Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i The American Poetry Review

Once a year I give myself permission to indulge in real tenderness. I dip an overripe fig in honey and eat it with yogurt. Then I allow some man to worship me. I make him go down on two knees and pray. “Pray for what?” he’d whisper. “Pray for whatever you like, as long as you pray to me,” I’d reply. “I am your goddess.” Then I’d fan my hair out on my bed, splay my legs, and he’d dip his head down, put his palms together, and purse his lips in concentration. Sometimes he wouldn’t know what to pray for, because his prayers had been answered. Sometimes he’d recite a novena he remembered from childhood. Sometimes he would take too long, and I’d watch him bend against the bed, his…

One by One One by onethey are jumping in. Is the water cold?—I call to them. Yes, the water is cold, they tell me. One by one. After COVID The only time I was frightened of my friendshe’d recovered from a long illness. Her eyes gleamed yellow from fever,her gums receded from her sharp teeth. For months she’d lost all sense of smelland taste and even the recollectionof smell, taste, hunger. Flame purified her of lust,she became a figure in an ancient scroll. But now her old wild beauty glintsin the pores of her dry skin like mica. Boasting now she has the appetite of a crow.Can’t stop eating, shovingfood into her mouthwith bare hands. Joyce Carol Oates is the author of over 70 books, including the novels Night. Sleep. Death.…

Concern What gluekept too much ink from sinking in,kept the surface from pulling that liquid beyond—at first gypsum then something madefrom lichen then gelatin thenstarch. Eventually bureaucrats ordered papertreated with the poison of certain berriesto protect against insects. Inanother world, some years later, lichens, the starchesof rice and wheat. The truth ispaper has always barely satisfiedthe papermaker, who tries to make somethingthat will both take and rejectwhat approaches. Trance, Entrance That first recitationtested the quality of my listening, the accuracy of my sounding,the success of my adaptation to those rules I was told,to a lesser degree the anticipatory silenceof the others, the quality of light in that room,the relationship between the work of my eyes andthe stores of my mind. It was not the first test,but it was the first…

I wait for what I know:curved tiles reflecting the river,a contextual style, the glittering glassof West Wacker Drive. We pass the port housesbuilt like boats along the water:a single round window painted green.The guide says, just wilderness. We discovered it,easily, like one might say founded in 1830.My friend and I bristle: eyebrows lifting in unison—The whole boat keeps listening and the captain keeps steering past a steakhouse and City Winery.Truth flounders under the boat, swims far awayfrom us and the slow rocking of waterfrom the tales we tell onboard:the way we sent the muckand the sewer-like waterelsewhere. And the Chicago fire:the cow and the candlestick. Oh, and howwe built it back up, brick by brick.In rows of white chairs on the dock,we each hold a drink in one hand,as wind…

C To read onthe train nowthat is somethingyou don’t see.People mostly cryinto their handsafter laughing sohard and forso long theystare off intospace. Somewonderat themselves inthe window, howtheir faces havechanged so muchand so slowly. Queens It is not at allthe scent of a newcar. These Little Trees—twoor three of them, allgreen—hang from the rear-viewmirror along with four smallflags and also a rosaryfloating beside this icon ofa man said to bea saint whose face isglittering as we wait forthe light to change inthe back seat of thisLyft. The scent is morelike old bread than anythingelse, bread, work and rain. Flower Stand In this weather,the most obsceneboutonnières – each flowermade to looklike the realthing and thirsty.In case ofrain, clowns-for-hire carryblue first thenyellow parasols throughthe crosswalk, painton their facespeeling, a curtsyfor every claxon. Night…

Poetry is just the shadow of the dog. It helps us to know the dog is around, but it’s not the dog. The dog is elsewhere and constantly on the move.—Charles Wright, Halflife The poems I want to write at this moment in my life are not the kinds of poems I would have valued as a young man. When I was in graduate school, I read a book called Halflife by the poet Charles Wright, who was my teacher at the time. There’s nothing quite like that little volume: it’s an odd, brilliant, sometimes cryptic jumble of bits and pieces of distilled wisdom and insight about poems, poetry, and other poets, along with the occasional advice about the mysterious process of writing poetry. At one point he says, “Each line…

Metaphysics with Poppies I can’t understand, after years of reading, the relevanceof metaphysics. How does it account for the wants of my mind breaking apart my body? I prefer to think of poppies,the variety fated to bloom blood-red. Or, of planting poppies, any flowers in truth—how they come to us in plastic pots; howafter we shovel them a place in the earth, we extract the flowers from their vessels; how while we lower them downinto their potting hole, ganglionated roots and the dirt compacted around those roots retain the container’s shape. I am interestedin the shape of things. Is that the relevance of metaphysics? You know I’m hiding again, don’t you? Still the boybetween the cedar and the wedge of stone wall where, lying flat, he cannot be seen from…

It’s April and all my friends are married. The Japanese maples, in their pots on the balcony, need to be weeded and pruned. The reds and yellows we associate with autumn leaves are there all the time, I read. But we only see them in dead or dying leaves, in the absence of chlorophyll. The cruelest month—who said that? Reading the posthumous Ashbery, edited by Emily Skillings—five unfinished longer works—I pay more attention to his xeroxed drafts than to the finished poems. Edge becomes hedge. Rigorous, peaceful. At the bottom of each typescript page, a date and location. For to be finished is nothing. Only children and dinosaurs like endings On my desk: beeswax candle, lit / three twisted stacks of books / loose: Joanna Walsh’s My Life as a…

bad copies soundtrack: untitled/fantastic instrumental, slum village can’t teach reading this instrument(al) anymore/than learning to breathe.heart learning to beat. by beat by beat. & here a honing in (this feeling)you remind me there’s no way to hear without taking/it in (like air) i meanthere’s no music outside (my skin) & everything inside is moving. i meanyou make me know my cells shake & not take that for granted. the mostbeautiful things point to their own makings/know they are bad copies/staybeautiful anyway suite in b+: after 3 portraits of j dilla by b+, clinton township, detroit, michigan, 2000 i. depth of field doesn’t stop/falling down a quality of sound/carries its owngravity/blink lights each repeat repeat/encounter open/happens along/alongside living i detect as much as i’ve lived/return anew/girl uncoverlessons a face/behind your face…

Let My Headstone Be a Neon Sign or a hedge apple in snowHow did we come to be in this dark closet, countless strands of tinsellashing the space betweenInventor (inventedI ask the nail technician for acrylics like the fluorescent ethanol in thecarpenter’s levelshanging against the farthest wall of the shed (and I will chewthem off given timeI am not an inventorMy father with a barn full of prototypesImitation fireworks and one-quarter of a Christmas treeNothing at all like a small figatop a cake, except for maybe the tendernesswith which she found herself there,a mouse died slightly off-center in the blue tub among thousands of unshelledpecansMy father wondered at a single hollow shell with an oval windowand whether he should place a miniature bird inside(whether anyone would wear it as an…

Lullaby after Stephanie Burt and Poetry Unbound It’s Friday night, dusk, and I bring myself to The Hudsonto breathe. I listen to a poem that is part-prayer: someonewill probably love you; and I watch the clouds sweep over the moon;the poem sweeps into fact, then promise, and here is where I slideinto its sweep: I walk along the river’s lull, watching the mooniridesce and when it pulls through, I stop along the path, in starand in startle, noting the pull of my heart, as I catch the eyeof a stranger in the night, and feel that promise pull tightaround me, within me, thinking, there are ways to re-love somethingand I replay the poem, then I replay the poem of my life, the storyI tell myself, but this time, a little…

Another Impulse A stick buried in grass is fabulous. Who knows what this means? The sky isa basket woven from shadows more subtle than shadows of the earth. Thisis to say, things are done quietly in the sky sometimes, too. You can partthe ferns and peer into clearings. You can deliver wisdom with force, whennecessary, until wounds heal as soon as they are inflicted. Extinction arriveswrapped in a gorgeous shawl of necessity. On the other side of the worlda stranger snaps her fingers, and you feel the depth and the value and thelength of ancient assimilations. To Dust For Christopher Phelps No one knows why their small bag contains a handful of stonesthat appear to be from another world. Even as it feels as ifsomething is an answer, our cherished…

Originally presented at Kenyon College and Naropa University, June 2023 A poem is a double work, I feel it as I never have before: that a poem gives us new eyes. A poem gives us two new eyes that seem the same but see differently: one sees the day, and one sees under the day—and every poem, or every poem of a certain nature, walks the surface of the world and walks under it at the same time. It’s hard to know who it is you are: the poet singing a solar ode, or the poet reminding the shades there is a sun. Both poets are one, but not the same. The difference is as hard to point at as it is to name, self and self’s shadow, maybe, but only…

In My Infertility Era It’s a glorious spring day in February. The utility company is clawing leadpipes out of the pavement while big magnolia blossoms tumble into thehole. At the doctor, I sit gingerly, trying not to wrinkle the butcher paper.I think of my grandmother, who lived 98 years and never threw anythingaway. Every Christmas, hunched over the wrapping paper, carefullyuntaping it & folding it for next year. A nurse takes my temperature,frowning. She ejects my germs into the trash & pulls an antique glassthermometer out of a drawer, shaking down the mercury. She jams that inmy mouth and goes out into the hallway, arms crossed. Low murmuring.Another nurse looks through the door at me, worried. The doctor comesin. “Your temperature is 21.2,” he says cheerfully. “You’re like a deepfreezer.…

Arthur Sze has published eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), selected for a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award; Sight Lines, which received the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian-American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has recently published, The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). Sze is the recipient of many honors, including the Ruth Lilly…

I’ll Never Look This Good Again It’s a calm, crippling blue fall daypunctured by the tearing caw of a crow and there’s a waiting list to notdisappear into a futureof swirling vermillion foamin a creek of hairripped out in clumps. I’m laying on a pile of dry cardboardhaving forgotten abouta day like today in a past whichI’d’ve thought would contain clouds. It’s a night now of moldering rosesa clear, blue-black nightpainted over with could-be thoughts. A Walk Through_____ a sky gathered with swollen meaning is a sky released and love’s surrogate lust in an empire of ______ I’m leaving this bleached historyunsure of what I’ve beengoing shapeless staying nameless through a field of manifold greenswithin inflection together to say you were right about these inwardhaunting, self-taught deceptions — you were…

let me live with no intention; i triumph at the mile-long hair in my shower; even in thunderstorms, more air is dry than not; there is no will that makes water cling to me the way you cling, but there is always the thought of water; i am telling you that blue does not mean sad, and couplets do not mean closure; let the world hold no symbols for me; let my every action be a symbol; i am porous as soil, and i get in everybody’s boots; down here, poetry has pressed itself to music; intention is delicate as the bones of a live fish, inseparable from the meat; let me have nothing to swim through; let colors convulse in me mindlessly; let me not meditate, because to meditate…