Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2024 i The American Poetry Review

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…

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.…

Sundays v. Bruce. Queens, NY. August, 2023. Sunday mornings I watch people at the gas station, off the highway,fill their cars on the way to the beach, or the game, or to whateverwholesome activity one shepherds their upstanding family.I wouldn’t know. The last time I went to the beach was 13 years ago.These days, if I’m lucky, I summer with a watermelon, without the seedsI still spit. My stomach stays in knots. It’s been three days since thathuge tree fell into the road. Blocking my path. This city has no urgency.Just wrap caution tape around it. Sure,I could have moved some branches out of that person’s driveway,but I decided not to—I walk to get my steps, all 12,000 of them.Every day, twice on Sundays. If I wanted to lift, I’d…

I dreamed I heard somebodySinging in the outhouse—Frank Stanford, “The Singing Knives” Growing up in the Virginia woods we deprecatingly referred to as “the sticks,” one of my friends had a genuine outhouse in their backyard. Their old farmhouse had been renovated with indoor plumbing, but this mysterious small building remained. Weathered grey wood, a crescent moon carved in the door to let light in, a bench seat with a hole and a wooden lid. It was dim, dusty in the outhouse, and there were daddy longlegs inside. In reading Frank Stanford’s longish, dreamy, narrative poem “The Singing Knives,” the outhouse lines (as well as lines in the companion, tirade-of-an-adventure poem, “The Snake Doctors”) send me back into childhood. Like history, poetry reminds us that we are barely a breath…

The Joseph Cornell App Supposedly there was this guy Cornellwho wanted to vindicate nostalgiaas a feeling and hammered togethersmall boxes in which he’d place aluminumflowers magazine clippingsand pics of girls in ballerina posesplus odd trinkets he’d foundon the street the wiki says he had parasiticeyebrows and his arrangementswere like bread crumbs luringusers to a forgotten pastof foundling chips and bottle capsdoilies pinballs bits of bitsI’ve had our coders meticulouslyupload close-ups of his artinto our servers design botsto crack their mystery and stealfrom their psychic structureswe’ll earn more clickssince nostalgia is like an unrepentantfrenemy that stuns usback to the luminous dashboardof our past when we all hadreal coins to spend in our pocketsthe wiki notes that Cornellprobably had x-ray visionand carried on conversationswith his dog he lived with his momwhich may…

for Kelly Caldwell (1988–2020) In my next life[since thisone burnedto ashthat nightwhen you shookyourselfout ofthe worldyour touchnow memoryan eyelashon the sinkyour foundationand blushstill behindthe mirror] I live in a trance, in a transformed valley,where the last flowers bloom and the last dogs eat them.I lower my mask to eat the last salmon,suck the last peach, scrape artichoke with my teeth. The wind licks my faceand licks my plate cleanon days I have no appetite, every day. Let me paint thisentire countrythe colors of your facethe last time Isaw you alive *In my next life[since thisone turnedto stasisthe horrorglazedwith springwithout herknees beneaththe sheets] I live with the beetles,invisiblein the dark.My grief has no witness,a quartz in a quarantine,hard and commonas enforced social distance.The rain is fearful,expressionless.And I’m looking into herlike a…

The art of syntax I would have loved a canapé—pinkyup—should he have offered it to me—is an example of the Austenian subjunctive— which I have much rehearsed—its coycurtsy—to feign that I abide failuremore graceful than I’ve done— so when he plumbed my tonguewith two then three fingers—the garbage trucks wheezing on the next street—when he shuthis eyes to my face imagining—I guess—hers—I would have loved— should he have offered—that he openmy belly—part the curtain to my slowsquirming—terror of being seen by the amalgamated organ of everyonewatching—the closest to GodI’ve believed in—so that how could I not try to please it—such that I posturedabout, exclaiming how-darling & hell-yes—every word stolen from somewhere— from his off-again girlfriend with the snowboardblog & the MySpace following—from punkest Mephistopheles: Here’s the coat of armsthat gives…

Liberty State Park Walkway Easy has felt easier. As I runpast this relic railroad terminal,my heart chugga-chuggas,months after a mystery infectionlanded me in Lancaster General,where I learned the meaningof “pulmonary and pericardialeffusions.” These are ruinsof the heart that from Ellis Islandreceived immigrants and pumpedthem home. Trackless rows.A rain shroud atop endlessMoria-like columns. Bad omens?There was the Depression,the War, but also the successfultransplant: the interstate system,which, later today, will take us home.The podcast says an average lifeis 74 years, and I’m 37.Guess my long run isn’t the only onehalfway done. Have I been heroic?A decade ago, running here,I caught the filming of a helicopterchasing a black car. The Batmobile?They’d go, back up, go again.I’m far from superhero status unlessthe CVS sign—“heroes work here”—can be trusted. I’m also no Clemenza,pissing here as…

—Damien Hirst; Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution; 1991 What we did not expect to find were my father’ssecret poems, saved deep in his computer’s memory.Writing, he wrote, is like painting a picturein someone else’s mind. He developed tender imagesdepicting moments of exchange—tipping for a haircut,a farmer’s wife bringing him lunch after a morningof baling hay. All art is a matter of regulating symbol,proportion, and distance, one theory goes.An artist requested a very large shark—“Big enough to eat you.” Years later, the sharkbehind the glass deteriorated and was replaced.The critics argued whether it remained the samepiece of art. An obvious and lazy question.When my father died, his ashes came backin a black plastic box where they stayed untilwe buried him—our messy interment, windand shaky hands spilling him everywhere. Afterthe…

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…

You make light of me. You do what Scriabin didto the sea. You make merry in order to score what you adore. The savior said of his mortalenemy—Behold, I see Satan fallingfrom heaven like lightning. Lucifer was the first winged thing to fall. You make light to ignorethe thunder’s roar. You overlook how he was light before. Each You makes itharder to die without hurting someone. Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020), and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018).…

There is a mark on the retinaI’m told I must watch, twice the optic nerve. I blink& see the dark side of a moon dissolving into the worldits shadow obscures, a dead star. If I close the lid the moon burnsbrighter, flipped now, as if lit from beyond, ocular terraincoming into view, as if gazing into night’s ghost, a curse,a reminder of a night you chose stranger visions, electric blue.Yes, I followed you, compass rose, a fool’s mistake, you’d say,giving love where there is no love. Blind, I roamed the labyrinthyou wandered the other direction, further, onwards.Wherever was I following to on instinct, so lovingly, hopingto be turned towards, a cure of light reflecting off stone,to be called my own name? Now water rises in the gut,& I see, I…

The monk told my recently divorced friend that no woman would everfuck him again if he kept carrying around that bag that looked like a pursewe laughed wondered if murse was the proper term for this cross betweena satchel and a pouch we’re both poets me and my friend so it’s only naturalthat this end up in a poem for the valiant way to complain is to create sometimesartists get to complain and call it art sometimes artists complain and no one listensbut my friend living in a monastery in Germany with the monk for two weekscould not speak about how incredulous he was about this declaration because whatdid the monk know about sex I’m thinking probably enough with respect to howit might pertain to a certain type of woman…

Love is the Mariana Trench.Fatherhood is the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Gravitron, the Scrambler.Motherhood is the honeysuckle and the havoc.Childhood is the mansion we haunt.Love is the way we detonate each day.Tuesday is sacrosanct and snarl—its pollen gussying up the sidewalks with green.Tomorrow is the mystery machine hotwiring the Holocene.The heart is a sea anemone.Love is the felony.Your mother is your mother is your mother.Life is the strawberry patch we dust with blood meal.I’m the man planting peonies, offering you answers without promises.You are a cherry-bomb of tenderness.I’m the man cawing to the congress of crows in the sweetgum above.You are the sour tang of life fermenting.I’m the carpenter in the coffin guessing it’s Halloween, my heart hemorrhaging into the dark.You are the promise and the answer and the waves of forgetting.You…

“Poetry is a dream made in the presence of reason.”—Adam Zagajewski I went for a walk with a girl I hardly knewwhen I was a boy on a trail by a riverfor a film I didn’t know was being madeby a director I couldn’t see or hearbehind his hidden camera in the cloudsand trees as we recited our linesunwittingly with no idea of the plotor ending as we walked for milesin that paradise of a park, which is whywe were killing it on that cerulean dayin a way that was more real than the trailitself, which has been razed, I’ve heard,for a housing development, which meansthe world in which we live todayhas become an illusion since we bothstill walk that trail where we were borna second time in a paradise…

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…

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…

My kid pats telephone poles, says twee,climbs bricks to skip in moss, & theysurrender to airplane awe but notto pouring rain. Puddle-kicker, theyname all colors green, then yay-yo,shake wet curls no when I wavetoward our apartment a half-blockof crooked sidewalk away. I carry you, their small voice calls up,muscled arms dripping rainwater,bottom lip a slight frown. I carry you,with a stamp; then they softenas I swing them to my hip. It’s true,I answer. Their small voice points:gween twee! air-pwane! yay-yofwower! Mama, I carry you! I carry. Darla Himeles (they/she) is a Philadelphia-based poet and writer for young people. They are the author of the chapbook Flesh Enough and the full-length poetry collection Cleave, both published by Get Fresh Books. Read more at darlahimelespoetry.com.…

The nighttime is the right time to be with the one you love, says Ray,but according to Hamlet, it’s when “churchyards yawn and hell itselfbreathes out contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,”says Hamlet, “and do such bitter business as the day.”So who’s right, the soul singer? The melancholy Dane? Both?You and I were walking across the city one night and came acrossa bachelorette party of sexy young women pounding each otherwith big plastic penises and using them as swords, thrustingand parrying as did Hamlet and Laertes but collapsing in laughter,not because they’d been pierced with a poisoned foil.The next best thing to night is day, and the best day is one whereyou’re enjoying alcohol, music, and sunshine, otherwise knownas The Big Three, though at night you…

One characteristic element of a sonnet is the turn, or to use the Italian word, volta. The typical definition holds that: In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet.1 In their contemporary American sonnets, poets Wanda Coleman (1946–2013) and Terrance Hayes (1971–) break this schoolbook volta mold in exciting ways that feel intriguing and fresh. But is volta-variation an innovation, or an example of everything old being new again? Looking back to the origin of sonnets—before Petrarch’s 14th-century development of the eponymous Italian form, before Wyatt and Surrey’s English adaptations2—we find that the volta in sonnets penned by Giacomo da Lentini (approx. 1210–1260) and…

Light and I “met,” if we can call it that, when we were both taking part in Lambda Literary’s virtual 2021 Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. I don’t know that I had prepared myself for the strangeness of a poetry workshop via Zoom, and ultimately found myself a bit flustered and out of joint for most of the retreat. But Light, in their small square, looked serene, always attentive even when not speaking. When they did choose to come off mute, they were kind, thoughtful, and incisive. Their poems had startling clarity and an expansive, omnivorous approach to form both abstractly and in the physical shape each poem took on the page. I knew, without any doubt, they’d have a book out soon. Thankfully, I was right! And now…

≈ The smoke never appears in family pictures. The smoke got up this morning and ran a marathon. She came in first inher age group without trying. The smoke’s children are fine, just where they should be on the growthchart. She lets their father cut their hair. The smoke writes her novels in the bath. She’s cool with school lunch.Her Twitter is a thing of beauty.Her kids are her inspiration. The smoke cherishes each moment. She doesn’t nag about people leavingthe lights on. She just steps over the shoes by the door. The smoke is a statue. She’s the life of the party. The smoke gets it all done and is happily exhausted in the evening. She canlaugh at that joke—exhausted. The smoke didn’t have to leave home to write…

Life is a series of decisions to move this poster to another room; that ass to some other chair.There isn’t really much to it, and then we’re done for. There was a time I wrote, seriously, about grief. I wonder whyI can’t do that anymore. Maybe it’s because I don’t have any specific datum point. No assumed coordinates where there’s a road,snowy or muddy or something else entirely, and I’m not driving on it. But I like to consider it. Think about it. Reminisce about its simple bumps and startling gravel. In 27 years, I’ll be retired. Just kidding, I’m never going to be able to retire. Or I’ll be dead long before that.Or maybe that’s you? I don’t really know. What was I talking about again? Oh yes, decisions.…