Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2021 i The American Poetry Review

In the End You Get Everything Back (Liza Minnelli) The afterlife is an infinity of custom shelving, where everything you have ever loved has a perfect place, including things that don’t fit on shelves, like the weeping willow from your parents’ backyard, or an old boyfriend, exactly as he was in your second year of college, or an aria you love, but without the rest of the opera you don’t particularly care for. My favorite joke: Q: You know who dies? A: Everyone! Because it’s true. But ask any doctor and they’ll say that prolonging a life is saving a life. Ask anyone who survives their surgeries, and they’ll say yes, to keep living is to be saved. I do think there’s a statute of limitations on grief, like, certainly,…

Hold Me I have an endless appetite for starfruit,for biting my teeth into the universe and spitting outthe space junk, for licking the rings of my favorite planetsand never slicing my tongue. There’s a story I shareabout my birth where angels circle my dead twin’s body,where a fawn walks into the room and licks allthat has bled onto the floor.Hold me as I tell it. Hold me when the rats steal my opportunityand the raccoons bring me luck. Let’s wash our handsin the river and swing from hummingbird feeders,let’s think of all the things we want to touch. Rememberthe five birds that no longer exist? Hold me as I name them—passenger pigeon, dodo, laughing owl, New Zealand quail,the Christmas sandpiper. We can’t press rewind. We can’t go back to the…

The work of Jean Valentine taught me that the word “eyeshadow” could belong in a poem. Before I read her work, I had only seen that word in advertisements and fashion magazines. But far from describing surface femininity or sexiness, “eyeshadow” was the spiritual bedrock of Valentine’s ars poetica called “Yield Everything, Force Nothing.” Astonishingly, Valentine understood eyeshadow as a proper name, an allegorical figure, and an incantation: The contest is over:I turned away,and I am beautiful: Job’s last daughters, Cinnamon, Eyeshadow, Dove. The contest is over:I let my hands fall,and here is your garden:Cinnamon. Eyeshadow. Dove. (Door in the Mountain 213) “Cinnamon. Eyeshadow. Dove.” This is a garden of spice, cosmetics, and the symbol of peace. Or does “Dove” refer to the soap brand instead? In its latticing of…

A woman I’ve never met sends me tulips from two states over.There are things women know to do. They sit on my desk next to the window. I love flowersbecause they’re ordinary on one side of the glass and a gift on the other. I keep them aliveto remember I can. There are things women know how to do. Clipped and caged and I thinkthat’s beautiful. What could be more feminine than dying a slow death and another creature calling itbeautiful. A hymn for every howl. It’s crazy when you think about it. Whatever you call itit’s the one thing that brings me back into myself, dancing naked in the mirror and making faces in the glass.I only ever wanted to make you feel my feeling. You want to make…

Deepfake What is the uncanny valley? asks the student and I draw the graph on the board, and point to the lowest point, and then move up the slope; This is like a scarecrow, it’s kinda shaped like a human but you’re not sure; This is where you’d put a mannequin on the graph, this is where you’d put, say, a lifelike sex doll, and right here where this dip is … that’s where you would just reach for your knife. People go back to observations said from the 60’s and say wow, they were prophets. Why do people think it’s a prophecy when it’s that things are not changing? The story hasn’t evolved. Tonight I was standing in the yard while the dog ate grass and surveillance planes took…

How old was I?It’s hard to remember from“this distance in time.”Seventeen maybe? She wrote me a letter—we both liked to write—a note really. It was on Wm. Morris notepaper I think—even then I knew who that was. And after I had read it five or six timesI kind of hid the note. Maybe I didn’t want my mother to find it.I hid it under a stack of books. And that’s where it stayed,I guess. Can you imagine such a cachement occurringand those pages, that envelope, staying there for centuries, for decades even—you know, for a long time.Like something in Pompeiiunder all the lava. We are so vulnerable at that age, aren’t we?so easily hurt.Maybe my sense of the time period is off. I do know that thing that’s like wolves,that…

Bone of My Bone Do you remember?You stood in the kitchen doorway.I said the words.You blushed, looked relieved,closed your eyes. Remember? You wantedto go down on your knees on the red carpet.I wasn’t ready. But on the lakein the boat,in the middle of my city,you asked me. You asked without thinking about how our first childwould wake every three hours,each night, for two years,and how each time we went in to hold him. You asked without thinking about how our next babywould be born early, very early.You asked the question. You did not dwell on the argumentswe would haveabout that book or that movie,which weren’t about a book or a movie. We were floating, choosingthe birth-room,choosing you whispering into your prayer-book,the midwives holding my shoulders. Do you remember rememberingwhat would…

Things Learned the Hard Way That the semi-circular canal is part of my ear,not a style of Venetian waterway arch,I learned mid-air on a Huffy.That bicycles left long out in the rain split.That prepositions are tricky.That I was made part industrious,part lazy-assed. That descriptionsof a crappy bike and person can besimilar: One end launching forward,the other dragging. That my bodycan be projectile, weapon, lyricfalling in the stilled time between.That similarities are convenientand narrative ends with my headwonky and fluid pulsing out my ears,that you horrify friends with imagesthey usually see in movies. Friendslike to dramatize horror by pointingwith one hand, covering their mouthswith the other, as if keeping their soulsfrom flying out. That souls leave.Friendship is teetering on a chair,while one dunks my wrecked headin a sink of ice water,…

Books God of Nothingness by Mark Wunderlich Graywolf, 96 pages, 2021 Paperback, $16.00 My father fell from the boat.His balance had been poor for some time.He had gone out in the boat with his doghunting ducks in a marsh near Trempealeau, Wisconsin.No one else was nearsave the wiry farmer scraping the gutters in the cow barnwho was deaf in one ear from years of machines—and he was half a mile away.My father fell from the boatand the water pulled up around him, filledhis waders and this drew him down.He descended into water the color of weak coffee.The dog went into the water too,thinking perhaps this was a game.I must correct myself—dogs do not think as we do—they react, and the dog reacted by swimmingaround my father’s head. This is not…

Hotel Belgrade (Residue, cellophane, liquid amber, pearl resin on cardboard) Platinum blonde, with whiteboxes of Russianchocolates. Silver liquid glitter,lemon candle, crimsonleather 1970 Mercedessedan interior. Gum drops, fox fur, creamblouse with gold specksand tiny orange embroidered-flourishes. Royal blue child-size suitcasecrammed with bookson the Death Driveand Hegel’s dialectics. Thick white face paint. Liquid amber, palepink powder. Cream ballet leotard,root beer, blood stain, deathscape. An index ofNothing, and never. Whatthe mind cannot handle,the body must contain— broken shardsof memory: a glass vialof mercury dropped downto the concreteground— Verzweiflung Lullaby I sat for dayson the pink plush carpetinside the death-roomof the blue hotel. I am trying to tell youbut I don’t rememberanything. Freud says when the shockof trauma hitsmemory escapesthe mind, blinds. And wherein the bodydoes memory reside. Death-child, Cindy, gum drops, warmbutterscotch puddingspace…

Like all good conquerors, the Burmese had the foresight to leave picturesque ruins. Americans find ruins fascinating because we fear being laid low, our great monuments atomized & tossed to the wind, our lawns left unruly, unkempt, untrimmed. The buddha, crowned in crowshit, makes us think thoughts we ought to think more of, like, perhaps it is not my children who will reap the fruits of my labor, or, my house sits upon another house’s bones. I am wine-drunk in the temple again. Against the wishes of my ancestors, all this red brick makes me think of Harvard. When a well-fed stray snarls at me, I meet its challenge, my sneer sticky with Pepsi-Cola, my veneers stickiest. Fake recognize fake. Yes, that’s me in the front camera’s shithole gaze, razor…

The base of a store-bought celery can grow more celerywith enough water. In the plush light of our apartment window,growth comes when no one is watching.It sprouts stalk & lace leaves while we are at your brother’s weddingin a place where palm trees aren’t native but symbolic.Like you, I fumble in our kitchen drawers for the easy metaphor.Liken a regenerating plant to myself. Cutcheese for crackers before dinner. You are hungry,wanting to know how to write about daily life.I tell you writing about sadness is easy. Joy comesin explosions. I learn something new every dayto break the line between repetition. It’s so easyfinding wonder in the baseboards’ dust liningwhen I zoom in. I find a single hair, long and mine.You call them recuerdos, ways to find mein our home when…

Motherhood Metaphor All I wantis a good night and coffee in the morningwithout conversation so I can considerhow my life— which made a new life—is still so incomplete. How can something smallmultiply to something large? Mathematics is a strange science.Prayer is an impossible problem. What should I do with my life? I ask myself. But myself is not mineso a 4 year old answers: Keep it. I’ve Been trying all dayto remember that feelingwhen you first meet, how a matchgets struckon a rock how you carry that firethrough each little taskand all day the people you passnotice the lights onnotice someone is home. Kay Cosgrove’s manuscript has been named a finalist for the Field Poetry Prize, the St. Lawrence Book Award, and the Larry Levis Prize at Four Way Books.…

The critical canon has spent decades wringing its hands over Sylvia Plath’s appropriation of both Jewish identity and the particular tragedy of the Holocaust. In 1969, George Steiner wrote in his essay “In Extremis” that Plath “… was a child, plump and golden in America, when the trains actually went,” who therefore lacked the “right” to “draw on the reserves of animate horror in the ash and the children’s shoes.” In 2018, her second volume of Letters was published, covering the period from 1956 to her death in 1963. Considerable press was paid to Plath’s use of anti-Semitic language to describe her husband Ted Hughes’s family, whom she accused in some letters as working against her personal and financial stakes in the marriage, and its end. In The Guardian, Rachel…

Career I spent all my avocado moneyby the light of Saint Martin de PorresI often think about bank robberyWhat wig I would wear, what fun it would beto harm no one and dump a million dollarsover the hills that belong to everyonefrom an airplane that I teach myself to fly Bright Angel It’s snowing in the Grand CanyonIt’s snowing in Central Park in the moviesI miss everything happening all at oncelike bopping groundhogs’ heads blindfoldedBut here we were a married couple sharingtamales in red sauce and red wine and memoriesAnd vampirically we laughed when we jokedwe might push each other into the canyonas though it were safe as a swimming poolas though either one of us could swim in the airOur server said his name was Derrickand that he’d be…

When the leaves fall away there appearsone last apple on the tree, like a late guestfinally arrived, hungry only for questions. I mean late ghost. Already gone, a half yearstuffed in a pocket with forgetfulness.The bare branches glaze in the lessons of rain and fog and ice. No sun. Indoors,the small table has been finally clearedand returned to the kitchen. Remember how only three of four legs touch the floor?The kettle on the stove begins to jeeragainst signs of last things and cold. December comes fat and humble as a question mark. John Poch’s poems have been published in The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and others. His collections of poetry include Two Men Fighting with a Knife (2008) and Dolls (2009). He teaches at Texas Tech University.…

Grave It is all, allover the earth, underearth, a graveyard: tree ferns, trees—roots,bark, seeds—ancientlife that emerged from the sea, forestsflooded to swamps& bogs, transformed to peat, transformedagain, sunk, coveredwith layers of earth with strangeamphibian, snake& later dinosaur bones—layers& layers & underit all for hundreds of millionsof years, ourancestors, resting under earth, over-burdened, we say,until we found them. A History from the Oxford English Dictionary Col groweþ vnder lond (1387) though … be good Plenti of Wood, yetthe People burne much of Yerth Cole (1538) They digge out of the mountaynes a certayne kindeof blacke stone which burne in the fyre like coles (1553) There doth yet remain greatquantities of Coles in the Earth (1667) Coals were heretofore seldom usedin Chambers, as now they are (1687) a new way of makingpitch…

Blue the billboard says blue lives matterand you think why can’t white peoplecome up with anything original you let your eyes drown in the aqua and navybackground surrounding the shield shaped badge blue like the sky dotted with cloudsvoluminous as cotton bolls waiting for the pickereven here the reality of someone’s labor in the car with your cousin you singthat old ancestral blues to pass the timeare we safe here she has seen the billboard too and like you like most prefers her bloodintravenous and blue to be honest you don’t feel safein a trump state or a blue one either you call this precariousness: birthrightwhy daddy taught you to croon the blues why there was always a mercya savior please sliding from your grandmother’s tongue you tell yourself safety…

To consider how absorption into a poem’s world works, immerse yourself in two opening stanzas. The first comes from John Crowe Ransom’s most anthologized poem, the elegy “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” first published in 1924: There was such speed in her little body,And such lightness in her footfall,It is no wonder her brown studyAstonishes us all. Ill omen and sweetness balance in this stanza’s contrasts. A light, little body dashes through in the past tense; in the present, she’s shockingly still. The phrase “brown study,” potentially puzzling to contemporary readers, was once shorthand for melancholy reverie but has fallen out of use. Blue is the color of sadness now. Yet even given that hitch in comprehension, this four-line sentence raises suspense that lures a reader into the deep end,…

In my flowerbed, I hesitateto be delighted by everythingI have worked for in my tinyterritory in the heart-land of America where the memes are goodenough to be bandaids for suffering, the memesare of 50s housewives saying I’m readyfor some blessings that aren’tin disguise and where still moredaylilies have openedinto paroxysms of orangeso orange it hurts. Once, the floristgave a short lecture on pain:blooms look alive as theywould were they still alive only with fresh cuts.What does that prove, I imagine you asking.The lilies echo the splashy explosionsa paintball makes on a surface—blessedI started hashtagging ironicallyin my mind. Blessed, a yellow decalpressed on our neighbor’s front door.Hose nozzle hissing in my hand, I recallmy high school French. Je suis blessée:I am injured. Once it was a blessing to be closeenough to…

When the heat of the dayis being cooked up by the night precedingI ask what writing has to do with suffering.He asks what writing has to dowith creating or understanding.We are both selfish.Why do we crush things downwhen the universe is flying apart?It must be the dramatic absence leftby star death that tricks us.Heartbeats lurch into my head. Thick plates of ice crashfish still alive shudder in the crumbles.When I think of extracting my obsessionfrom its utter diffusion in my bodyit would be softas melting waxthick as milk. To write is to show that I thinkthere is something worthy inside me.We found each other by chance.No.Yes. We found each other by chancethough we could only have found each other.I was too much.I was a part of the noise in his…

I pick cottonwith my own handsin the town where Emmett Till’skillers were acquittedin 1955, at the bottomlandsfed by the swollen Tallahatchie. History of the last empireexplained in its white,dreamy bolls. Cash cropso valuable that plantationowners burned it by the baleto keep it out of Union hands. And I can’t help but thinkabout the negro hands,cracked and worn,twisting the lock from the burr,stripping the stalk from topto bottom, the hard ground brokenagainst weather and weevils.Their lives tied to a parcel of land. Children younger than my ownworking from can-to-can’t-see under a blistering sun.Hungry. Half-paidor nothing. The debts they woulddie with. Everything weigheddown to the fiber. Everythingdone by hand. I break off a branchto feel trauma in my hands—a reminder that I have riskedso little to be here,not even the shirt off…

Heartbroken over a football game, Autumnevening, of this kind of thing I’m not ashamednor of the twistiness of that diction,or wanting America to burnthough only certain parts deserve it,its forests are beautiful and have donenothing wrong, even the desert’s emptinessthough it terrifies me, is beautiful,and tacos, and kebabs wrapped up in naan,and today walking through the park I turnedto see dozens of bright white seagulls flockedon the windy lake against the blue skyand I felt an ache and I sent a textto a friend I said TODAY I SAW FLOCKEDON THE LAKE WHITE SEAGULLS IT WAS BEAUTIFULhe wrote FOLLOW THEM it was too late Matthew Rohrer is the author of The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books, 2020), The Others (Wave Books, 2017), which was the winner of the 2017…