The American Poetry Review May/June 2024

i. We ride horses in the slowly-falling snowand you tell me it is Summer, it is warm,and I don’t quite believe you, but I love you,so I go along with the oddly humorous deception. My mother says “Love is blind”and “Hindsight is 20/20,” but it doesn’t help.The horses trot, the rhythm transmittedthrough our bodies, the horses somehow one with us, and we are terrible beasts,half man, half horse, truly and fully awful.You say we have so much in common, so many of the same life experiences, but those are liesas well. You lie and lie and lie as if breathing.And I believe. I believe. I stupidly believed. ii. In the early 18th Century, it finally appears in English:from the Latin manipulus and brought by the French,the word manipulation quickly became…

Paradise Lost Throughout the centuries,through the nothingness of the world,I, without sleep, search for you. Behind me, imperceptible,without touching my shoulders,my dead angel keeps watch. Where is Paradise,Shadow, you who have been there?I ask silently. Cities of no answers,rivers of no speech, summitsof no echoes, silent seas. Nobody knows. Men,stone-still, standing on the edgeof graves, ignore me. Sad birds,their petrified cantos,in ecstatic formation, fly blind. They know nothing.Without sun, ancient winds,inert, leagues still left to go, they rise,reduced to ashes, then fallto their backs, saying little. Diluted, without formand hiding a truth within,the heavens escape me. Already, at the end of the earth,at the farthest edge,the eyes slipping, hope dying in me,that green porticoI search for in the black vacuum. Oh, chasm of shadows!Hotbed of the world!What a confusion of…

1. “Are you by your machine?” he says. “Yeah, I’m here.” I turn the phone on speaker, set it on my desk, open a Word doc. By “machine”—I know by now—he just means computer. I don’t think I ever hear him say that word: Computer. I know he did, once, when he told an interviewer in 1989, “About the computers—the university gave me one, but I gave it back.”1 As far as I know, he only touched one once in his life, which ended in the early morning hours of February 20, 2023, after congestive heart failure. Laura Johnson, one of Norman’s former students and a longtime assistant, said that in the early 2000s she tried to teach him how to log in to his email. When Norman sat down…

The Poem Fails If the day is not in it—some bitof its weather, its key, as toldby the ginkgo leaves. The weatherholds time, exquisite information. Life is not a dream like a scenein a novel I’ll never forget. I mean,it happened to me, and I will forget.It’s that kind of dream. If the poem fails, it failsto save my life. It failswith almost holy intention.An upward spiral. A thought in the night.L’appel du vide. The voidhas no color, it has no shade.It is not like a tree. Experiment on a Bird The news comes through so slowly.Some men in an eighteenth centurypainting are going to kill a bird.A paint child can’t bear to look. Birdcage empty, moon is full.And here, the winter sun lights upmy dust. A drafty window. A…

As part of her signature project, You Are Here, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to observe and reflect on their place in the natural world. The volume was published by Milkweed Editions in April 2024. Snapdragon Kevin Young Of late the deadhave quittheir midnight visits. They askto swing bysometime, without ringing first—Thank you, no.Think I’ll stay here, friends, in sunlightat the startof summer, the snapdragons & daylilies brightmy son plucks. Down the roadthe dandelions bloomin a garden of stone. A garland of souls. Like the vinesI’ll climb—like children who join their limbs to the silvermaple’s, wavingto all who pass on by. There Are More Ways to Show Devotion Hanif Abdurraqib than we can ever know in this lifetimeonce you traced a finger along the trafficof…

Thicket & Child In the middleof spring, in the centerof the thicketa family of finches are making a slogof dinner, wormsthat, pulled outof the ground become somethinglike an elegiacwitness to hunger,the birds’ hunger, the thicket’s starvation,the yellowed grass’sthirst. Or not.I suppose I’m feeling all powerful again,like last night,when I watcheda family of raccoons walk throughthe shelter of the thicketand then into the darkyard with just a clip of moonlightlike a half-secreton the furry tipsof their ears and said to no-one:Look at that!An index of deathis arriving too late for love! I’m a goon.I cannot reckonmy own lifeso I make up lies about another life—finch life, raccoon life,my sister’s, mother’sbrother’s life. I can’t believeI’m allowed to drivea car but also wantto be held like a baby again. I can’t believeI’m supposed…