Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2022 i The American Poetry Review

Gratitude, 2001 The red strip is not a tongue or fire. I try to imagine it without the white strip above it. Or the green blocks. What is the red strip withoutanything else? Agnes said suffering is necessary for freedom from suffering. Maybethe yellow strips are suffering. See how far away they are? Always distant butalways there. Or maybe they are language, in how we can still see the yellow on the periphery when we look at the red in the middle. Iwant to pull the yellow closer but maybe I should push it away. What am I outside of language? Is this the solitudeAgnes spoke of—standing in an auditorium without a microphone or anaudience, at a podium reading wind. And where the skin that has beenwound tightly around me…

The Long Blue Dress I whooshedthrough the party. I grewa set of invisible hands. I was flower girlto the Commonwealth where lovers danced a dancecalled the snowdrift. Sugar mapleshelicoptered samarasin my glass. The dogs slackenedin their webs of shade. A democracyof clouds formed, a stormwas decided. Everyone inside,candles on. I sayit makes sense! Every raindropa little bell, every switchbackand holler baptized. But it feltso good to cry. I stackedthe wood so high I never again left.I never again wore shoes. My long blue dresssuggested my power, my powerful sadness.And you and you and youand the gyrating populace and everyonewas there. Bobby Boris Pickett For no real good reasonexcept for the gravity of being alive all the time, I wept in silence in a corner of the farm.I climbed the pawpaw…

My grandfather Dave Pinsky’s disregard for the practice of Judaism as a religion was so calm and perfect that he didn’t seem to express his feelings about piety and rabbi-craft except implicitly, by living his profane life. Without warning, Zaydee Pop sometimes showed up at our Rockwell Avenue apartment and announced that I would not be going to school that day. He would be taking me to New York with him, to keep him company on a business trip. My mother, his great opponent, did not put up much of a fight. Their combative relationship came up in a question about one of my favorite old pictures, a studio photograph of Dave as a well-dressed young thug, handsome in an apelike way, posed with his beautiful young bride, Rose. She…

It’s a lot harder, to squeezeyour pointer finger enoughto make a vial fullof your own blood,than you might think.So much gets wasted.The kitchen counter,a crime scene. Your printseverywhere. No one elseto blame. But youwere willing to bleed enoughfor Y to be detectable.SneakPeek, just a clickaway, delivered to your homewithin a week and marked“No Male Contact Allowed.”Alone, with the winter suntoo strong through the window,with not enough waterin your veins for viscosity,so you had to do ittwice, guilt growingeach finger-prick draw,even if your self-inflictedbleeding, repeated, didn’t startthe Sawmill fire, didn’t swallow45,000 acres of lifein southern Arizonaafter a blue-smoke gunshotproclaimed the unborn“boy,” proclaimed “him”gender before name,before body. You’ll always feelsomething is missingunless you have a girl,your husband saidbecause you and your motherare X’s of the samechromosomal pairand you need to proveyou can…

One day after his death on October 6, 2019, the Irish Times printed thirtyone “lightning elegies” for Ciaran Carson from poets, writers, and friends, including Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Michael Longley, and Gerald Dawe (Doyle). Paul Muldoon published a review of Carson’s just-published Still Life in the paper two weeks later, writing, “These poems now see him [Carson] writing to devastating effect of the devastation wrought on Belfast.” At the same time, he noted, “Still Life will be remembered as one of the great testimonies to married love.” But Carson is little known in the U.S. The New York Times published a respectful obituary, but the paper didn’t review Still Life. Nor did any other major outlet, including the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the L.A. Review, or…

My heart is the son of my body and it wants you.Do you know how much that aches? Like a salt bathfor the blistered. Like a cold that haunts the bone.It betrays me and I kneel to it; wouldn’t you call thata kind of theft? A kind of breaking-in? In any unspokenlanguage, shame is a palindrome that riddles me:through the holes, a blue moon whistles nearby,me and all your untouched desires gathering. At nightevery bell is your voice ringing my name. I am alreadywillingly of you, ungainly with consent. May I touchthe clouds of your chest with my fingers? Am I fatedto be the lover who begs? Camonghne Felix is the author of Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books, 2019), which was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award in…

A week into a year in Germany as a high school exchange student, I spent the night in a tent on the beach of the North Sea. I woke up to the sun warming the tent, a frenzy of birds calling over crashing waves. I unzipped the door and looked out to see a wrinkled old man bending over with spread legs to touch the water, completely naked. Weeks later, my host father’s sister came over near the end of her pregnancy and took a bath with the door open, the family walking in and out to chat with her. As a teenager from the Midwest, it was hard to reconcile this casual nudity with the shame I’d been taught to feel. It wasn’t until I became a mother that…

When I visit Virginia in winter,Mom says she’s been seeing printson our snow-covered deck.Deer, she tells me. I laugh.Deer can’t jump that high.Maybe opossum or raccoon.But she doesn’t know what thoseare, not my English wordsfor them. And I don’t knowhow to translate. I’m frustratednow—at how often our conversationsgo like this: faltering, me punishingher with silence for not understanding.How my first instinct towardsmy mother is never kindness.Who am I to tell her what is possible?Just this morning looking outfrom the deck, I saw the fireof eight cardinals burningin our honeysuckle. An omen.Maybe that was my mother too.One landed on the snow brightas a radish, as the pendantmy mother gifted that I refuseto wear—too showy, too loud.My mother has already donethe impossible, making it here.What have I done? I want to believethat…

KAVEH AKBAR This book is built around the epistolary form, these letters from you to friends, futures, cockroaches, your radiator, William Shatner. And then there are also these letters to you, many of them actually poems to you, written by friends. I’ve never seen a “single-author” poetry collection include several whole poems written by other people to the poet, which seems wild, to land upon a whole new poetry-book-thing in 2022. Can you talk about how those poems in the book came about? MATTHEW OLZMANN I think there are a lot of interesting collaborations happening in poetry. In the case of this specific book, it sort of emerged as a natural extension of the collection’s epistolary motif. In addition to the more outward-facing letters where the speaker is addressing various…

Election Night Are you ready? I nodded. She slid the needle inand the sick cat, who only a moment before had tried toleap to the floor closed his eyes and exhaled. Andthat’s it, she said a little too brightly, pulling the needle out.That’s it? I asked. That’s all there is to it. + The syringe going in, and then the pressurewhen the vet pressed the plunger, familiar,then unfamiliar, a sort of sparkling in the cornersof the cat’s eyes like fireflies in the darkening back yard—and then the sparkling grew thick and filled the air,handfuls of black glitter— + Hours earlier, after I had voted, I found the doghad strewn garbage over the kitchen floor, the TV onloud—a commercial for pharmaceuticals. The cat wasstill alive at the vet’s. All I wanted was…

The dream in which I see myselfborn. The dream of momin her one good dresskneeling to Thérèse, Saint of Lisieux,The Little Flower who died of TB;the irreality of her cheeks,in that light, like sculpted Carrara marblepears as hard as the tumorin my father’s neck, flat white in scanshe fanned out on a sewing table, to stare athis fate; to know its contours—I can trace for you the mountain,later, we scattered with hisface, I can show you the puff of himlike magnesium smokestalled above an old photo flash-lamp,but I can’t play the sound of himlaughing before he was ill.Is this what the book meant, observingof mirrors their symmetryis sinister, a subtractive delusion?Is each keyhole smaller than the last? Brian Tierney is the author of Rise and Float, winner of the 2021…

Saint End The weekend in Rehoboth Beachthey won a necklace as a penny prize at a boardwalk arcade, a fragile plastic heartthat read “Best Friend” and snapped in half to become two necklacesthat brought together formed a whole. They split it on a windy day,standing on the pier, the ocean heaving beneath their feet:Her half read, “Be / Fri.” His half read, “St / End,”like an abbreviation for Saint End. They saw the same things,and often they saw the same things differently, so she might say, “It’s a beautiful soundthe trees are making,” whereas he would complain of the noise of the wind.They wore the halves when one of them traveled. They wore themfor protection. They wore them when things were badto remind themselves they wouldn’t always be. “Be Fri,”…

The White Sands Motel 1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds rake groovesinto the dunes. A glass of winein one hand, I lower my binoculars. 3. An old man sweeps sandfrom the motel’s lobby. Still,sand is everywhere: in my blazer’s pockets,under the glass of that photograph,on my plate of tangerine sections. 4. What do I see through binoculars?The charred remnants of a campfire?A vermilion lizard skitteringacross a dune? A putrefaction on the sandresembling a man? I sip my wine. 5. The brochure says: “. . . a continental breakfastserved each morning.” So I rise,shower, shave, and…

At first these poems were their own At first these poems were their own sweetfurlough or as Basquiat did it the reflexiveopening of a new personal phase for mealone that many have traveled beforebut never together a phrase too busy to sitand be spoken that awakens to the recurringwave of arrival But arrival of what? Cakeand candles? No an abundance of cautionlike migratory flocks of a novel species oflanguage that comfort us through familiarityrather than meaning and which roam withouteffort from hand to hand in the manner ofa joint or communal wafer A ritual that lendsthe emptiness ahead a reassuringly solid veneer The plan for these sonnets At first the plan for these sonnets was to openas a secret practice whose incantations go onon love and death but the sonnets…

Three weeks every summerthree houses down for about twenty-five feeta smell envelops me when I walk the dogs.Slowly, I breath it in, thinking, this, this,this is perfection. I should plant itin my yard, create my own privateoasis to bask in the succulent scent,but I am trying to replaceall of the boxwoods with hydrangeasand last year we lost one—a hydrangea,the boxwoods survive anything: heat, humidity,hurricanes, blizzards. And at the side of thegarage, Asian lilacs replace tiger lilies.The lilies are beautiful when they bloombut they remind me of Michiganroadsides where they volunteeron state property and when they growtoo high grim men riding machinesmow them down on lazy summer daysfor safety. It makes me sad so I plantspring lilacs though it may take a full decadebefore they are a wall of shrubsthick and…

After the Masquerade The masquerade was over, but the guests refused to leave.We taught our children to stay a grave’s depth apart. “Six feet under” originated with the plague to keepthe animals from digging too deeply into our wounds. At the party, the Sun King carried a parasol decoratedwith lice and lilies. We were the last ones naked in the swimming pool. Millions died. For scope,we looked at the stars. All those names we could not remember. The streets were made of broken glassand monumental body parts. [At night, in the rain, a chandelier]. I practiced my posture not with a book,but a candelabra. I did not call my mother. I walked with my shoulders back to suggest wings.We prided ourselves on each having our own masks like snowflakes or…

Listen—if I’ve learned anything from men,it’s that their tongues are bareand motherless, lapping the breast of brawnthey mistake for a masculine God. Too young, I’ve earned the word beheadin my mother tongue— How young? She, named for light, was twenty-seven.My hunger for fresh language carries mecloser to violent shores, gravel voices. Once before Fajr I cracked a date pit betweenteeth, lilted the sharp half into a lover’s mouth.I tested the crimson I was sure seethed beneathhis, every man’s, skin. You’re like a furnace,he’d whisper, dry against my sweat-laced back. It’s true I dream of handshot around my throat, the finger marksI saw fading grime-green against [] ’s.No one has blued me, but still I wake afraid,keen until the complex dogs bark back. How to fathom it, my grandfather alive nowlonger…

Daniel Defoe, Hosiery Merchant knew his seams both false & true, his garters, nifty eyelets. A gainful trade,stockings being what they were: always ruined or runneled: even Queen E’s silk fixed, darned at the tooes. He owned a brickworks, too. Wrote novels. Pamphlets. One about religion had him pilloried on Fleet Street. Insteadof dead cats, though, people threw flowers & then queued up, elbowing for the new installment of Crusoe. His patterns more invention than dissent: purl to shale, quarry to quill; now he’d be checking Apple stock, for a robustcapitalist was Daniel, also a debtor & bigamist, an arriviste who swapped Foe for Defoe, bet-hedger with a short attention span. I get it. So many threads! Scarlet, rust-red, poppy. So lush this grass-green fray, so deft that zigzagstitche, a…

The Laws The shroud must be hand-made.Pockets are forbidden. The material may be cotton or linen.Sentiment does not govern these laws. The women had washed and bathed her body.This is required.They did not talk during the preparations. This is also a law. The watchers sat with her during.They sat and recited the requisite words at darkand at noontime.They continued speaking them, ancient and brief, at sunrise. The manner of respect is governed by religious traditionrather than personal whim. I did not attend gatherings.I said no blessings.These are not choices. I stood at the podium facing the people.I turned to where she lay, asked her to forgive meas is the custom.I heard a voice crying in the room. Then they lowered her into the earthand a mound rose above the surface…

after Kim Addonizio Nearly everyone I love is living. I amliving, and my wife beside me snores gently in our bed. The bullfrogchorus wakes before dawn, perhaps they never slept. Their throated croakalternating with the cat’s soft purring, his body’s comma curled at our feet. The babywill come. Buddhists say abandon hope— but the poet says listen, I love you, joyis coming. A friend in the midst of divorce braids me a friendship bracelet, vibrantmarigold, teal, and green spiral my ankle. The note in her letter says joy is coming here.My contentment an inside job. My paid work tedious, the houseflies somehow multiplyinginside. But look, here is a life riddled with sweetness & abundance—palm unfurling, fiddlehead to fern. Rage Hezekiah is the author of Yearn, a 2021 Diode Editions Book…

At 472 pages, Wayne Koestenbaum’s latest volume of poetry attests his self-described logorrhea. Ultramarine (Nightboat Books) is the third volume in his Trance Notebook trilogy, after The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and Camp Marmalade (2018). Taken together, they run to over 1500 pages. For almost a decade, Koestenbaum has composed the notebooks at his desk each morning, transcribing a tissue of associations (dreams, memories, thoughts) from an unfiltered state of consciousness. According to Koestenbaum, the resultant poems are merely a “distillation” of these original longform drafts. As he told Felix Bernstein, he “obey[s] the order in which the thought-clusters [appear] to [him], without radical reorganizing.” If the idea is that poems are unworried, unstudied, unprocessed, I don’t really believe him (I don’t think he expects me to). The vast scale…

Diaspora Sonnet 26 The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their taut skin. Laugh lines or frown lines. My father can’t pickwhich. His wrinkles pick their own trajectory. Afternoons lack the luxury of stars.The heat unreels like news from the speaker perched high on the refrigerator. Stuckamid the buzz of insects and static, the mind repairs itself with sound. Fatheramong friends, talks story. Makes himself found. Diaspora Sonnet 27 My father’s rifle is a house of sorts.Its nerves are blunted, cold beneath the steel. And rooms echo with reports of noise. Loudand boisterous hail stones? Not…