczka— babeczka, I say to my little toe.In Kraków, I read, “The City Council has proposeda ‘renewal’ of the trees surrounding the Błonia by removing all of them at once.”What will become of the sparrows of Kraków?The sparrows stumble about the Błonia as the accountants of Krakówpedal furiously to the mortuary, elbows wide.The alphabetical schoolgirls of Kraków line up to visit the next monument,and the Vistula River changes its mind again.The traffic cops of Kraków wave on, wave on. Love, lie next to me, I am…