Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2023 i The American Poetry Review

Anabasis But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.—Matthew 19:22 What if I started here if thisWere the beginning what exceptThe differences were small and keptMyself no not the differences Keeping and kept some most of whatBefore or always I had doneIn the midst of winter winter goneIf after this my life were not So long as long it might have beenIf I had spent it running andNot sitting had not kept each handIn a position I had when I was a child in school I learnedIn typing class to know the lettersNot looking mine online abettorsIf now and after now I turned Around away from gazing atThe past imagining I’m look-ing to the future turned to lookAt the void that…

DMZ Colony was written by writer and translator, Don Mee Choi. Is it silly to say that it could not have been written by anyone else? … the torturer asked… what if I smashed your head to bits?… I said… eee… ideology1 History is ever arriving.2 I present to you a correspondence of certain grave significance. It’s written in a foreign language. No translators are available.3 To translate is, supposedly, to render one language into another. Don Mee Choi refers to the act of translation as an “anti-neocolonial” mode. How are we to understand this designation? Should we take it to mean that translation is an act of radical empathy, one which transcends boundaries, languages, race? DMZ Colony is an unclassifiable text, and so it must be classified as Poetry.…

The Wounded Clock Time is aslow close-up while waitingfor a woundto close up but once it heals,everythingspeeds up and returns tothe surface again. The Witches’ Open House for Toni Simon It is very airy— has no walls,no roof,no door. There are columns of stonesthat rise like smoke and stand precariouslybut never fall. These stones(which may once have been birds) are easy to animateand rearrange to makestone tables and stone chairs. It is an energy field.A cape of space. Many may passand not know it’s there. The Lonely Parade Eachcarriestheirparcelsofsadness throughthetwilightvillage undertheillusionthey’realone whenreallythey’reinthemajority. Flaming Star Going to the movieswas anarchic back then. You walked in on the storywherever it was in the telling, happy just to sit in the darkand listen to these giants—be with them for an hour or two.…

Daphne, Felled The first blow came like an icepickheadache. And the second?Like a weakness in the knees. I still remember what it was likehaving a human body, a woman’sbody. Full of rage, of honeybees stinging each fingertip from the insideout while the drones busiedin my heart, wings scraping the spongy interior of my lungswhile I ran from that dung-stainof a god. I lowercase his need. I blot it out with my shadeas if he were a weed. I canonly remember my old body through this one, now leaning,now falling in a fragrantcrush of leaves, a rustle like a prayer reaching the mindof a god. There are manygods to whom one should never pray. Women especially,hear me. If I had fallen with no onearound, I still would have made a sound.…

i want mutual suspicion. an agreed upon distastefor optimism. for goals. when we meet, i want a handshake.a smile, real & gentle, but wary. a shrewd eye to eye. if a glint, so be it. but i’m neither askingnor gifting. i gave the last of my polite laughsrelationships ago. i like cats for their earned intimacy, their requisitelistening. the respect in learning their themness without presumption. or elsethe claws, the teeth when all along, buried under patience: the purr.the nuzzle. the tender kneading. Gordon Mitchell Smith is a poet, writer, and wine professional. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Palette Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Columbia Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Review, MumberMag, and elsewhere. He lives in Santa Monica, California.…

The Story of Her Arrival It has to be one of the gloomiest human characteristicsto wish for something from the pastto return again: So when my girl callsand says she wants her first room back,the one that gurgled and swayed, suspending herin that gravity-free chamber of my bodyI say deal with it baby.I’m out in the garden, with bees from the honey hive:Drones who are male inseminate the queen then drop dead,a queen who stores the sperm for her lifetime,and the workers who are all female.These bees don’t mate like other insects,not like the grasshoppers on the stucco wall the other morningthe big on top of the small, legs wrapping and unwrapping around thoraxesbodies shaking—not shaking—then shaking again.These creatures were at it for hours, believe me, I kept going to…

Disintegration At the end of the world, I sat in the dark waiting for you,but you didn’t come. You didn’t save me. At the end we are always alone, candles slowlyburning out, losing the flame for lack of oxygen. You didn’t tell me it would be like this. All of itcame back to me so clearly, shadows on the walls playing out scenes from my childhood, from our wedding,from days when I was full of hope. Every tree I planted, every animal I ever loved. I wasn’t as weak as I thought.There was enough for this. The waves rolled in and out at midnight, and there was a wild wind. I thought: I willgo out with the wind. Under my feet the ground was shifting. I couldn’t feel my feet.…

Divination Let’s be GodFor a moment, Shall we?That which invites Composition,That which is suspended From a great height,The presence Of approximationHeavy in the meadows, I’m not afraid,And yet My shroud vanishesIn these lines, I am so weptPast weeping, And what seems to holdThe world in its place Is evidence of theWeighted trees, And leaves me alwaysWanting. The Animals The warmest winter storm now over,My splendid chamber all in disarray.As I go on inventing myself, as theAudience is fewer and fewer, I would Say I was struck by memory, and theHaze of what swells and collapses, nothingBut grace and a few lines to form a shape.The opera’s pulse, a flower left out for Us. The undulant doves carrying messagesIn their mouths, number upon numberOf slow and patient animals. How selflessThey are,…

APR announces the Fourteenth Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for poets under 40 years of age. A prize of $1,000 Publication in APR May 15, 2023 deadline A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning poem in The American Poetry Review will be awarded to a poet under 40 years of age in honor of the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets. The winning work will appear on the feature page (back cover) of the September/October 2023 issue of The American Poetry Review. All entrants will receive a copy of the September/October 2023 issue. Poets may submit one to three poems per entry (totaling no more than three pages) with a $15 entry fee by May 15, 2023. The editors of The American Poetry Review will judge. Winner…

We’re breaking into your apartmentthrough your bedroom window. The maintenance guy’s ladderis propped against the sill. I climb the ladder rung by rung,it shivers, I try not to look down. A face appears in the glass.What are you doing, the face says. I’m looking for my dad’s, I say.I thought this was his window. Aren’t you Ken’s boy, he says.No, I say. Chris’s. Oh Chris, he says, he’s dead. I know, I say. I thoughtyou could be Ken’s, he says. Sorry, I say. Believe me,the face says. Not my first rodeo. I climb down. We haul the ladderto the next window and try again. * It surprises me how littleI recognize what’s here. How long has it been for you, Noah says.Almost ten years, I guess. Four for me, he…

Scouts There was a boy even stranger than I waswho’d call me in the eveningto see if I’d come to Scouts. Something in mehesitated. Then one morning during eighth grade English we got hall passesand did it in a stall in the bathroomtaking turns over the john,as thrilling as clumsy. We kept our secret.But he came to seem a targetaround that one-light town. The cut of his hairor the way he laughed, or maybe his jittery hunched-up walk.For a while he went on calling meto see if I’d go with him to Scouts.Instead I learned: treat him low or be treated so myself.Once in Art while the others snickeredI planted tacks across his chair,and he sat down and shot up so quick the chair sprang backwards, a few silver tacksstill…

To know what happenswhen you meet the aliens, to know you once named methat which you now seek, knowing that I am not from Mars. To know that God is a weaponin your vocabulary, to know you would introduce themto what you have never seen, to know you expect them tounderstand your accent. In space, black is a shapeand coincidentally, it also means disappearance. It is how you know someone is lostand would never return. To know what happenswhen you meet the first aliens, to be sure, seduce them with apple juice,or force it down their throats until they notice their nakednessand sign a treaty to ship them to another planet out of shame They can help plow the snowin exchange for more juice. To know that your goodwillwould be…

Benefactor Dana Bilsky Asher Margot Berg and Robert Epstein Jonathan Katz William Kistler Terri E. Moreland Ethel Rackin Ava Seave Peter Waldor Bank of America Patron Millie Lane-Berg Judy Newman Alicia Ostriker Carol Parssinen Page Starzinger Anonymous (2) Sponsor Catherine Asher Julie Fowler Werner Gundersheimer Dana Levin Anne Marie Macari Kathleen Ossip Timothy Schaffner Kathryn Slott Anonymous (1) Supporter Christopher Adams Andrew Anway Bridget Barnes Ellen Bass Robin Becker Laurel Blossom Dennis Brennan Ira Brind Deborah Burnham Henri Cole Brian Cronwall Paul Cummins Susan Davie Thomas Devaney Carolyn Dille Jennifer Flannigan Jeffrey Ford Diane Ganiere Bill Gothorpe Robert and Judith Greene Susan Grossman Hendrik and Nancy Hartog Robert Hasselblad George Hess Jazan Higgins Jane Hirshfield Ditta Baron Hoeber Elizabeth Jacobson Joann Karges David Kermani Claire Keyes Andrea King-Brockman David Kirby…

A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours Unlike Nellie Bly, penname of journalist ElizabethSeaman, the first American woman to navigateAround the world in seventy-two days in 1890,We set off on the “Nellie Bly” doubtful, tentativeOf early season weather and April winds, yetA hint of hopeful courage wafted on our dieselEngine launch from Sheepshead Bay Yacht Club.Salt and sun percolated on our skin. We jetted outInto Lower New York Bay, liquefying like ManifestDestiny. The concave of the sea lapped the convexOf the shore. “Nellie” bobbed on green waters. WeSoaked and simmered and undulated and drifted.Then, as if by providence, wind descended upon“Nellie Bly,” her sail unfolded like heavenly wingAnd our lungs filled with air, our chests inflatedAs conquistadors’. A Rush and a Push … To sailIs to steer…

I loved to see them shudder at the sightOf a soul bared Black: a slick funk that fucked& mewled, made men knuckle, women buckle,Everyone hustle for touch. In a countryOf shame, I was an enigma: a niggaWith pride. Yes, I was named the oppositeOf sin. My angles angered my father.The child of a child of god, my fatherWas a bishop who didn’t like my business,Who begged me to clothe, to fear, to faith.I never listened. Sundays still he wouldCoax me to rise from the oakwood pews,Black as I am, hushing, ushering theCongregation to look, look at my girl. Tariq Thompson is a Black poet from Memphis. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, wildness, underblong, Sixth Finch, The Academy of American Poets, and The Adroit…

Mother One day the Internet will be gone.The lights will blink off.Buildings will be only the outline of their foundations,then those too will turn to dust.The gods give you fire:you put it in your heartand walk forward.Heat and pain. Dim light, long shadow.A tiny person wakes up sad, then happy,then hungry, then full. My job is to keep her alive.Failure is inevitable.What if all I want is to delight in this noxious body?What if there’s nothing above this?What do I sacrifice if not myself? Kitchen Utensils Robert Lowell destroyed his first wife’s face, twice.She went to Maine to drink herself to death,and when she ran out of booze she calledthe local sheriff to drive her to the liquor store.When I read that, I pictured her in the backof an ancient…

Ama Codjoe. Bluest Nude Milkweed Books, 112 pages, September 2022 On the cover of Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection, Bluest Nude, a Simone Leigh sculpture stands—an entirely white, 5-foot glazed stoneware shaped into the likeness of a female figure. The torso is missing its head and arms; the lower half is shaped like a hand bell one would ring, or, perhaps more likely, those elephantine hoop skirts fashionable among the European elite during various periods of the colonial era. After all, the sculpture is titled “Martinique,” a reference to Empress Joséphine, the first wife of French monarch Napoleon Bonaparte. The statue of her on the Caribbean island of Martinique stands headless, decapitated by protestors in 1991. Leigh’s piece is apt for a collection that archives the imposition of colonial…

my grandfather castrated pigs as a childhe tells me this casual as breadwhen i bring up the book i’m writing some thirty odd years of talkingand this is the first that information raises its headand shakes the mud from it his father, i learn, was a farmer outsidebaltimore. summers he’d be tasked with slicinginto piglets how one de-pits an avocado— excising the sweet meats, seizingtheir means of reproduction how many pigs did you castrate, grandpa?just a handful and i picture hands the size of pasturesfilled with castrato pigs singing opera oddlywagner probably my grandfather wears shirts with buttons,is freudian by training, obsessed with the germanstheir brutalist art i can hardly imagine him scolding a dog— how is it we are always where we’ve beeneven when unaware of it? one moment…

Zing A set of instructionsfor making instructions. That’s a virus— pure, unencumberedvalue, money making moneyin a host’s cells, so streamlined,it’s redundant. But what goodis a metaphor weighed downwith obscure reference when what’s wantedis the zing of unimpededtransmission? The Take-Away Is it strangethat all electronsare the same as if “somewhere”was the perfectcopier? To a humananything strangesuggests a door. One grain of riceon a bathroom floor and its growing shadow. I’d like to knowwhere the “take-away” istaken. To heavenwhere you’ll never go. Escape Velocity Out the window, lilac’slavender swag above long leavessplit down the middle as we are— mirror-imageat the core— matter andits opposite number, bad actors both.Can’t handle intimacy. But here we are,comfy as hell. The Horizon Originally, plants and animalsturned into people. And people could turninto animals or plantswhen pressed,…

Prayer to Be Undone Great One, Maker, Weaver of Things, I want to undress the tree to find you hidden there in the layers of sapwood, as you were hidden in a mango I ate today, its sweet and buttery flesh. A fly entered the house through the front door. Was that you? At sunset a coyote limped across the field, looking back over its shoulder. I am trying to discern you. I am trying to keep the cat door of my soul open so you can enter. Sometimes I wake up late at night, the sheets cool against my skin, and ask why have I been torn from the tapestry of petal, scrub, and bark? But the sky is silent. The universe is one, rhymed thing, but I keep…

There are always more thingsto tell you about the gloryof deep red against your skin,or the color of the ocean onyour toenails. The truth is,you make all colors holy.The truth is, you make all colorsfeel like flight. I think of this on a pale graymorning in Morningside Park,staring blankly at a statue of a bearpursuing a faun, and around methe country falling, burning.There are always more things to sayabout love and about grief,about the way destiny holds our bodies,about the way the pregnant skyholds the rain. Kwame Opoku-Duku is a writer whose poetry and fiction have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, The Yale Review, BOMB, and other publications. He lives in New York City, where he is an educator.…

Café Konzert And in the café Lou Reed is alive and we can be heroes and David Bowie puts his trust in modern man and god has been dead for a century for some oh the boring atheists where did they go underground overground o big daddy o metaphysics Derrida is dead a poet said in Chicago and my shirt is flowered my vagina not a wound right now but oh the blood that moved Girard moved through Girard and his anthropology of violence. Are we sick of men and books or could I laugh I am so sick of women of humans of an inflamed California my friends and some frenemies and so many creatures I don’t know can’t breathe unfiltered in. The pianist was delicate every finger equally…

In books and magazines, newspapers and pamphlets, hundreds of thousands of words have been written on what makes a good translation. (APR has, of course, played a role in the continual discourse; the ending essay to the November/December 2020 issue, as of this writing the latest, is entitled “The Archi-texture of the City as a Network of Translation.”) So many things to consider for the translator: voice, music, style, form, verve, flexibility, literalism, contextual priming, transformation and on and on. In “Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary” Lydia Davis writes that while in the midst of translating Madame Bovary she thought there were “fourteen previous translations of Madame Bovary. Then I discovered more and thought there were eighteen. Then another was published a few months before I finished…

Camellia No more teaching people how to liveand what to do. Today’s a star, orI am searching for the endlessendlessness inside myself. And in yourselfa flowering disco ball of foldingchairs clanging against my rather boney exterior.Also, in case you may know something, I’m lookingfor a non-alcoholic beer that actually tasteslike it’s drunk. I know I make it weirderwhen I stare, so I don’t look muchlike I used to in store windowsor on the spines of bookswith a blankness. No wonderI can’t find anything to drink. Water watereverywhere … And there’s a bleaknessto this unprocessed process, which iseveryday until never again. Soonerthan later I will wash up with youon a shore somewhere, tangled in kelpand old plastic bags, batteredby a shopping cart of bad clams,probably littlenecks or razors.If you’ve ever had…