Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2023 i The American Poetry Review

Terroir: A Mapping / Jishin-no-ben 1. Wine-makers say it’s the complex flavorcreated by the singular terrain of place: the kinds of minerals in the soilfiltered through the soft pulse and coil of earthworms; the curl of fog that snakesaround blushed grapes like wisps of smoke; the taste of rain. You like how the wordevokes the trauma, the bruise, of origin. 2. Because you don’t want her to feel lonelyyou flatten yourself down to a sheet of paper thin enough to slide underneath the doorof your mother’s room so you can sit with her inside the conspiracy. Most days she locks you out:swears at you in Japanese, tells you she hates you. But some days you flatten yourself so far downyou’re able to slide back into remembered terror. 3. The way…

Resting on Laurel Laurel texts after breakfast withan unusual request: she wants me to rest on her. In more ordinarytimes this would feel retrogressive but given the space we’ve beenmade to keep shape in, I don’t question these pleasantries orask about masks. There will be— Laurel says—some elegant groundrules: sheets will lay neat through the breast of our bodies; agingred ferns will be dragged to the curb; she will turn down the dyedcast of her mother, and I will be made to take off my ring. I thinkabout wearing holed sweatpants and rainboots but Laurel says it’sbest to prepare for discomfort. With damp racing briefs under too taperedtrousers, I get in the car and watch as the suburbs in subject carry on thisinfection: soccer game, Tinder date, holiday shopping. When…

Anglo Saxon, you rampaging Viking hunk with blue eyes,muchas gracias for your 500 words we use every day—boyand girl, cow and pancake, all the curse words, and skunk,monk, lunk, funk, because English, you had some funkybeginnings—while the rest of the world was using alphabetsyou used runes, and your first sentence wasn’t writtenuntil 450 AD—This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman,which means what? The coin, a dog, or a sharp-tongued woman? Who knows, English, but you grew fast,put on weight, opened for business, and set up your Bully pulpit of mercantile lingo—derivatives, assets, revenues,liens, debt consolidation, cash flow, collateral,break-even point, only no one does, just big daddy Mr. Moneybags,Scrooge McDuck, the Bezos-a-rama, ka-ching, that forgetsthe little languages that fed into the mighty Mississippi, like Celtic, a banshee screaming in the…

Rough Air A beer at 30,000 feetis the bomb. I meanbalm, as one shouldn’t jokeabout explosives this high.Especially in 32c,where I’ll never reachthe cannabis gummystashed in my overhead coat.The fuselage rattlesand jolts. The airline saysit has for my leisurethe most movies in the sky,but they do me no goodwhen I pine for wheremy daughters play.They’re the best wayto get lift or downrightdrunk. I prefer their facesto mine—all this wantand ego, my desire to steerthrough rough airthis plane that shanksthe clouds. Will the yawof an orbiting satellitepull us through?I’m asking for a friend.I grip armrests with otherbundles of fear, tryingto dissolve myself amonglushes and teachersand Marvel dorks,holistic acupuncturists,iron women, nail biters,brats. It can be calmingin an e pluribus unumsort of way, breathingthe same air as K-Pop fansand home brewers,even conspiracy theoristsand…

Books “When you contemplate an object,” Plotinus tells us, “you become that thing, offer yourself as matter, allow yourself to be shaped in the form of the contemplated thing. If you remain encircled in yourself, then you are empty of world, and empty of yourself. But if you give attention to the world, you hold it, and with it yourself.” Upon encountering Kazim Ali’s The Voice of Sheila Chandra, one finds themself shaped by the form of song returning to silence, and silence becoming song. It is from within this chronic circle and cycle that one is able to empty Self of self and be filled by that which exceeds it, which is to say that which precedes it—Mythos; Memory; Music. It is only from a space that precedes thought…

Up on the Roof Magic lights near, far,everywhere.Off the kitchen, upthe skinny flight of stairsto the FIRE door, stairwellto the roof, this spot. Tiny lights, tiny tiny lights—Elijah, Sparrow, Shira, Dan.Rust and peeling door-paintin plum, from one dark street toanother we come.And laughter, and otherunspeakable sounds below.Electricity in the air.A separate place.A separate slice of darkness.Silhouettes all night long! You Looked at Me, But I Saw You First We picked each other out.How I feel, what you felt, all that. Travel separately, so long.Touch in a look, return in a dream. What we know, really: little man, big boy.The heat of the summer street in our feet. The step of our daughters walking ahead of us—We can pick them out of the soup. We’re not snagged in a look.The moment…

Bright Shade by Chelsea Harlan, winner of the 2022 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available at APR’s website, www.aprweb.org, and at other outlets. Bright Shade was chosen by guest judge Jericho Brown. “Chelsea Harlan’s Bright Shade is always playful in a way that asks the reader to join in with the play, to fully participate in a poetry that enjoys language enough to arrive at the most serious of realizations.”—Jericho Brown CHELSEA HARLAN was born and raised in Appalachian Virginia. She holds a BA in Literature and Visual Art from Bennington College, as well as an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Rose Goldstein Scholar. She lives in upstate New York, where she works at a small public library.…

Precedent I wanted something in my heart like a drum.Peaches fell from trees.Suddenly: monsoon season.So, I told myself a storyto soothe myself into a kind of slumbernot like the wrestling recently begunnot like the wager life seems hell-benton becoming. Meanwhile, my friendsI’ve meant to call you. All around treescollapsing, arterial roads blocked,then blocked again. The countryseems triply damned. The oldprecedents mean nothing. The Greening I walked beyond the stone fence, downthe winding road, into a neighbor’s yard, and stoodlooking into their pool. Where was I headed—the road seemed a dead-end given the urgencyof everything. The flowers dying violently—stemstruncated from heads—as if they’d never comeback. The pool, the lawn, the fence all shroudedin shades of green though most of the hues weresickly holograms of their former selves—or so Ithought. Had I…

when we thought the world would end, I didn’t think it would be like this watching my beloveds through Facetimethe tens of tens of apps downloadedso I can hear the scattered voicesof everyone I love & the silenceof my apartment building so loudmy whole world is now my kitchen& yellow couch & I haven’t touchedanyone in days, my fingers press intomy own body, I surprise myself in the mirrorit’s raining outside & my skin feels so hollowthe meditation says to think of a happy dayI remember being packed in that woodedhouse for Angel & Hieu’s graduation& Danez saying “the bitch can’t dance”as I wiggled my flailing body, trying& how easy it was to hold Safia’s handmy knee against Shira’s in the back of the minivanto brush the hair out of…

A screamer. A gasper. A startler. A dog’s cock.1 “An index finger raised in warning.”2 A bang. A pling. A slammer. A shriek. “A squiggle manufactured in Renaissance Italy in order to revive the ideals of classical oration.”3 “A squirt of lighter fluid to the smoldering embers of tempo.”4 “Startles and provokes.”5 “Like laughing at your own jokes” (according to Fitzgerald).6 “Intolerable” (according to Adorno).7 A punctus admirativus, or a modified io. A signifier of the barbaric yawp, or a lazy effort to simulate fervor. A yearning to transcend language (in vain, or not in vain, that is the question). A signal of poetic irony, or a gesture toward an ecstasy derived from death-consciousness. I bring you: The exclamation point. This little, unevenly bifurcated mark—but a dot beneath a line—can…

In the spring of 2019, poet Matthew Kelsey suffered the loss of his mother. Less than a year later, he would lose his father to COVID-19. The following is a poem-interview between Keith Leonard (questions) and Matthew Kelsey (answers) that began in June of 2019. What shape is the window of longing? The window of longing is circular, in general. But it’s also an Apollonian Gasket, comprised of many smaller circles within it. Each circle recalls all other circles, just as each longing recalls all other longings. Is the ocean a good father to the lake? A pond a good brother to a puddle? The pond to a puddle, yes—they both know what smallness is. But the ocean is too estranged from the lake to know it. Too big to…

How you see me is predicated on the body as foremost. Even after the grave. That is, how you grave me is predicated on everything after the body, a foremost conclusion you’ve made. My Catío grandmother is more than a brown & stolen thing. She befores the conquistador’s thingmaking. Conquistadors make little rabbits of everyone. Hunt & hobby. A reticle satisfaction & snort. There is nothing grand about it. How he machines her for seed. In my dream, she escapes in undetectable form: two hydrogen, one oxygen. A fugitive molecule in crystal motion. Transporting sediment, churning up a good prayer. But in the end, what becomes of the poet? What becomes of me? I learn there is no tide. Only planetary swell & fury. Gravity & inertia exerting me to…

Messianic Time Left to its own devices, resurrection runs its course.Of course, the dirt is warm with introduction. This far northand this far late, it takes a while to carve the freshunseasonable coat of windrowed ice off of the paneinto the shape of what remains of geologic time:shavings of thaw scabbing the daffodils. Enough of April.Still, there was a time for actualization.The First Concerto reasserts its last chromatic trill.Our dreams relax into a storm-sewn scattering of miles,webbing the world out beyond the Garden Ring. You shall not setyour lands in order. Plant lilac for remembrance. Sing!This isn’t how that went. Tikkun olam, it’s awfully late.And then the sound of summers gonereturning through the narrow gate. Graven Images At the Aux Folles, we watchthe gloaming settle in, dustchalk off of itself…

Free Fall She was in a coma, the doctor told meover the phone, she was electrolytes out of whack,that was the literal, while I was on another continent,standing on a cliff, looking down at the sublimeview my new friend had brought me to see, thatwas literal too, the glittering sea, and the harborwith tiny boats lined up like teeth. Below uscypresses jutted from the cliff’s red rock.I couldn’t understand how a person,a consciousness, was a kind of invention,provisional, and could be erased by glucoseand potassium spilling through cell walls.That was what I was thinking as we stoodin the small crowd that had gatheredto watch the sunset. I marveled at the lossin store. Though I saw the beauty. A skystained every color but green. A slow,liminal glower stretching flat and thinas…

Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party by Chessy Normile, winner of the 2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available at APR’s website, www.aprweb.org, and at other outlets. Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party was chosen by guest judge Li-Young Lee. “These poems are full of ideas zipping by, ricocheting off each other, and fueled by a desire to know, to understand. The speaker wants out. Her sentences and lines search for an Archimedean point beyond the inadequate accounts of the world she’s inherited. The speaker wants in. Deeper in. To the heart of the matter.”—Li-Young Lee CHESSY NORMILE received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at University of Texas Austin, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets University Prize in…

Books Begin at the cover: a photograph of the author in bed with a cup of tea, as if to affirm for us that the book—like all books, although it is not always so evident—has an author. This assertion of the author’s life will be important, as will be the image of poetry as the author’s beacon, lighting out. Whereas before 2020 sitting fully dressed in bed with a cup of tea might have signified a Proustian kind of illness-decadence, it registers now as our prevailing ontological condition. With the covers rolled up to her waist, she’s lit by a doorway, a blinding frame of luminescence. A figure in the doorway, the arrivant, holding up what we know to be a cellphone. The photo implies the existence of another photograph:…

It’s at this time of day I might fess up. There is nothing to suffering. And few heart throbs to be bothered with anymore. Only Mr. Gums tilting to the right again. Feeding leftovers to the gulls. And some plovers volunteering for sleep studies. If I was paid in shells to go on I’d mention the tide. How it gives off the whiff of all that’s idolized dying. Or the bulldozer even-ing out the sand. Its reasons for this treasonous assault rising up in dull puffs. But instead shuffle the letters on the side of a van. So it reads U R FARTS. When before we had SURF ART. And long before that STAR FUR. In its windows I appear wrong-headed, gone-to-seed. The world all but done with my kind.…

Things Too Small to Be Seen Radioactive dust landing on the surface of an eye decades after a meltdown.Something pooling there.The feeling one gets passing by a beggar who rattles his cup.Reaching inside, emptied of change.Not even one kind word.A woman weighing her pockets down with stones as she heads towards the river.Lodged in our lungs, viral particles T-cells fail to recognize.Ticks clinging to an opossum’s belly fur.Fifty teeth inside its snout.North America’s only native marsupial wandering through your yard.Interplanetary gossip.The promotion you didn’t get for the third straight year.Hot gas “blow by” eroding an O-ring.Skin punctured by the tooth of a bat while an entire family slept.Bull’s-eye rash spreading on the scalp of a prom queen crowned with roses and Lyme’s.Marred by a comma splice, a letter of application…

Alas And god created the waves and we the graves beneath, bodies madeparticulate by the force of water against water, water against rock, againsttime. I descend into the deep in a kind of prayer, listen to its centuries.Make me pay, will you, make me hurt. Instead I am held so that I might listento myself: the battered sand shines back its longing to be a star. A planet achingfor collapse. And all I can respond is please, make me good. I have no right to these red wings of rage, no right to the echo in my cup.I have not suffered; I am a maker of half-truths painted over in gold. Mydress leaves a trail of desert where once there was forest floor. Make me pay.How else to witness a…

Bottoms Yoko Ono respected assesup close, a complete backdropflooding the camera.The ass as a form. A form with four sectionsseemingly simple to draw,as when a child is asked to foldconstruction paper into four squares and asymmetry ensues.When in motion, we noticehow they tip up and down.Yours are like two globes. Your words not mine!And it’s a perfect description.That you see your own assso fully, I must confess, is hot as it’s no small thing to valuethe back of one’s self.Self-knowledge is 360 degrees.And you know, too, how you want each cheekto be touched. I’m a pain slut,you say, unashamed.As with any rhythm, surprise won’t comeif we haven’t firstestablished a pattern.Repeat after me: I wake to sleep and take my waking slowDarling, if you say,I want impact, I delivera steady pentameter.…

Geology 101 after Dean Young, as alwaysThis is Wisconsin so the Armani caseleft behind in the hallway lookslike evidence of alien life—picturethe Coke bottle that fellfrom the sky in that movieabout an aboriginal tribe.Lucas says there’s a jellyfishthat’s existed longer than humansand will never die it just regeneratesso I picture a jellyfishthe exact size and shape of our universe.It lit the match (menthols)and bam we sufferabout two jellyfish drags. Oneorbit we hiked slot canyons.One we baked meat pies.One we said ’til death do us partand now that scares mebecause I’m sure I don’t want to bedead alone. Tony’s deadof cancer after writing about cancercuring racism but I liked when he inventeda river of money and sailedtoward Radio Shack.Dean got tired of Tony always strivingto become British royalty.Better to live like…

Vantage by Taneum Bambrick, winner of the 2019 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available at APR’s website, www.aprweb.org, and at other outlets. Vantagewas chosen by guest judge Sharon Olds. “Vantage is a love poem to the creature which is the earth, to its substance and flora and fauna, including us: imperfect as each of us is in our ability to love; and loved as each of us could be. I love this essential, gorgeous work of art, and thank Taneum Bambrick for it.”—Sharon Olds TANEUM BAMBRICK was a 2020 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and she is a Dornsife Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. Her newest book is Intimacies, Received (Copper Canyon Press, 2022).…

Latitude by Natasha Rao, winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available at APR’s website, www.aprweb.org, and at other outlets. Latitude was chosen by guest judge Ada Limón. “At once searching for a clarity and resisting a blunt narrative, Rao uses a language alive with imagination, surprising imagery, and a sense of unending longing for what has been lost.”—Ada Limón NATASHA RAO is a poet from New Jersey. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn.…

Summer is so far away. * Last year this same occasion, there was more love among usin the room. More ice cream with olive oil,six or seven spoons touching the cold, melting cloud. Close to midnight, I tell him my pain. My pain,revealed for the first time. I know you’re availableto be here for me now, I say. I just don’t knowif you will be thoughtful. * Staring out the window at a restaurantwhere the waiter knows my name. Outside, a woman with gray hair is in deep conversation with her friend.I keep looking at her, thinking that she looks a lot like my friend. * The first boy was a mess.He wanted to have an idea but didn’t know how.The second boy was just a hurt boywho couldn’t articulate…

With thanks to the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research for putting your deep sea footage online My ghost has a number. Your ghosthas a number. Count the moonflowers.Divide by me and you. Whatever you gethold it like too much drink in the mouth,you can’t back your valve to swallowbut neither can you just let it out again.We’re not kids. Look under a flat stone.I knew you were thinking of the number three.It’s okay. You don’t have to understandthe garlic shrimp to take them into your body.Use some to make new blood, some to layera fresh scale of bone up from the mash inside.We’re sponges, yes. We’re the light some fishgive off. If you’ve a room dark enoughto see my glow you’ve got yourself onedark room. The whole world…

Laramie I am no sovereign to the boys who leave himagain to die. Tonight, no sovereign—I can’t bemore than who I am each night: a silver moth beating waves of feral air, feral air as the boysstrike him, him and him, and him— blame stuck across wings. October 13th, thenOctober 14th. I try to rewrite what cannot be rewritten, but in this retelling I amone moth—I can’t fly in every directionof every him that tonight I’m certain is needing a kind something from a kind someone to knowsomeone knows, though I can’t know whatinvisible or visible beating every he has taken… Twenty-three years—and for most, I haven’t knownabout him… but at night every now or then I whistleto his sleeping body and watch him cross the brook, stepping among reeds…

Equal parts flour and fat cookedover low heat to new mooned midnight on a winter’s solstice, not blonde, not red becauseYaya requires a deeper dive towards burn. Towards those “back when” days—back when Dad would sneak us sips of cold Coors while we watched the potsimmer. The beer’s tickle of bitterness made us feel grown. Grown like I am now. And I stir, slowly,over this new stove in a new house with a new wooden spoon that scrapes against the old cast ironand when the roux sizzle starts to sound like Susan topping off Dad’s J & B, I know it’s getting closeto the charcoal-colored moment before scorch so I stir in the trinity of onion, bell peppers and celery—cut earlier with my knife that is half the size and…

1 Time, in Proust’s novels, parallels relativity as discussed by Einstein. Shakespeare’s dramas anticipated Freud. The Dutch love of flowers paved the way for Van Gogh. 2 A man named Rand invented tubes of paint, making art portable. 3 You can draw a line from one thing to anything else in the universe. 4 But a brick can fall from the sky—or the 8th floor—at any time. 5 Although Galaxy Quest reveals that only the nameless get swallowed by aliens. 6 I’d give anything, he said. 7 She said God is a loan shark calling in debts. 8 Fuller Brush ad misread: Love [is] the sweeper.Picks up almost everything effortlessly.Had [one] many years ago. Awesome then and awesome now. Diane K. Martin’s poems have appeared in diode, Field, Harvard Review,…