Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2022 i The American Poetry Review

THE STANLEY KUNITZ MEMORIAL PRIZE: A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning poem in The American Poetry Review, awarded to a poet under 40 years of age in honor of the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets. THE APR/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE: In partnership with The Honickman Foundation, an annual prize for a first book of poetry, with an award of $3,000, an introduction by the judge, publication of the book, and distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium.…

Unlove Poem If I call myself unlovable, I am, practically; if I say itenough times: unlovable. Then, like practical magic, I’m hollow as old garlic; I’m distance-skinned.I’m a long, mean package, a terror-dyke, a nag, a squinting, slut-spun hag—it’s easy, really. It’s the simplest thing,I do it in my sleep. I have invasive dreams, after all, they infect my lover’s skull, they crank our jawsinto four slow hammers. After all, I’m made of distance plus the beautiful things people have tried to putinside me, they fall out the bottom. No one can kill me with kindness. No one can reach me through the soundof such ancestral ugly, sound of my grandmothers gagging a half-century ago (did they?). My grandmother beatingher stomach with her fists, drinking medicine, then poison (did she?).…

KATE A poem I keep returning to in your book [Path of Totality] is “Urine Season.” It ends with the lines: “Some will say this is not a poem for them. But I say it’s a poem for anyone who ever expected anything.” “Urine Season” is about the loss of your child, and takes place in the hospital. It gutted me with its grief, but what brought actual tears to my eyes was its generosity, bringing the reader into the speaker’s suffering. There is this quality throughout the book, the speaker’s grief spilling out so that it encompasses everything, including the reader. I am not sure this is a question, only that I wanted you to know this before we talk about anything else. NIINA Thank you for telling me…

Kiss me and you will seehow important I amsaid Sylvia Plath which is exactly what happenedwhen you saw the woman you’d marryat that party you almost didn’t go toand kissed her later that evening you lived with herfor years and years and had your ups and downsalthough a lot more ups than downs and if your ups were not as high as some people’s upsyour downs are not as low as theirs and you made and spent money but somehow managedto make a little more than you spentand you put that aside for years and yearsuntil you had enough to stop work altogetherand travel and sleep as late as you wantedand eat out more than you used toand stay up later than you used to becauseyou could sleep as late…

Waving from a tree limbone handle free breezefilling the sacksail w/o craft full-bodiedfailure discardedyour form is emptiness emptinessvalue thank you thank you thank youthank you cascadingdurable membraneagain not full againtrash carrying trashnever to be depletedsupple soft crinkly creasesyou’d roll like a tumbleweedstillness at the centermore always comes outa parody now of goods at handyou hide nothing eighteen timesyou can return to formcoffin mask luggageof outcasts nomads pressedinto flight resistant stable noapparent characterorphaned childwe never ask aboutyou cycle through familiescirculating systemsporeless you capture moving airopen to the future risingfrom what was dead skinhair nails fluids absorbedby two-ply productyou speak your own languageoffer help to allaccept what others avoidthe hand turns youinto a quick mittfor picking up shit vomitunidentifiable eviscerateevacuate & readydo you have room in your bagI have a little roomone…

exordium While sound and seaworthy, I confess a life of false confessions, false hearts, ample contempt for bench warrants charging me with failures to appear. Let what interest death’s elbow grease won’t erase compound, judgments sealed in my ova, my oeuvre, my juvie, and on Q-tips scribbled like rice grains with the starshine of my stem cells. Yardsell my cracked hourglass, my salt-crusted astrolabe, my maps of the lunar seas. Collect my student IDs, my employee discounts, my almost-winning scratch-off. Take my voice mails from the clouds. Dismantle my altar to Walter Mercado, phrenologist of the stars. But stay memory, time’s plagiarist. Stay poem, spare tire for memory. Stay reader, beloved, prosthesis for the soul. narratio In 18th Century France, Franz Mesmer made friends dance in synch like iron filings…

Delilah —after Gerrit van Honthorst’s “Samson and Delilah,” c. 1621 They’ve made a monster of me, marring my namefor eternity. I’m not Delilah,but Laila. I loved him. Each night, in bed, after our bodies became one body, he would succumb to sleep, resting his manein my lap. Dream -starved, I’d wind his black locks, their feathered curls, as if he were a birdwho flew by means of his hair. How heavy and tender we were, not like the jawboneof the ass he raised against my family, mowing us down like grass. He was weary of killing, the riddles, the deception.In the end, his sight narrowed to me. I was no slut. I helped us wing free. Terminal Hair For you out me as animal, wolf risingwith the moon and by…

Into the Mistake My solecisms spread like sumactrees, somber cloudsat the perimeter, stalking.I walk the desire line of path with my bowand arrow, toward the straw filled boss, its bull’s-eyemy third eye. The angels always ask mequestions with no answers: What is a mistake but a misunderstandingof the mystic? The translucent wingsof white bramble on thorns and tall grass,lead here to the upper field. Missing the mark,what some call sin. The thick urinous stink of plum trees and flop, the neighbor’s Guernseycalf in her pen, just born, a ghost in a machine.How can she want a fieldwhen she’s not yet been to one? We all know what we know. That’s howit is. In the loud high-pitchedmoan and moothe greenness calls like a shofar.Blessed are You, Ruler of the world. I…

We’re so grateful for the support that our readers around the world have shown the magazine and the poets we publish. We hope you will join us again now, in our 50th anniversary year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. In 2021, we published six outstanding issues representing the work of 134 writers, including Rita Dove, Megan Fernandes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tomás Q. Morín, Jennifer Chang, Sally Wen Mao, Donika Kelly, Mary Ruefle, and many more. We published the 24th volume in the APR/Honickman First Book series: Latitude by Natasha Rao, selected by Ada Limón, and we awarded the 12th Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Casey Thayer. Thayer’s winning poem, “Reminding Myself That We Are Not Remarkable,” appears on the feature page of our September/October 2021 issue. We…

Schoolyard Evangel They say I have been sent. Who says?Not my parents if that’s what you’re thinking.Not my parents and not my pastorneither. And not God. God’s busy. The other boys play contest games.Some run like hares. Others huddlelike fat old toads. Both kinds please me,how full they are of keeping score. Sometimes one asks me what I’m doingup here on top of the mountainof old truck tires. I say I’m waiting.For what? he asks. I tell him I don’t know but that when I do, I’ll tellhim so. The teachers must relyon me the way they watch me watching.Sometimes they stand in groups and look my way together like a congregationlooks beneath the pulpit, or siblingson their backs guessing atcloud shapes before a storm. Schoolyard Blessing Remember that the…

Blaze Mulholland burns. Getty nudesstand sentinel in ash. Marie Antoinette’s porcelainin jeopardy a second time. What a shame to watchher lover’s pillow burn. From the hilltop museum,it’s difficult to tell the city from plywood empirebacked by buttresses. I’m thinking about us,how easily it could all become smoke. I tell you about the Watteauwith the lovers, the innamorati who wear no masks. They’re enchantedby a guitar. The Vessel Hudson Yards, ManhattanPeople pose on eighty landings,a copper honeycomb.A two hundred-million-dollar sculptureabove West Side Rails.I watched a 70s porn where men cruisethose weedy lotsnow penthouses for oligarchs.On the old piers, guys pinned name tagsto their shirts, in case they fellthrough rotten boards and drowned,no family to claim them.New York City,my first crush.I’ve been away too long to live here again.Maybe I’m just as…

Bitter Sea Proof your dream is true: seeingthe Prophet’s face. As a child in Mecca,I once imagined I saw him. We prayed for whole dayson rugs behind the concentric circles of people doing tawaf.White marble everywhere! Soon even the air looked hazywith light, small birds inside bowl-shaped fixtures.Miles of archways, calligraphy I read as art first,then lesson. I thought, Here I can ask for anything,so I prayed obsessively: Please give me friends,please let my family enter the highest heaven, please letus all die together somehow, in a plane or car crash. Let usdie of martyrdom: of stomach cancer or murder, save usfrom the punishments of the grave. I was staringat the Ka’ba, that infinity-black cube, for hours—I saw him. The Prophet flying around it. I couldn’tmake out his face. I…

Benefactor Dana Asher Margot Berg and Robert Epstein Bruce Greenwald Muriel Karr Jonathan Katz William Kistler Terri E. Moreland Ethel Rackin Ava Seave Mark Stein Nicole Steinberg Peter Waldor Bank of America Patron Adil N. Godrej Judy Newman Joyce Carol Oates John Wright Sponsor Linda Lee Alter Kenneth Boockvar Marianne E. Brown John Carswell Paul Cummins Helen W. Drutt English Werner Gundersheimer Millie Lane-Berg Dana Levin Anne Marie Macari Alicia Ostriker Kathryn Slott Page Starzinger Anonymous (1) Supporter Andrew Anway Bridget Barnes Ellen Bass Robin Becker Dennis Brennan Ira Brind John Briscoe Robert Brown Stephanie Brown and Derek Christiansen Deborah Burnham Ann Butchart Oscar Chamberlain Henri Cole Brian Cronwall Susan Davie Carolyn Dille Rachel Fichter Ruth Fine Bill Gothorpe Robert and Judith Greene Susan Grossman Hendrik and Nancy Hartog Robert…

Giant Visits the Nursing Home I walked the sterile halls alone,walling my heart, afraid of whatI’d see. I found my mother first.You haven’t changed, she said, though I knewshe was merely hoping I’d say it back.Before I could speak, my father crieddown the hall. I guess his earsworked extra hard in lieu of his eyes,or else he smelled my fear, the sweat setfast in my palm. When I looked back at my momshe met my gaze, winced, said Time is running out,what can you do? I scooped her up, held hertight to my chest, rocked her then to the slowslug of her heart. I love you a bushel, I whispered,love you a peck. She threw her arms botharound my neck, making my hearta barrel in a heap. That’s when I…

Remembering Donald Justice And so what does it mean, pale geographies of the heart,The wishful hour alone at a window?Boyhood:A blind kid with puppets and homemade songs. Will the hours ever be softer than in those days?It was sweet to be lonely with the cricketsSinging in a broken stove. Blind, I bought a horse… Blind, I bought a horseNot to ride, though some wouldMy wife for instance—No I bought him becauseOf his loneliness Orphic horse retiredFrom the trackLeft standing in a stall Have I mentioned his neck?It’s long as Noah’s hopeFor new sun—Il miglior fabbroI whisperedTo the greater maker… Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey, Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”), and Eavesdropping: A…

Isaiah The wolf plans to live with the lamb, the leopardto lie with the goat. It’s written in stoneand onion skin. The lion will eat straw,the snake will eat dust. It’s prophesiedin ball point on the palm of your hand.The date has been fixed for the wedding:the guests will gather, and mill, and dispersethere beneath the dimmed marquee. I guess you say Static soft as snow, noise emptiedof sound and the sirens quenchedfor an hour. A meteor falling intoradio waves, burning through the breathof this world. I’ve got a sweeter songsays the song than the birds inthe trees. Turned up, up too loud.What can make me feel this way? Hart Island Taken by a drone over mass graves, the phrasejuts, cutting, from the page like pampas grass,invasive. The photographer’s blockedby…

Half a mile down the road from Annettesleeps my parents’ dream house white colonial100 acres with a creek I wander the big grassy yardred barn dismantled earthworks old cemeterybrush off a headstone grown over & littered with tractor partsElijah dead at 22 I vow to bring them back mushroom rings shine dissonant sparking greensparking mustard ladies lace paints there must be a godotherwise what is this web of rootsarbuscular mycorrhizae? Annette & I ride bikes down a dirt roadwhile I belt out Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” then we sit aimless by the creekkiss river stones alive “people lived here”Annette holds an arrowhead in her palm where are they we ask where where wherea porcini blinks I quote my science teacher matter is neither creatednor destroyed but only changes forms Annette…

Standing in each stanza—no, I’m sorry—room. Standing in each room waslike standing in a tester stroke of wall paint. All these blobs of colors in rows and columns, the size of thumbs.Together—a portrait of potential. But blues leaped to yellow leaped to burgundy. There was no order of hues.I told Charlie I didn’t know why I kissed anyone, except that I wanted to, I’ve been living without any consequences to otherpeople because all my life I’ve thought about other people, I’ve tried to get thelavender to like me, the copper to stay my friend, the lemon, the jade, the maker’s mark, Ipoured drinks for all the people and still couldn’t fit them in my rooms. I had to sleep in each one, one at atime— to know what living in…

In the late seventies, Lydia Tomkiw, a precocious, inventive poet and a beguiling new wave chanteuse, blazed out from Chicago’s intertwined worlds of poetry and punk rock. Her trajectory stands as a thrilling testament to the independent do-it-yourself ethos—that the journey from Chicago’s Ukrainian Village to the inaugural volume of Best American Poetry can be made via basements and nightclubs, armed with little more than restless imagination, words, office xerox machines, and moxie. Tomkiw’s poetry is both innovative and entertaining—formally playful, rigorously perceptive, delightfully surreal, and fueled by her singular, sexy charm. Tomkiw emerged alongside a circle of immensely talented poets, mostly women, including Elaine Equi, Connie Dea no vich, and Sharon Mesmer. Collectively they invigorated American urban poetry and cleared paths for more vital, raucous, and fiercely female verse.…

Love Poem When she sees me, she turns awayAs if there weren’t, between us, things.—Ahmad Shawqi staring at you,we held ideals, earlier I told you howmuch I loved your socks, we smiled andsipped on boiling thyme, yousaid it was time to go,I went:your hairblack, dense, resting on the edgesof the car seat, on the passenger sideyou sat and said things, nothing,looking at trees and sky—you said:the watersare in jars, and the dawn is inthe stars—some line, some love, something: I wanted to sayI love you but I waitedanother day Dispute i– the chairs stacked one by one on top of the other did not create an arch by themselves that made them seem as though leaping one outof the other ahead of themselves it is the thud— when dropped afterthe…

(after Friedensreich Hundertwasser) From where I standthe river is a symbol and the landscape less itselfthan our idea of itself. We walk through unawareof the compromise. We don’t speak the river’s tongue.Mythic bottled panorama. It was built for more than bridges. Crocodiles and river godscall it home.Squalls and lotus eaterscall it sister. Bathers call it hither and yonand here we stand as skeptics. We forget the times we drowned,as a duchess and a soldier as a guest of the water. We would pave the river overif we could. We would wear it as a boat wearsits prowess upon the hook. And it would lure us in to its centerspilling into our yards and overflowingits every bank with water and dreams of water. The vision has not invited us into its…