Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2021 i The American Poetry Review

Give & take is how the great sun sets& the moon rises, how beloved Venusglows there as if she never came too close to the sun, & as if Mercury is not a hunkof metal fused by indescribable brightness.Indeed, give & take is how our planet moves & breathes, & we at the topof the food chain hardly even notice,waiting for horses to tell us about a wave. Those who love the winds of timeknow one another the way horses knowfirst by smell, or by the same way trees breathe pheromones in the air to signalrain or a pest arriving from a distance.We have forgotten how to listen to planetary clues—water bloomswith algae, or, you’re forgetting, Mercuryin the horizon is first to carry news. I sit here, thinking like a…

Yes, a toadstool, I told her. A poet friend was keeping me company while I hemmed a skirt. It’s like when I see a poem that’s around fourteen lines, unconscious expectations are set off: the poem is probably a lyric on the theme of love and probably turns like an argument—which is to say, I expect a sonnet. So—here I looked up from stitching—what expectations might be prompted when you see a zuihitsu? She replied, But a toadstool? I said: Well, just as a fungus is not an animal or a plant—it’s its own species—the zuihitsu isn’t poetry or prose. She picked up my seam-ripper and taunted, So, where does that leave you—a thousand years after Sei scribbled her random thoughts? If you leave the definition at “toadstool,” how can…

Though he doesn’t say exactly what this thinkingis about. He strokes his beard, a clock his facehas made, his right leg lifted to harass the chair, his left on the floor, a pulpited flamingo in tweed.He tells me to relax, and maybe it’s becauseof the authoritative way he can grow hair under his nose, but this command workslike a cauldroned incantation. I’m so relaxedit’s as if I have never, too, thought about time, about the frenzied hours of trying to settlemy son’s dervishing, begging the languagelessto take my breast so we could be done and I could get back to the work which would notwait. I’m so relaxed I don’t rememberhow that son now tells me seven was the worst year because that was the year I left to find…

Another Year Came Suddenly I amfree from everything but time.Time started doubling.I started dieting sothe gap between lifeand death could remain an inch.I try not to move,crouch under the raspberrybush, pulling small bullets off. To the Rain You seem so happy.If I could be your pupil,I would sit in front.Please teach me how to collapse,the way your legs breakand then spread, how you let go,flow this way and that,take the form of everything,even tighten in a lake. Calling Late The men used to callat all hours, but what I missmost are the late nightcalls, ones where I held the phoneso close, it pressed like a gun. Little Soul I rode on your backuntil your knees broke and nowone mile left, I must toss you. When the War is Over I…

Great white shark calmly swims by snorkeler off Great Barrier Reef—video—The Guardian, Tuesday, 11 August 2020 for Adrian Bullock When I was a child, when I was a girl, the greatwhite shark was the monster of my heart. You understand what I mean: the paramount one, the monster highest in jurisdiction.I never read the novel but went repeatedly into a room that wasn’t mine to study the cover of the book ona bedside table. It smelled of salt and tanning oil, the faint damp of living shoreside. She was not a girl, like me,but not my mother, either. She had made the long drive from Ohio to my grandmother’s house on Long Island to be our “sitter”that summer. She was glamorous. She kept her earrings in a shallow dish near…

I am studying, finally, the pines.Trying to hear the hush of forest floors under needles’cover, their soft erasure. Not as lacking the stirringof deciduous, varied and tangled understoriesof shapely leaves. But as more thanan absence of sound. Years, the woods felt foreignhere, where I came to be a teacher. Soon, my students’senses will stop attending to me. The boys are 20, saplingsof men. A woman of men. A womancan only mature beyondwhere the eye wishes to reach. When timber grows tallit is cleared away. Centuries already,the Longleaf pine has been lumbered out of existencein this place. Still, along with Loblolly,White, Pond, and Sand, late, I am learning its name.There may never again be occasion to say it aloudupon seeing one. But who knows what lifecontinues, in that quiet where I…

Great Things from the Department of Transportation My mother desires to track my location on her phone.My mother announces that she’s “latex intolerant.”My mother is horrified that the children’s cartoon character Caillou is bald.My mother to the server at a terrible restaurant: I don’t want a box—I want a flamethrower.One’s mother might be the most famous person one knows.My mother says, There is no Denny’s, only Zuul.My mother on penises and traffic cones: On occasion they’re both orange, aren’t they?The young lungs of my mother fill with fine particulate matter on the streets of Clairton, PA.My mother on the X-rated hypnotist: He was only concerned with having the hypnotized persons actsexually stupid.One night in the 1970s, in the Mojave Desert, my mother ceases to feel apart from the world.My mother…

that’s what you get by Sheila Maldonado Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2021 91 pages; $16.00 I am not right anywherewas always displacement girlforever fromthe edge of the seablood moving nowto the outer banksof this islandwhere our people fromthe middle of the worldare pushedit is most homewhen I am most decentereddecentral Americaunstable a sliverhow do we hold onto the continenthow do we not fallinto the water —Sheila Maldonado, “leaving Coney” Poetry! The miracle of poetry is that it can make a place for the person that does not feel right anywhere. Poetry remakes worlds. Poetry rewrites history. Or is “rearrange” a better word here? Sheila Maldonado’s parents immigrated to New York City in the early 1970s from Honduras. In a 2017 blog interview with Brooklyn Poets, Maldonado joked that her…

nature of the hour:the line marks the woundin the art of the frame: first things makesecondthings, then minutely, last things andno-longer-things: this be/comingthe unseen, the shadowlandthreat by way of remove,this infiniteregress from the center towards the darkening exteriorthat marks further and further the outsider inthe mirrorof the border: for that is the dream of the frame:home/comingfor somebut not every: you with but not amongus: giveus this our:(in the feed inthe applications in the windows of the cellphone, images light their mirrors: drawnin the same thick darkmarker: a kid scrawled grid—the fence | the foreground—slashing up scant stuff in the otherwise bare room: a toilet:the stillat the time saidchildren: a door: [locked more often than not]) Gina Franco’s recent book, The Accidental, winner of the 2019 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, was published…

It’s true: his family car, me—his colleague—and a parking lot near a midtown bar. The deluge gave us privacy. The steamy windows. The not-wanting-to-leave the moment and return to small rooms of want: theirs, not one’s own. Which was okay until things like the lot, torn panty-hose, the noise. Rain beating. Parking the car in the motel lot after dinner, the floodlights making the night an artificial day, he spied something large and moving on the pavement. Too delicate for a rodent. It was a beetle—the kind we’d only seen in decorative displays. He scooped it up gently and we brought it inside to see in the light of the room and up close. I googled it and found ‘rhinoceros beetle.’ But that was not quite it, given that they…

Going (Guest House) In the story I tell about myself,I belonged. To a room, to a body,to a hall, each light fixture,soffit and valance. This,I’m telling you is full of dark.Only so much insidethe guest houseis visible.And maybe if my body belonged to meas it floated down the street,then I would follow it. Knowwhere it goes, how she carries methrough the violet haze of summerand the evenings rustling inside their skins.Glory, it must be these gothic colonnades.Not afraid to be entirely visible.But I’m not that way, there is onlyso much inside meI’d let you visit.One part of meis disappointed in another part,like rowers on the lake.One hand staggering after the other.In the foyer, I could notask the question withoutturning it off. On and off.When has loveever been enough?In the garden.…

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy by Anne Carson New York: New Directions, 2019 68 pages; $11.95 “I expect you’ve heard of the Trojan War,” Anne Carson’s newest book, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, begins, “and how it was caused by Norma Jeane Baker, / harlot of Troy. / Well, welcome to Public Relations.” Taking its material from the myth of Helen as told by Euripides and the biography of Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson, then Baker when her mother remarried), Norma Jeane Baker of Troy replaces Helen with Norma Jeane; replaces Menelaus, Helen’s husband, with Arthur Miller; and populates Troy with characters from both worlds, like Truman Capote (as Norma Jeane’s chorus) and Hermione (Helen’s, and now Norma Jeane’s, daughter). Euripides’ Helen, along with the versions told by Herodotus,…

Given Too slave to mule a word, I relapseinto him as he into me,and for brief breaths it was just us,bound, stupid stallions lavedin love, twisting into each otheras he strokes then settles—he is watchingme, holding me there as the sun,familiar now of our mythology,leans into the wicker of trees,casting pink and orange and amber,casting what some have gossipedas wonder or a type of wonderthat makes the crows allay their blackness.This vein of wonder wanders as a streamin his eyes when he comes suddenly and not so.Dusk is juvenile. He gets upand silence slides down his back.I look out the window. Into the City, I Become Become Buildings bastardize the rolling dawnas the train thunders into the cityaway from the home of the man I love. A construction site ivies…

I have seen the picture of youin your hospital bed,a plastic shield filled with gauzeover your left eye.The police knew you were press.They saw your camera.They shot you for it. Eyes are twins.Seeing your rightI can imagine your left.You likely never thought of your left eyeas a singular thingbefore now.Your beautiful dark left eye,the eye that is gone. That’s how it will be from now on.“My eye,” you will say.You will mean the eye you have,or the one taken from you,depending. It’s a tender shift to the singular.You will love your right eye nowas you never knew to love your left.Your right eye.Your miracle,your treasure. By the wayyou should start to sitat the head of tablesor at least at the lastseat on the end.It is lonely to sitwith your blind…

for all the times i wanted to give up on myself for the time i was hospitalized& missed the first semester of my senior year of collegefor which i blamed myself to warn me that i seemed manicfor the time i compared myself to my college boyfriend … hisbuddies hired by graduation into finance jobs … living inthe west village at 22. for the time i felt certain i’d made a horriblemistake trying to do what i loved. for the time i blamedmy mother for encouraging me to write. for the time she hadto physically hold me down between doses of clonazepam… it took a long time for me to see that this too was an act of love.for the time i stopped taking my medication … the years it…

[She twirls] in my sister’s ball gown & an aunt’s cancer wig, I’m Hannah Montana. Yes, baby, before RuPaul’s laugh, before Mosul was collapsing, before me as witness. I rise in that mirror so proud, a haram-bomb girl, my mom says. I made my own doll. Tarik Dobbs’ chapbook Dancing on the Tarmac is forthcoming from Yemassee Journal. It was selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for their 2020 Poetry Chapbook Prize. COMING SOON IN APR Kwame Dawes Natalie Eilbert Megan Fernandes Forrest Gander Sally Wen Mao Matthew Rohrer Alison C. Rollins Maggie Smith…

Machine Religion When they commanded the network to produce images of barbells, they discovered something strange…In the “mind” of a neural net, a barbell was a material object with a human hand and wrist attached.—Steven Levy, Wired Magazine Jesus is a lyric poem.Jesus is a lyre orliminal force. Jesusis a lord quiet andlike a lamb. Jesusis a ham sandwichno one eats. Insideus, he pleads againstthe devilish will. Insideus, his illness spreads.Inside us, we widen.Inside us, we believe.Jesus incites us toviolence. Jesus isa violin. Jesus hasa rhythm. Jesus isa holy instrument.Inside us, his openE string pleads The Introvert’s Lament One person I mimic. One person I triptych.One I travel or tromp, trod or stone.One person I misunderstand. One person,I am. One’s voice I mistake for an engine in the night, purring,…

For the Willows to Bless with a shower of leaves, red in the dawn,the stream by their side, riverflowidling, a little back spill, the shrillcry of a bird, and little by little,as the light grew, the sun crestedthe hills, and, as it splintered its goldamong our leaves—a two-legged figureappeared, and behind it, another,another—as if the horizon itself wasan opening seam from which they werepouring, a column stretching back and back,over the hills that the sun had justmounted. They were backlitby that sun, flat silhouettes,and it was hard to discern onefrom another, so alike they appeared,and so endless their procession.And as they approached us, wetensed, feeling something betweenapprehension and wonder, so much likean army of ants they seemed—so many,so many…as they came closer, we hearda great keening, so that, unsurehow to…

His hands touch my foreheadi His latest musemy kinks and knots nakedin a room His fingersbrush between like an autumnzephyr grazing a bed of dahliaswaiting to be loved adoredagain to be touched by another humanseasons to be afresh like bulbsbathing in warmth the stillness of twobodies whisk away in a cloudof isopropyl alcohol and talctenderly touching anotherin regions mothers once nurtured puckering my lipsHe trims belowmy shadow the quiet traceHis fingers flowfrom chin to appleeach stubble uncurlingHe gets my good sidei gets his good sidebloom a smile only for Himpay Him for His lovingwhen the weeds cover my dahlias perhaps this is how some mensay i love you silently Rodrick Minor is a poet from Mississippi. He is a four-time member of the Baton Rouge National Poetry Slam Team, a…

Prince in pussyprint purple perchedon an ohio oakwood porch, eyeslocked on pages of Beloved.muttering love isor it aint. Love isor it aint Toni big afro-loving in the clubshoulders movin like hips likedips in concrete,mouthing dearly beloved.mouthing we O, the string of Black this is.This curve of dark history,pressed against memorylike cool cloth to fever.Like fresh lips to bone. Tariq Thompson is a Black poet from Memphis, Tennessee. His debut collection of poetry, How Could I Be Lonely?, is forth-coming from Sunset Press.…

Inheritance by Taylor Johnson Farmington, ME: Alice James Books. November 2020; 100 pages; $18.95 Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance is a collection of discovery, “attuned to all these human privacies” in a language where closeness isn’t akin to love. If language is a tool, then we are still grasping for the handle. This debut collection prospects the possibilities, outlines a terrain through the certainty that we can still hear one another “and [hold] close each other’s sound.” Enter Derrida. Enter Coleman. Enter Miles Davis. Johnson evokes the names we know and also the nameless: the deer filled with singularity and plurality, the pines, the birds, the light between them. “Sometimes language is the animal, sometimes it’s the gun,” both possessed because language does not serve us all. So what will? Johnson lays…

2700 BCE Yesterday we men of Elam and Sumer waved hello along the roads and labored side-by-side in irrigation ditches. Tomorrow we must rise as mortal enemies, arriving at a chosen fieldto try to end each other’s lives. Farewell, wives. Farewell, sons and daughters. We may never see you in thislife again. At dawn beneath the rising Sun perhaps for the final time our battlecalls unblock our throats and we rush forward. Around us sharp objects fly. Blizzards of spikes bury in skulls,shoulders, chests. May the gods be proud of us! Shrieking survivors advance, propelling spears and stones, killingother men and breaking their limbs. Let our names be remembered and our memories be loved! Warriors coupledtoe-to-toe swinging blades, clubs, fists. Our blows and counter-blows, cloven muscles, slashed skins, openedwounds, exposed…

I Want to Wear the Crown A history teacher at school tells me the Constitution starts with the people and ends with the people. He says, the Constitution protects the people against tyranny, and I think, what protects the people from the people? What protects the people from their selves? My horoscope for December tells me the year ahead is my emerald year; that I’m going to wear the crown. The other day, I overheard my friend say to her dog, how do you live with someone so miserable Every one of us is important, and I want to wear the crown; I want to mind the brilliant exception; the brilliant expectation that the regard with which I give myself to others, is not shortchanged; is not a testament to…

I. A three-quarter’s moon is quick this New Year’s morning,Almost transparent at the tip of those mountains.There are no bears. The kitchen window, propped openBy an old dictionary (blue Larousse) easesCold air and a few last flecks of starlight inside.Last night, we played at tall puppets and perfectedA most imperfect year with your death’s gaiety:Pencils and bears. You were the life of the party. II. Under the night’s final lamp, I found a stranger’sWriting in your books: a scatter of emphases,A few translations and, more than once, the one word“Emmanuel” underscored. It was all in softPencil, easy to erase if I wanted to.I didn’t. In the red hymnal given to meIn 1961 “for good conduct,” the word“Emmanuel” is likewise underscored, page two,The second hymn for Advent. Clearly, the strangerKnew us.…