Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2023 i The American Poetry Review

Abortion Poem I want to write a poem about abortion.I’m driving to Rural King to get a key cut.I’m in rural Indiana. Then I’m in rural Michigan.I’m in Michiana. I’m driving to Niles.I pass the neon Pegasus sign outside a gas station,always off. I pass a man panhandling at the intersectionof two rural highways; one of many men panhandlingat many such intersections in Michiana. It’s 9:00 am and already85 degrees and he’s in the shade of the telephone pole.I pass Galaxy Skate, whose sign is a giant pairof roller skates with wings, like Mercury’s shoes,like golden Nike. When I was a child,I roller skated around the ballroom of my parent’scountry tavern. I roller skated at a rink whose nameI’ve forgotten. Every time they played Van Halen’s“Jump” all the skaters would…

Song I count the syllables and thenhave nothing To make a songhave nothing Nothing voice, nothing hands Go forward into nothingin the key of C My son is learning to playpiano in his music class of nothing Notes turn to nothingin the air like a shiveringblue aftershock Snap of blue flamecindering into nothing My father whistled throughmy childhood into nothing Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, fallingthrough the hammockof his voice into nothing Nothing air, music, wordsgone, gone, gone An orchestra of nothingblowing us away Every Object Is Someone My father, my blue cup. The cherry table in the kitchen, my father again. The red lamp overhead bobbing like a half moon, my toothless grandmother. See her inside the picture viewer, a green plastic tube the size of my thumb. She sits on a…

[4. Aegic / All-encompassing] You can’t go far wrong with violence.You’ll go far, my boy.You’ll cross oceans, my boy. Start with the Fall, go back or forth,Through bombs or boats,Across all the killing fields of thought. You can’t make it upBecause it’s all yours—by blood.By right. By wrong done to your blood. Hold to trauma.Even if it never happened to youYou may claim it. Your blood contains it.What happened to them—Your parents, theirs, all their kin— Who don’t talk about itBecause of what happened to them—Is yours to take and tell. Their harm / your hurt.You may write it. For it is written.In the very walls of your cells. [15. Dire critical] All in the tone.Give us each day our diacritics—our low and high, falland rise, our horns and holds:Flat…

The Seal of Approval I drifted for yearsnot knowing ituntil I washed upon the island of the seal of approval.No one greeted me.The fires were dead.The paths grown over.I was cold, called out.No one answered.Through the dusk I shivered.A snowflake I might have been.When I touched my faceit was someone else’s memoryopening the canopy of frosted palmsbehind which presidedthe seal of approval.Its curled body expressed a möbius strip,a map of imagined countriessome of which I’d lived in for a time.Purple, brown, pink, and bluestates roiled tectonically across its skin.Its whiskers wiggled.It might have barkeda message I couldn’t understand.I touched the face that wasn’t mine.The palms began to close, recede.I lost sight of the sealon its dais of tropical iceI knew tasted of bubblegum.My audience with the seal of approval,when I…

Mucho ruido: pocos nueces —Spanish saying for Pádraig ÓTuama Well, my fellow priest in chargeof the food ministry fingered the thin pagesof our broken taped bible like cash untilhe got to the story of Juan Bautista and readabout the man who stepped aside and ateinsects and smelled like a backed-up toilet.Those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. Yes, the Bishop told me earliermy colleague punched the man, you know the one,the bald anarchist atheist pompous asswho sassed back raging with wretched breathand cysts, who carts off broken cratesof rotten quinces for the needy: I laughed. The Bishop told me it was not funny,priests shouldn’t punch anyone in the face, but,but if I crammed you upstairs no AC on a mattresscaked with cum stains listening to drunkspuke on the…

Beatitudes The sting ray flies, the penguin swimsAnd the nightshade harms and healsLike the spear of a hero. Protect the silkworm, and the bear whoCreated the world, from MammonAs Allen Ginsberg forewarned. Thank god for boredom, the greatEventual deflator of all fadsAnd spurious elevations, For without it we would be suffocatedBy centuries of baloney,And have nothing. There are Jews of Asia descended fromSephardic and Ashkenazi tradersOf silk and spices. Over centuries away from Wilno or MoroccoTheir rituals evolved. Their faces resembleThose of their neighbors. Spica, one of the brightest stars in our sky,Is a rotating ellipsoidal variable inCelestial terms of meaning. Bless even “To facilitate understanding and to workWith creative aspects of our process asInnovative means of transformation,” For behold how those other words accumulateTheir syllable clutter to make WorkShine…

So come my friends, be not afraid We are so lightly here—Leonard Cohen We can’t take any of itwith us to the other side of the veilSo what’s it matter if the huge soaking tubis mine or a moneyed stranger’s?Repeat that to a mind unable to tune outhow unhurried bliss & love minusthe pallor of scarcity are most attainablefor those who score shout-outs in hefty wills,while some slice off a little Good Lifethrough grift or proxy, & others get legitdistracted by the concept of striving—or as Jack just texted, We are but specksin space & this is what you choose??? Here’s to the rest of us, fixated on cosmic dealingsancient beyond human intervention.Give us our daily digest of microplastics& plots to place ads in our dreams.Anonymous donors sponsored today’s witnessingof…

Bad Bear if you see oneyou can saybad bearright to its faceeven if you’re not sure,maybe it’s goodand has discretionin relationto the delicioustreasury of humangarbage or eventhe eternalwork of bees,who knowsbut it’s okon the pathwith your thunder voiceunequivocallyto condemn it,lore says thatwill make it leaveso you can gotell your storyin the tentand again at the tablelaughing without askingwhat violencebrought you there,you and allthat foodfrom everywhere,those flowersyou eatand do not wonderwho told youit’s ok to lieeven to the richor to save a lifeeven your own,in the middle of nightin the caveyou will hearthe eternal questioneven darkerthan what surroundswas I born this wayor was it circumstancethat condemned me,silence answersyou were bornto be condemnedeverywherebut in poems,for a while you hangdead leaveson the night treethen they fall awayand all that is leftis this honeyyou…

Taj Mahal For Sudeep Sen I know how grateful you were for myconfession. I, too, had been trusted, I, too,desired, and felt the other mess of need,the clumsy psychology of powerand uselessness. I, too, had betrayed,had confessed, had faced her wailrushing down the hallwaylike a terrible wind fillingwith the breathlessness of fearand horror at the way everythingin me collapsed to see her imaginingthe end of the world; her anger,yes, but mostly her soft sobbingafter midnight, the tears—dear Lord—and no hope of solace. It had not yet beena year, and the wounds were still tender,and I travelled with fear like a leaderfearing a coup in his absence. Still,we, on that excursion to Agra, stood outsidethe walls of the Taj Mahal, in the sun, bareas nakedness, with white and brindledmongrels skulking about…

When you want someone to look at your tarot cards, you ask for a reading. Diviners can read tea leaves, coffee grounds, wine sediments, your palm, your head, and the iris of your eye. If you’re a Diviner, in order to practice pyromancy, the art of divination by flame, you will light a candle, a hearth, a barbecue pit. You can throw salt in the fire, you can burn plants or bones or the bottom of a turtle shell. As they burn, you will look deeply into the flames; you will note the shapes the smoke makes as it curls up blackish or white; you might even be drawn through the fire into oracular vision: the king will die, your client will live, or love, lose money or gain. As…

Not that I’ll never hear it again, your N,that soft center like a hammockleading to the smaller n, the sigh.Your name is the samein five languages,and all the women sharing itprance around the earth, and peoplecall out for them:it can’t be made to soundlike keening no matterhow slowly wailed.Your name: sweet swing of it, in-outlike a tide, and the little boatshave all been pulled in for the season. Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poetry, Copperhead (2011) and Hundred-Year Wave (2016), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series.…

notes from the understory (layer 20, direction one) All of it begins. I’m soaked to the skin by a sudden downpour. My gray silkblouse won’t come free from the skin of my chest, my arms. I abandon themeanings of silk and skin to a moth-wing thinness, fluttering skyward. Sun returns to warm the blue question of what sky might become, whichremains answerless as it fills with what seem to be clouds, but they’re only potential. All of it begins. I ask if there are still sleeves wetly affixed to what I thoughtwere my arms? Will I act within only one meaning of “arms”? Judith Butler offers me Merleau-Ponty’s reply—the meaning of flesh istexture, which returns to, and conforms to, itself. It begins. I wear flesh wet. I wear it moth-wing…

Community Check-In Sara Mae tells me I help them be goofy.Josie tells me I don’t need to worry, I got this.Talya tells me she feels sad, sad today,that she can’t seem to keep going. Clem texts, their brother died.Sarah calls me, they are driving to Nebraskato be with Clem. Do they need anything?They don’t know yet. Gervais tells me he’s brimmingwith anxiety, says he had plane issueshe left at 5PM and got in at 4AMand he’s still so tired but he can do it. He can workon the sample if I email it to him.Mariah posts a picture of three smileswithout her and a sadness face. Who are these people? I type out.My family, she responds,I haven’t been able to go homein years and they’re all together, without me. Kate…

Nature Hates a Void The way water would flow into the hole made by displaced sand when my mother and I sat on our knees at the beach, digging it out and packing it into a pail together, just so, does aggression, like water, come to occupy more and more of what’s been excavated. Up from the wet sand or washing inwith the incoming tide, water fillsthe newly scooped out hollow. Third hand, my sister and I begin to hear about remarks we need to apologize for. We seek out the individuals insulted and explain that whatever it was, it wasn’t meant personally, adamant that if our mother knew she had said or implied such a thing to such an old, dear and valued friend, she would be mortified. She…

Catastrophic Georgics Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. And me? Well, C, I took for granted the wellspring of poetry—the vaporand the turtle dove—and when things went dry, I found myself on the airplanes of Earth’s nautilus.I took a job up north (in Vermont, as in evergreen). Temporary. The kind of job most flee from—leftmy children each week; deposited in a meadow. Isn’t it almost funny, how we’ve decided to replacelifeforms? The ibis with “Narrow Classic Mesh Box”? Reshaping nature in our own vision, into the tools wesupposedly need? The three ibises that have been pecking the lawn have…

Alive She sang—I mean she tried—for she, tired, couldno longer hold a tune, as the brain synapses slowedwith age, a minor stroke, Parkinson’s, and brokencollar bone canting her a bit starboard side, shesang a song—broken like her body—holding somenotes a long time, millions of years in fact, the waygranite holds intruded gneiss threading its cursivepath toward sunlight, “I feel so alive,” she kept sayingbetween sloppy chords, “I’ve never felt so alive,” asshe sang, “What a wonderful world,” though nothingseemed that, and yet it was, her veins purplingaround senile lentigo spots on hands jumbling byher face, as if the tune were a net, a beautifulnet she was just now lifting off for me to hold, I meanto practice holding for other songs still arriving. All the tiny arrows How the future’s…

for the 3,000 people in unmarked graves in the Austin State Hospital Cemetery Sitting on the patio of our favorite café,drinking our coffee hot on a day tooTexas for that kind of thing, we watcha backhoe grumble in the vacant lotakimbo from the shop as it digs a hole.It’s quiet except for the backhoe, a gracklebegging for scraps, the chain-link fencearound the lot the desert wind rattleslike bones. Leah asks me what I thinkit’s digging. I say, I think a grave, andwe squint through the sun, point out fiveor seven markers we never thought about,assumed were simply stones. I say it’s weirdwe never noticed. She shrugs, says softly,I guess every graveyard used to be a field. Raye Hendrix is a writer from Alabama. She is currently a PhD candidate at…

I can easily say that I would never have become a poet without the first workshop I attended as a high-school dropout earning her AA degree at the local junior college. That workshop was revelatory for me. For the first time, it gave me as a sixteen-year-old the feeling of having a voice that mattered, and I wanted to feel that way more. But something changed as I wrote my way through my MFA and PhD and creative writing postdoc. The workshop became a space that felt competitive and stifling, and I quickly found I couldn’t produce anything true when I had to perform in those spaces. I wrote the bulk of my first book, The Local World, while living abroad, both physically and emotionally about as far away as…

my niece wantsto transfer pockets of oceanto her nearby sandscapeso she ignores the holeat the bottom of the lobster mold every time we offer her a bucketshe runs away fasterscoops the water and gigglesscurrying back to usas if time were the thief her lobster is always emptywhen she arrivesat our blanketso she starts the process againand again somewhere along the waywe begin rooting for hermaybe we thinkif she moves quickly enoughshe will triumph Olga Rukovets is a writer and editor living in New York City. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida. Her writing has appeared in Potomac Review, Passages North, Jelly Bucket, 5×5, Mixed Fruit, Breakwater Review, and elsewhere.…