Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2022 i The American Poetry Review

FIVE $10,000 PRIZES AND BOOK PUBLICATION PARTICIPATING PUBLISHERS: BEACON PRESS, ECCO, MILKWEED EDITIONS, PENGUIN BOOKS, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS NOW SUBMIT ONLINE ENTRY PERIOD: January 1, 2023 through March 1, 2023 ENTRY REQUIREMENTS: Previously unpublished book-length manuscripts of poetry accompanied by a $35.00 entrance fee. Entrants must reside in the United States or be American citizens, and winners will be responsible for compliance with Internal Revenue Service guidelines. SUBMITTING: http://thenationalpoetryseries.submittable.com/submit (and/or review and follow the guidelines on our website: www.nationalpoetryseries.org) The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five books of poetry each year. Winning manuscripts are selected through this annual open competition judged by five distinguished poets. Each winning poet receives a $10,000 cash award in addition to having his or her manuscript published by…

LOOK AT A THING: W.C. WILLIAMS, ROBINSON JEFFERS, CHARLES SIMIC Russian Formalists have a word, “ostranenie,” which means constantly attempting to discover new ways of looking at everyday things. There are almost always two realities rubbing up against one another in every poem, whether they are specified or not, and whether they are used consciously or not. These are the internal realities of the poet—her thoughts, feelings, and imaginings—and the external reality—the circumstances of time, weather, season, landscape, the things of the world, Stevens’s Necessary Angel, everything that is not us. One way to enter the poem as a writer is to focus the poem’s attention outward onto a physical object. Poets have been doing this since the first words were broken into lines. So let’s start there. Focus for…

The Getty, Los Angeles, 2019 Because I am one of time’s children,things happen to me. Tourists pick the poblanosfrom their burritos to feed the seabirds. Planes drop clouds of red phosphoruson the ashy birches. A man in a Tom Brady jerseynearly trips into the bust of a Roman emperorwho slaughtered his own brother. The sky looks wrong. My spit is brown.I won’t be here for very long. Van Gogh’s Irises keep hummingfrom the walls, knowing they’ll outlive me,that the violet paint they don oozes a stillness that will bestill forever. It’s simple really. I might just close my eyes& do it, a friend told me two days before she justclosed her eyes & did it. There are so many people no longerhappening, it almost makes a sound. Matthew Tuckner is…

September This is the time of year when stormsspin up from distant dustand sand and make their way to us,and we worry and adjust the scales we carry in our headsto account for luck and prayer.We buy batteries and candles, cordsand water to prepare. There are three trees beside the housethat rarely catch my eyeexcept in these days when I measureall things against the sky or what the sky might bring to us.I worry and adjustthe scales inside my head and wonderwhat to do or if I just need to know some secret thingsomeone who isn’t mewould certainly know: which way the windwill blow up from the sea, or how to navigate a seaof worry. I worry my scales—their beams worn as thin by now as the‘venetian blinds’ that whales…

Thirsty Animals that moveon small, short legs. Sand that sucks inanything / anyone. Something seenthrough a torn screen I hadn’t expected it. We all havethese genesthese sequencesof numbers I don’t knowhow they arewhat they are. This is youevery dayright now in more thanone car A basic love lookis missing. EgosyntonicorEgodystonic Splinter ratherthan organ. Suds on a grapevine The totality of real thingstrying to escape from reality To rub out or removeA fixed luminous point in the sky which is large I thought I’d know youin the old house I thought I’d know youin the green field The lake was too far away. Lights The erotic novelthat caused astir on the train Setting it on fire. The apple thatgot too hotin the bowl Filling with flies. Maybe the thingwe lose is…

Light breaks the window. You don’t recognize light as a hard hitter. Moonlight moonlighting as meteorite, curtain rod come loose, cabinet collapsed at dawn, a sign you must go out into the world, received by the reproduction of gardenias and orange blossoms hungry for visitors. Love bends the balcony in water weight. Once, a neighbor cried out for help, collapsed under the collapsed trellis of passion flowers. Maybe the best omen for moderation is the thing we love pinning us down. I check the value of my house on Zillow. My house moonlights as a more expensive house online. Even the comfort of numbers scares me. Then there is the comfort that the end of us isn’t the same as the end altogether. Asa Drake is a Filipina American writer…

After Kathleen Graber Her hands are in my mouthwhen my dentist and I discover our common love of bones. Our professions, both of them, are at odds with the fact that, once formed,enamel cannot repair itself. She concerns herself with caramelfor the same reason I track the skeletal layout of human fingersin whale flippers, in possum toes. How the alligator split from the flamingoby accident. There is no reason to think dinosaurs weren’t also soft and pink, says the paleontologist. After all,our fear of birds is ancient: hinged ankles, swivel toes, a wishbone.There is no reason to wish ourselves extinct, yet if left to instinct, humanswalk circles counter-clockwise. Think of the hippodromes. The middle of the desert.The word for this in witchcraft is widdershins, meaning counterto the sun—unlucky, unless intentional,…

Echo in Winter At the center of silence, a mirrorthat renders no face, a mirror I would shatter with the pressureof my presence. Cracks in the surface mirror stripped branches shiveringthe vitreous sky. Day white as a mirror fogged with breath, as brief—dusk alreadydarkening the edges of the meadow like a mirror desilvered. Whelmed by grief, once,my body left a mirror image in the snow. I emerged colder.I observe my suffering now like a mirror, impassive pane. Years, like you, I was certain—my agony infinite as a room of mirrors. But now I stand where you are not, oneI thought I needed, like a mirror, to know myself. If I risked it now,I would be swallowed as a mirror swallows the object it sees. Is that love? How I watched…

The Fish Ladder To be the fish on the ladderand not know what it means. To feel the bronzes,the pearls, the greens, but in a contextof pure combat. To fight the literal stream we hurl ourselves into for nodiscernible purpose, other than some moleculesays it will be worth it. To feelworthless enough to listen. To feel something rather than nothing—the rungs of ita punishment, a goadinginto againstness, against the current. To come to knowthe concrete intimately. To come to know what we want is. To come to know what we want isto be the fish on the laddernonetheless. To feel the sunlike a god we can discern. We hurl our self into it, being for this purpose. To come to seewhat there is left to feel. To come to feelsome…

Golden A prayer begins & endseach meeting, it starts with the word God& ends with the word difference. The difference, as far as I can tell,between what is offered & what is possible is a chasm. At times it seemswe simply run out of places to be, until we call whereverwe end up home, that bright moment wealways talk about returning to. My friend is in the room he grew up in,the room his grandma died in, beggingfor morphine, like all of us will. Unlike some of us, she begged for itall his life. He’d find it, prepare the needle, dim the lights. Things gotquiet then—a bust of Jesus on a bookshelf, translucentyellow, like piss or money that has been in the laketoo long. Golden, which is how we got…

I believed, once, in Ouija boards, of standing in front of my own reflection mouthing Bloody _____, Bloody _____, Bloody _____ —& how still I hesitate because I know words transfigure tongues as easily as brain, transfigure to spells cast without my consent—in anticipation of monsters who don’t resemble my cheek bones, my clavicle, my left ear lobe slightly tipping forward, who don’t live in motel rooms—someone says Bates & I wish myself Hitchcock not Perkins—in Number 3: a counting of three brown kids drawn inside a blueprint, blueprint of a 1950s motel drawn with charcoal so the pencil may turn at any moment to eraser. I believed, once, in a spirit here, then broken. I name this in my lungs with breath in heaves in singed burn rhyming my…

After we leave New York, I read a book about how to notlet the internet destroy my brain. I thinkthe answer is to have been raised in California, to be a completely different person. At homepeople clap every night for healthcare workers.They clap like someone who’s seen their friend’s play or flown in a plane when planes were still new.I call it sweet but don’t know how to judgepublic gestures, like when after the towers fell, after our mother pulled us out of school,my little sister chastened me:“You shouldn’t be reading right now.” My friends take me canoeing in the Housatonic River,where the drought is obvious, water lowand undressing the downed trees. Steve noses his canoe through narrow channelsof branches. I break through brutely, scrapingthe belly of the boat against…

Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That Is Fleeting Each morningwakingamidst the not-ever-before,dressing inside the not-ever-again. Under sunlight or cloud,brushing the hair. Not yet arrivedat the end-crimped finish,drinking coffeeand buttering toast. Permitted to slip into coat, into shoes,I go out,I count myself part, carrying onlya weightless shadow,whose each corner joins and departsfrom the shadows of others. Mortal, alive among othersequally fragile. And with luck—for days even, sometimes—this luxury, this extra gift: able to even forget it. Poem Holding a Wristwatch Belonging to the Brazilian Poet Ferreira Gullar I’ve been waiting to find again my own just-right proportion.So often a person is too big.Less often, too small.Either you block the view completelyor you stand peering, squinting, one small handshielding your face from the sun.Sometimes I stand next to trees…

Beating the rush Day after Thanksgiving. I give thanks for Eveto beat the rush of appreciating hernext year and let her sleep inuntil three hundred o’clock.Thank you light on the mountainfor being my star on cloudy nights.Thank you all the guns I’ve never ownedand killed myself with on a whim.No one lives up there, it’s just a lighton a pole I can’t explain to my cat.Thank you Erik Satie for taking my body apartand putting it back together as the Seine.How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?Thank you rhyme and silly people. Thank you airfor holding me in your arms, sunshinefor the bodyguard of my shadow, my three toiletsfor never overflowing. But no joy, toilets,no inexpressible fullness? Who do I thankfor being a 40-ounce beer in a shot glass,an avalanche…

I. I wanted to see her body. I’m aware it sounds strange, even lurid. What I wanted was to see her read her poetry, and her body reading it. Something about Rukeyser’s writing made me feel that she was at home in her flesh, and I wanted to see her loving her body as she read her poems. Because I have felt so exiled in my body, so at war with it, I have hungered for models of being at home and at peace in one’s skin. Years ago, I met a musicologist who was an expert in analyzing how classical music compositions moved the body—as if the composition were not just a script for music but also for the dance of the body. I wondered about the dance her…

Books After reading the opening section of Sean Singer’s Today in the Taxi, I went back and started the book again, to slow things down. Good poems are a form of transportation; they take you places you can’t get in a car, places you can’t get on your own. And I didn’t want to get there too fast. Or maybe even get there at all. Singer’s book is indeed transporting, lovely and strange in all the right ways, yet it’s also composed with almost classical symmetry. It’s a book of deep patterns, with a deceptively simple architecture: three sections of exactly 20 poems each. Three characters consistently recur in the cabbie’s musings: Charles Mingus, Kafka, and the Lord (who, in Singer’s imagining, is invoked with she/her pronouns), forming a trinity…

I had a father, but he gave me away.The end of the altar like a cliff face.This same father is of the old faith.He says billions of people acrosshuman history can’t be wrong,which is also an argument forpopulism, but I understood.He bought me Umbros when I wanted pretty dresses.He said the problem with most people is that they’renot hungry enough, metaphorically speaking, but thatI didn’t understand, so I refused to eat for two decades.He drove in every cardinal direction to move me fromapartment to apartment during my intransigent years,helping me pack up my books and buy new futonsto install in another basement efficiency, if lucky.Some had windows. Never once did he complain.He stood at soldierly attention when I went insane,the dissolution of all ability funneling from mind,leaving me motionless as…

Outdoor Coronavirus Violin Concert Normally they hunch at the backOr stay in past centuriesWhere there’s roomFor their peculiarity We still can’t really see themEach is a kind of blurEach one equippedWith a kind of silencer But never have I seen usLeave such space for them6' left between usThat nobody filled in. Adam Scheffler’s first book, A Dog’s Life, was the winner of the 2016 Jacar Press Poetry Contest. His second book, Heartworm, won the 2021 Moon City Press Poetry Award and is forthcoming this winter. He teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program.…

A Painting I Can’t Remember 7 I recall loneliness is cousinto privacy when I turn the glossypages in a monograph. Long-deadmakers and their quiet study capture the intangible of a personstanding in a field or looking out a windowalways interior in the exterior.Are all paintings lonely? I remember that Edward Hopper painteda cartoonish ramshackle row of buildings,an emblem of my mid-twenties when I feltlike a citizen of Hopper’s world, his emptycafé, that goofy city. To remember is to call upthe self I once was, loneliness housed by a boxcalled body made of sinew, the horse stilldeep in the marble. I was wounding and pain,fashion and bad posture. The Hopper citylives in the fabric of those years. It is my portrait,head shaped like an egg. I studied the egg, saidConstantin Brancusi,…