Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2023 i The American Poetry Review

Animal Family There was a family of deer that looked something like us.They traveled far with a fierce sense of collective unity.Held their fearless faces absent of cosmic worry, for the most part.And yet something crept in, making the easiest partof being together a struggle. As fate would have it, they would eventuallyhave to make their way across several highways alone,not in a pack of unity or disunity, but as singular beings.The hardest part is some of them would die.Some knew they might freeze in headlightsbut survive. Some may creep across the Montana parkswithout knowing who else might be lurking.Others fell in love among the icicles of snow that dossal in sparkles.Couples, we agree, are wintery mirages unto themselves.This family, fragmented in a finitude of private loves,hid in their respective…

Prologue: Love Poem in the Black Field somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly to brave thisAloneness—now, as the hoofbeats swell,Like a whip welt, around me—But I cannot. I weep for you,Clutch the hogweed, imagineIt your wrist. Likewise, the stalksRefuse to bend, even slightly, insideMy balmy grasp. O my savingGrace, my heart’s restharrow, mereThought of you dams the ploughsThat would have my head.When you arrive to pull me upFrom the mud, the salt will crumbleFrom my eyes; my eyesThat, for nights, have seenNothing, save that cardinalNorth from which the stars beckon;Those stars that, like…

Lucille Clifton’s prose memoir generations was obviously not her sole autobiographical text. Throughout her body of work, she draws from her personal life, family history, and even generational history, writing about her great-grandmother Caroline Donald—called “Mammy Ca’line” in generations as that is what Clifton’s father Samuel always called his grandmother—in her earliest poems, collected in good times. But even if it wasn’t the only place she wrote about her family, generations was the most extended view of her family in her published corpus, and the only prose. This text offers sustained and significant clarity on the various figures who appear only briefly in poems, often in single episodes. The book was released in 1976, the same year as Alex Haley’s more famous Roots. It was a time when a new…

I was struck with faithin the classroom the windowonto the quadrangle was open the black-board was washed with erased, grayish thoughts someone hadrubbed in fluid ovals Donne’s speaker’s desire woke in a cradle he was a molten baby again my thighs insidea pair of green cargo pants were as firm as twin belugas the professor improvised a linein chalk I would saygarish, controlling was my response rhymetouching itself in an early bush was mine like a hot sword the dew drew away from the plantsbeyond the window into the aira bit dirty a bit dirty then the city below the collegethat knew very much more than I like a man one time laying on the tracks at Park Streetthen pulled off or a man’s tight white jeans pressedagainst me in…

A Little Sorrow in the Title I settled for the reverse narrative. The after ever, happily. I’d purchased a dragon, a handful of teeth in a tin (they’d advertised it as arattle!), a surgeon’s veil, some Oil of Olay, a few parasites. The water rippled, and I stood very close to it, having a conversation withmyself. In our session the week before, the handsome Dr. Greer suggested that if Iweren’t afraid of water, I’d likely drown. Touché, Dr. Greer. If you imagine humanity as the stained banister of the stairwell. In such that it’s fairly easy to paint over a stain. Oh, hey. What’s your name. You’ve got a little something in your teeth. I’ve been pleasant enough. My rage, modest. My attempts at betrayal, weak. Picket fences, perishables. My…

Our Wedding It wasn’t what we wanted,but we wanted each other. The rest was still somethingof a mystery to us. Still we knew it wasn’ton the four-course menu or sewn into the fabricof our expensive rented clothes. We wanted I thinka lightness, an annunciation in the trees. In trees we hidlike birds of paradise waiting for all the touriststo leave. Having a Third We have two childrenbut shall not have a third.A small selfishness, sure, the way all life choicesimply privilege to choose.We have two children— beautiful and bright—though they fightlike we might only keep one: the victor of some vitaland ludicrous duel.We have two children but won’t have a third—no oops in Aruba.No minivan in the burbs. And this fact will shape usas all inaction must.No sister for daughter…

Becoming Particulate When a voice met the resonant frequency of the object,when the song crashed into glass as invisible waves,at last I began to vibrate. Finally! I exploded like a garagewindow the year the rooster sang. What was it that rattledme so astrologically? Or does it matter onlythat I was rattled, propelled from my brittle bunkerinto a new position, compromised now by such beautyas mist caressing a mountain, or how heavythe satchel of ashes lands against my ribcage? I praymy recollection of the neighbor dissolves into nothingwhen we leave this town, that however much the songI love rattled him too, that he forgets me entirelyfor he exploded in a different way. Somethingabout my mother is I learned to dry plastic baggiesupside down. Though I’d never plant grass in a placeI’m…

A person supposedly speaks sixteen thousand words a day,meaning the world utters 128 trillion words a day:612 million Moby-Dick’s, 228 million War and Peace’s,thousands of I chair here go lettuce oh shit no rice street o’clock’sacross the globe. When I speak a lot in a day,I feel like a shop at closing time,ransacked displays of empty crates and trays.Some days it’s hard to get past two thousand words.People pay to be silent for weeks,though one study found 67 percent of menopted for an electric shock over fifteen—fifteen—minutes of silence.Twenty-five percent of women opted for the shock.I might choose the zing of electricity out of curiositythough I usually prefer quiet. Even nowwhen people call on me in groups I feel likecoffee that sloshes out of its cup when a car brakes…

FIVE $10,000 PRIZES AND BOOK PUBLICATION PARTICIPATING PUBLISHERS: BEACON PRESS, AKASHIC PRESS, MILKWEED EDITIONS, PENGUIN BOOKS, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS NOW SUBMIT ONLINE ENTRY PERIOD: January 1, 2024 through March 15, 2024 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…

I Am loved best. Words I have neversaid. New sentence, at 80. Of coursenot more than his children, and their children. That goeswithout saying—but I want to lay down eachelement of love’s house. First,the hole, under—apple cellar, potato cellar,cellar to hide in—and then the foundation,post and beam, and raise the newwalls of light replacing the walls ofshadow we had held up between us. Now,doors of light, windows of light—not yet the roof, like the earth on top of thecoffin lid, in this world of sweetdirt, and whatever comes after, if anythingcomes after. I am loved best by the oneI love best—of course not more than my childrenand their children, that goes without saying. And it’s notlike winning anything, it’s not better than,it’s not like sex, though something like just after—holding,…

Before I Learned to Read All those days at home shaped by outline.The mouth perched on the couchback. Eyes tracingThe ceiling’s steps and ramps, as if to walkAcross it, as if to walk on the fresh snow.And hunger was like looking out a windowOnto thick forest, that other wall.Each page in my coloring book beganNear perfect, but somewhere in the middleOf any design something fell awayOr broke apart—the purple running out,The border of the dragon’s belly crossed.Again, the waste. Hours sagging. AfternoonOn gray and mismatched wings. So I dreamed Of other things. The alphabet stood alwaysLike the open door to my parents’ bedroom:I could walk through it, put my hand to it,Knew the lintel and the jamb. Tall enoughTo reach the knob, I could fasten itThen open it back up.…

What is desire As when listening to a story, children always want to knowthe next thing before sleep until they wake and the morning becomesancient, so too those beginning at love first ask, Is it real?—and then years later,Was it a memory?—only to stare at a vast middle growing, openingat their feet, the river of language. To be awakened to each word’sminnow-pulse, the salt-scent of humannoise, breath, texts, old letters—the rapids and eddies of stories,poems. The three words of a dead father’s fadedink kept folded in a wallet: Giving is having, the dividedtrochees’ out-breath unending. The bird flying within each of uswhose wings are hands, the hands of words joining people,ages in a sentence growing toward its end, leadingtoward the next one in a brief waking like youth—the day and…

Even Night Is Not Night Enough For I woke with a walnut for a skullFor every star switched on, burning through black pagesFor if you seek God you will find His childrenFor everything I know fits in a walnutFor every scene I once lived now invisible For I didn’t want to meet people but my eyes were forced openFor I reach around back of me for a weaponFor those I hurt stand before me in a long lineFor I am radiation like the sunFor the sun doesn’t love us, love is a hundred floors beneathFor I wish to get off there, please For I have no hometown and never didFor I carry my box of crayons into the voidFor I remember the willow teasing with silky waveFor when you break…

like the drunk girlat the drag showtelling my boyfriendyou have beautifulbeautiful eyes, thenpulling a prepackagedmuffin from her coatpocket & handing itto him—howwe laughed& laughed at heruntil, at 2am,we walked pastCVS & sawit was closed, allits little bagsof pork rinds& popcorn unreachablebehind dark glass, &we sighed & putour drunk handsin our pockets& heardfrom one of those pocketsa crinkling, the ideaslowly dawning on usthat the girlmight have given ussomething we needed— Patrick Kindig teaches in the University Writing Program at Brandeis University. He is the author of the chapbooks all the catholic gods (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press, 2016), and his poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Chattahoochee Review, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, and other journals.…

Poetry did not save my life. It frustrates and complicates life. My emotional experience of writing a poem is akin to maneuvering tricky Venetian window blinds; I struggle. Sometimes, I must undo movement in order to make progress. I cannot articulate this. No one else can tell you or show you how to do it—you have to feel it, then it just clicks. And “success” doesn’t necessarily mean you can do it again the next time. It’s always a striving, always a surprise if it works. Poetry did not save Ariana Benson’s life, either. I know this because she told me so. The first night I met her: June 11th—inside Opening Circle, the orientation of the Cave Canem Retreat, the “Home of Black Poetry,” in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She arrived late…

A Catalog of How Are You Doings There’s the ones you get from cashiers,acquaintance coworkers, the husbandsof your wife’s childhood friends—they say it like tearing the last yellow pagefrom a pack of construction paper,not your first choice, the ink runs,you know whatever you do with itit’s bound for forgetting’s garbage bin.Then there are the ones with ‘man’tacked onto the end, the old friendsreaching through telephone wiresto garland your shoulders with cigarettebreaths, and something about themfeels like ship horns sounded in the harbor,the brightest pennies in a wishing fountain,how your hands first landed on the small of a girl’s back.There’s the ones at aunt and uncle funeralsplopped like spoonfuls of mac and cheeseon a paper plate, ones like a flock of geesetaking flight after you bump into your ex.Your mother dies…

Flat Earth Conspiracy Hesiod described our world’s uniform planeas Achilles’ shield afloaton the river Oceanus. A beliefthat stood until Pythagorasobserved the shape of the moon’s terminatorin orbital cycle. And though more than a millenniumof scientific progress has broughtenough space explorationand satellite imaging for Earth’s curvatureto no longer be a questionbut a logo, flattened onlyby mass-produced renderings,there are still some who are looking for any reasonto disprove what’s been proven.The privilege of their disbelief sharpened,brandished like a switchblade,on countless message boards and forums,those newest, darkest alleys of the cultural zeitgeistwhere we mug only ourselves.Because if the earth were really a spinning chunk of rock,a helicopter could hover in place,its pilot waiting for their destination to appearon the skyline. And any bulletfired straight up would land at least a hundred feeteast or…

Books Nightboat Books, 2023 paperback, $17.95, 132 pages Emily Lee Luan’s stunning debut poetry collection, ⧈/RETURN, opens with the ancient Chinese glyph for ‘return,’ calligraphed by Luan’s mother. In a style recorded in the Eastern Han Dynasty, the spiral curvature appears distinct against the version simplified circa Cultural Revolution, one square interlocked inside another, ⧈. Much of Luan’s collection traces the cartography of an immigrant’s desire to recurse to the beginning, scouring for the source of an inexplicable sadness: “When my Sorrow was born, I held it, a dark pearl spit from its shell, and I remembered the salt that had rounded it, centuries ago, before I even had a mouth” (6). Luan’s collection explores the contours of this unknowability, whose faces and forms endure in the void of the…

Omphalophobia Some days, all I can thinkis that we are born into injury: an umbilical severance, our firstwound. Blinking awake to a humid fog of pain and sleeplessness. Nowonder babies cry. In yoga class, I press my stomach to the mat,an instructor urging me to find my center while I recall the girl who criedwhen I tucked a knuckle all the way inside my belly button, gut swallowingthe digit. My finger probed, as if I could feel the organs underneath. Somepeople fear knot-like navels can unravel, intestines unspooling. Sucha secret place, a whole world populated by bacteria—an early mouth, tetherto where you came from. In other ages, umbilical remnants were kept sacred,the last tie to parents, ancestors, home. I move through the asana; my middletightens, belly button flickering like an…

To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. The Book of Disquiet, section 229 Fernando Pessoa In the summer of 2021, I was returning to Kansas from a writer’s conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Along the way, a small rock must have hit the windshield of the car because I watched a crack climb from the lower left corner across my line of vision to the upper middle part of the windshield. It divided the line of hills. It divided the road. Light reflected from the crack as the sun moved across it. I had just read from A Line of Driftwood, the Ada Blackjack Story, in which I had experienced a similar split between Ada’s diary and the diary I wrote from her diary as I read…

I Only Love You More Because the World Is Ending for Brenda Shaughnessy The news isn’t good, and neither of us feelslike pretending, though the list of what we hope forgrows longer by the day. More news, goodor otherwise, everything witnessed by the lightof fires, and something we cherished alwaysburned away. So let me say this first: Brenda,I love you. You make the world more beautiful—how could I not love you for that? There are peopleI’d die for, only they are not my children.What I really mean is there are people I live for,and if they died, I’d feel for a time out of timewith time. But I know as you do that endings areupon us while love goes on starting over and over.What this means lately is that each…