Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2021 i The American Poetry Review

Declaration of Interdependence Hooknose, Canada Goose, slit-eyed Toucan.Porch monkey, baboon, trash-talking magpie.I cover my head in adoration, just as you doff your hat.Do not rub my head. Don’t even think about it.I bob as I chant, I pray as I breathe. Does that disgust you?I shout to the Lord, dance out my joy. Does that amuse you?To my knowledge I have never terminated a deity.Last time I looked, I did not have a tail.Business is not “in” my blood. I attended university. I studied.I am a trained athlete. Nothing I do on the court is natural.Matzo is not a culinary delicacy: There wasn’t a menu.Fried chicken will kill you just as easy as the Colonel.You buy tickets to hear me crack jokes about my tribe. Are you uncomfortable yet?Suddenly you’re…

It’s a brass class of penny-whistleson branches, the black oystercatcherpicked bark; hole struck in a plastic lidburnt by butane. Melted, stingingmissiles marking territory, terror’sa truck right through the base oftrees. Turn down the sound. Talk starsalong the sidewalk that hangs in the fog; I guess what I’m trying to say is: todaysounds the same as every othertinnitus day: tincture of fear, a tinprick flap that can’t be uncoiled from theflag mast. Sometimes, at night, I can hearthe clear-sound snap of sternand I begin to cry. There you are:there you are again. Matthew Minicucci’s most recent collection, Small Gods (New Issues), won the 2019 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award in Poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from numerous journals including The Believer, Ploughshares, POETRY, The Southern Review,…

The Moon Light delimits the darkness as snowgives shape to the silence of winter trees.Above a rooftop, the shadow of illness hoversindistinguishable from the wraithsof common chimney smoke.Strip skin from flesh, flesh from boneto behold the comical, adumbrative skeleton,rickety ladder to the ore-cask of the skull,crude keys to forgotten locks.Surely, this cannot be the answer,this calcified puzzle-works,this unmarked instant ticking to dusteven as I seek its delay, letting it crawlup a finger to my wrist, like an ant.How luxurious the world’s materials,and such illumination—moonlightrevealing every inch of a table so familiarit could only be your mother’s kitchen.And the ant, laboring to cross that plateau,what part of you desires to crush it?Not the hapless thumb,not the bicep, which lacks agency,not even the mind, which admires industry,and understands harmlessness, and professesfellowship with…

Books Systems for the Future of Feeling by Kimberly Grey Persea Books, Fall 2020 79 pages, $15.95 Nu sculon herigean. —Caedmon When Kimberly Grey stepped onto the stage of poetry, she didn’t sound like anybody else. When I mentioned this to her, she said: “I just want to write good work that is compelling and different. I don’t want to write like anybody else. I always said to myself, it isn’t worth writing something if someone else has already written it.” When I mentioned this to Gabriel Fried, her editor at Persea, he said: “Form and subject matter in Grey’s poems are melded. Nothing is ornamental or incidental in her work, no small part, which you can make do without, is left over at the end. Her books form a…

so little rest. All living things must breathe.Oocyte. Ootid. Ovum.Heifer. Cow. The old milk snakestill shedding her skin to nestthrough cloudy brille in the leaflitter of the melaleuca. The bony oarfish, the shinysea monster washed ashore,her thousand eggs swarmingout of six-foot ovaries. They floodthe waters of the sea. Spoonbilland loon feed on the belly full of krill, the severed tailand multiply on Earth.From August to May the feralMuscovies breed on our driveway.They incubate their clutchesfor a month, twenty minutes a day for each hen to drink, eat,and shit alone under the sun.Duck was your first word.They were everywhere.Even when the dog flushed thempast our seawall, they returned. Of course, I understandthe pushback. The bedtime stories.The midnight snacks.Thirst and pee.Water and water. Alwaysthe reaving of day by night by day. When…

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.…

Ignoring the still watersand the kingdom of Babylonsome call AmericaI practice my different strokesin the three river systems of Pennsylvaniaand once in a wool bathing suitat the far end of the Steel Piera city block away from the safe sandand my two uncles buried thereexcept for their noses. Still waters alsoin the quarry off Route 32where our cars and bikeslined up in the dirtbeside the concrete,but there was no Babylon,no one there mourning for their village,only naked bodies leaping from rocksand either hugging the shoreor swimming madly the half-mile or sointo the tall grasseson the other side,me among them.And since there was very little musicwe gathered around one of the tapessharing the sound until we dove back in,but I no longer heard itas I approached the grassesthough I heard something…

In the air you don’t know who you are or where My own self feels it is in wind being born These are currents a man made one eighth of smokeless fire fears but chooses A path south from Anchorage to a Mountain House Ungovern the northern land to pass from people to people not to own I came to learn something, that’s always what I say What pilgrims follow on trails are bodies that went before them Paths neither consecrated by use nor blood or days Or is the body of a pilgrim climbing a mountain like that of an athlete Whose path to Victory is just a metaphorical expression of sexual or political or military conquest In Homer now at the end of a long promontory continually shored…

I was promised a girl held her glossy image, shatterable, ice skating on a Soviet pond. I’d never seen snow but for the cut out paper flakes hung in school hallways. I only knew rain as intermittent confusion. Los Angeles in the ’80s. We set fire to hairspray for fun we wrote half-truths in our padlocked journals, we collected the phone numbers of grown men we collected the gratification of grown men to trade for money, we were adolescent! There was never enough money and there were never any quiet moments on a pond there was never any pond only swimming pools into whose water I was not invited. I couldn’t withstand the excess, spent any money on bus fare and lipstick and then, then V showed up on a…

fleece One person who cannot see you is you. We can get an idea from water or gold, depending on the light. So I know myself by approximation. There is a likeness between the curve of the paradisiacal snake and the parabolic arch of the bridge, but placed one on top of the other, it’s unlikely they’ll line up. Poseidon, God of the sea, earthquakes, storms, and horses, is silent on the subject of bridges and love songs. Poseidon got his gold the old-fashioned way: he fathered it. He turned the granddaughter of the sun god Helios into a sheep and himself into a ram and fucked her in a field of wolves. Thus was born the Ram with the Golden Fleece. Some say the fleece represents a method of…

Dear X: In 2015, The Best American Poetry series anthology included a poem titled “The Bees, The Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve.” Perhaps you remember this poem, in particular the fact that it was authored by a White, male poet named Michael Derrick Hudson who published it under the name Yi-Fen Chou, the pseudonym Hudson used to get the poem taken by the literary magazine Prairie Schooner, which The Best American Poetry guest editor at the time, Sherman Alexie, then happened upon. Hudson confessed his true identity to Alexie after he learned of his poem’s anthology selection; he also confessed his use of the female Chinese pseudonym in the final published anthology’s biographical notes. Hudson wrote that he’d chosen the name only after the poem had been…

I Gave Birth Woke to the “meanerror,” of birds squawkinginside the blue-greyblackpolyphonies of whathappens when we losethe terminologyto determine how badthings really are. Wasthere no way to puncturethe agonizing filmthat kept us all corralledhere? I looked throughthe window—bewilderingaxiom, condition,assumption—I lookedat the dwarf orangetree, fruitingsour fruit incessantly. In Another Suppose it is possibleto be in three statesof errorat once and in each placeto think three thingsand in eachthing to feela different version ofthe salted wind as youare walkingalong the high sea cliff.Take, for example, apricotswhich have been geneticallybredto amplify the length oftime their fragrance staysin the crisp airof the cadaverous supermarket,just long enough toplace themin your cart and thinkto yourself the worldis good.You may be very lonelyat this point. The groceryclerk scansthe apricots and asksyou a few questionsto which the answeris…

Eating Wasps Pre-apocalypse, things take on a certain radiance our eye the dystopian lens lingering on death: a field of corpses, say— then resting on an amber ditch where the assassin’s flicked cigar flares red. And now I’m eating wasps. Did you know that figs are full of dead ones? Not really. In any given fruit there’s one at most who, pollinating, died within. If there at all they’re reabsorbed, digested by the enzyme, replaced with pulp or a hundred glinting pips. Think of that next time you wake at three to the abyss. It’s not the worst thing. You knew (right?) about the aphids in cabbage, thrips in the corn, all the mites that grace gray sage, eagwig bits in our coffee, one hundred & some parts allowed per…

[Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants something] Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbut all forms of relief end with a kickback, like my aunt with the blackeye who lied she was kicked by a horse. Free goldfinch comes to feaston thistles in May and perches and weaves and sings of its politicalexhaustion. Pisses me off, bird, to find out the devil from Sunday schoolis real. I didn’t even have my own Sunday school. Trespassed and thievedart supplies and gibberish. Had I only tied the play apron around my waistand faced the windy sun and watched your gold hermaphroditic wands sway.Dumbbell…

Barefoot I learned the world through the bottoms of my feet, barein the creeks of summer, stepping on pebbles, the squidgeof moss between my toes. On hot asphalt, the hop and skipover cracks, feet already toughened by bramble, dirt, the pricklyground of pine needles. Callused and ready to roam the rough hallsof July, of August, of early September, through acres of blackberryand bristled fountain grass, the spiny clumps of cocklebur,and foxtail. Through clusters of quartz, agate, feldspar. Small,black ants crawled over my toes. Fish nibbled at themin the skinny creek. It wasn’t summer until I’d been bitten,ankles pocked with the raised bumps left by mosquitoes,flea bites from Toof Toof the cat, who liked to roam the fieldthen settle back on the shag rug where I’d sink my toes into the…

Pantoum with Trombone Player The sun is a disaster waiting to happen,The gypsy trombone player starts to blareLa Vie en Rose again, and Hello, Dolly.I turn Fairouz up not to have to listen. The gypsy trombone player starts to blare,today, and yesterday, at noon, at seven.I turn Fairouz up not to have to listen,and hear my panic clanging in a cavern. Today, and yesterday, at noon, at seven,the sun in splendor, summer, and it scares me.I hear my panic clanging in a cavernwhere light and dark are blaring repetition. The sun is splendid, summer, and it scares me—the pain and disappearance I came back to,where light and dark were blaring repetition,replay—their names, their unforgiving absence. The pain and disappearance I came back to,the absent present, and that present absencereplay their…

A conversation with poet Philip Metres about his new collection Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon Press, April 2020) that takes a deep dive into the Israel-Palestine predicament, which, as the poet quotes a friend in saying, “is not complicated like a car engine, but complex like a forest.” I first encountered Philip Metres in the 2012 anthology The New American Poetry of Engagement alongside Robert Bly, Bob Hicok, Yusuf Komunyakaa, the late W.S. Merwin, Sharon Olds, and my teacher Timothy Liu, among others I admired. “Testimony” (which appears in 2015’s Sand Opera) was the poem that stuck with me due to its bleak, dark-humored ending, with a heroic couplet rhyming “donkey” with “Iraqi,” as Metres paid tribute to artist Daniel Heyman’s “Portraits of Iraqis” through his lyrical sketch of an innocent…