The American Poetry Review March/April 2024

Envoy I was trying to look a little less like myselfand more like other humans, humans who belonged, so I put on a skort.Purchased in another life, when I had a husband and wrote thank-you notes and held dinner parties,the skort even had its own little pocket, and the fingerprint stains yellowing the fabricwere almost invisible, nothing to be ashamed of as I walked past homes and faceswith their welcome signs and their no-trespassing signs. I was hoping to look domesticated,or at least domesticable, that I too could walk the trailsand then return home, stretch out beside another human and watch somethingon a big screen until it was time to sleep. I too had veins at my wrist,and I’d read Maslow, with his hierarchy of needs.I remembered that love and…

Big Mistake. Big. Huge. Mark Rothko was just too trustingwhen he announced I’M INTERESTED ONLYIN EXPRESSING BASIC HUMANEMOTIONS—TRAGEDY, ECSTASY, DOOM,AND SO ON. Personally, I couldn’t beginto fill in what the other ones are.Is one of them the feeling of overlyenjoying the joke WHAT’S BLUEAND SMELLS LIKE RED PAINT(BLUE PAINT)? Is one of them notbeing able to rememberwhich director it was who said,regarding violence in his movies, THAT’S NOTBLOOD; THAT’S RED? Is one of themreturning from the dead? Strollingback into the world, I felt like the movies:Julia Roberts in PRETTY WOMAN,decked out and making her beelinefor the boutique that declined to serve her:BIG MISTAKE. BIG. HUGE. The mulberrysilk. The gold brocade. Is oneof them they could’ve had it made. Remember My Decision for One Day Oh sure, keep referring to oxygenationof…

My daughter is eight & alreadyworried she won’t find someone to marryor, more precisely, someone who will want to marry her—already the notion of marriage arrives an exclusionary prize.Though I say It doesn’t work that way she seems unconvincedthat life’s destination isn’t a prince, caped,at the end of 8th grade, the time fallingin love & marrying is said to happen. In Philadelphialanternflies cling to trees & we agree to kill them,the flies, to save the trees. I wonder what makes an ideainvasive, how we can know as we grow our desiresto suck dry another’s sap, inject it with our sadness,release our dreams from their cold bark knowing someonesomeday may crush us with purpose: a personal victoryin the name of ecological community. Always,a looking back at what could have been hadwe…

Like a thousand-pound Pembroke Welsh Corgiheavy as four baby elephants. The sizeof a small car; or the size of a bridge. As big as a bus, or the size of a house. As bigas 90 elephants. The size of an Olympicswimming pool, with the width of an airfield. Choose between one the size of Big Benor one as large as the Statue of Liberty.In gradations: As big as a plane, the size of a 20-story building, or the Parthenon.Something heavy cometh, or must,we believe, though we may be unlikely targets in the pebble-strewn cosmos. Considerthe hyperbolic asteroid ‘Oumuamua, interstellarscout of the glancing kiss, calling the aerial bombardment of its companions. We’d liketo believe that. Fear is invigorating, andwe sense we have done things for which the punishment must be oblivion.…

Let’s start with something that really happened. I was at a production of Bertold Brecht’s A Man’s a Man at a small theater in the East Village. During the first act, one of the actors ran off stage, followed by screaming, followed by a voice over the loudspeaker saying, “Hold your places. The play will continue shortly.” The play had begun with the soldiers breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience, and because the “stage manager” is an agent of fourth wall breaking in Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town (two plays I know quite well), I leaned over to my companion and whispered, “That is the first time I have ever heard a truly convincing Stage Manager in a play like this. This…

Spent months and months, onceon a sofa I’d seen under a tree, driving homefrom Vermont, it wasn’t the sofa made me think of heartachethe disposing of something important, it was the suddenness of any thought and then once you’ve had it. I could probably recapitulateall of the art from the trip, but shouldn’t. A Sudden Gust of Wind, I will say—and, god,the intricacy of the shot, down to woman’s barely lifted left foot as her sheaf of paper is blownup into an unimaginable arc—a reimagination ofHokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji. Surely, you have already laid yourself down on the floorof a forest and watched. Like an underwater windparting stalks of heavy grass. That not until I learn to stop the new computer reminding me tomorrowmarks my mother’s birth, do…