The American Poetry Review November/December 2024

Undulations:: Plate 29 After the Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl {From the Blue Vessel Emerges a Dark & Foamy Substance} From the substance, animated creatures. Winds. Winds who display characteristics of Quetzalcoatl. You think of what emerges from the vessel of you. Vessel inside a vessel. What nesting doll godliness inside you. Creatures who leak from your pores, your hair follicles, the webbing between your fingers. Miniature feathered serpents born in your cochlea, slip through your tympanic membrane, down your car canal to shimmy & climb up your helix. In chorus, the creatures sing back into the tunnel of you, Dawn is coming. Open. Dawn is coming. Open Open Open. {Intertwined Starry Wind Serpents Spitting Out Wind Figures} Using throat to guide. Trachea as passage as birth canal. To the next section of…

A Backlog on Beauty In high school my art teacher made me look at my reflection/gave me thirty minutes/to find beauty/I’ve never been able to look at myself in the mirror/againI spent five summers looking at the Texas skies/how each yearclouds outlive beauty/an old lover this weekend wrapped his legs around my torso/myfingers in his mouth/he kissed my chest/look at me babe/once I danced next to him/our bodies became waves/pulling each other into our mouths/I wish I could believe the words Maram Al-Massri wrote/everytime a man leaves me my beauty increases/increases/ a man once told Amá I would grow up to be a beautiful boy/she corrected him/handsome/I watched novelas growing up/I always paid more attention to the men & their muscular bodies/at church Iwould prayto grow into a body like…

Snow day I set a tea kettle on top of a snowman.I’m pretending I don’t have laundry to do,that the drywall isn’t crackedin the bedroom, that I’m stillthe sixteenth inch thick bar of steelI was in my twenties, when if you bent meI sprang back to where I’d been, lonelyfor the previous condition of my existence.Snow people like meat peopleare elegies – all they do is die.At least this one is capableof a cup of tea. It’s sadbut all my snowhorses have failed,all my levitations and wings,all my attempts to feel prettyexcept when looking in the mirrorof chimney smoke on the horizon. Shake Drove home. Home home. The first home. Remembered being ten and afraid of the dark,the light, of cats and rats and mowers,threes and Qs and Zs, of…

New and Selected Poems Marie Howe W.W. Norton (2024) $28.99 In My Trade Is Mystery, Carl Phillips writes the following: “I’ve long been fascinated with the role of a first poem in a poet’s first book. It’s a bit like the literary equivalent of attending one’s first debutante ball.” Phillips explains that this first poem is how we’ve chosen to announce ourselves, deliberately and purposefully, to the world. This first poem is encoded with preoccupations, obsessions, and assertions that might either be reiterated or railed against throughout the course of subsequent books. The first poem in Marie Howe’s debut collection, The Good Thief, is “Part of Eve’s Discussion”; this squat single-sentence lyric does all the work Phillips suggests such a primary poem might. For years I assumed “Part of Eve’s…

Dear Absent, I unsubscribed from the world’sscatter shot awfulness. That’s whyI always seem so out of the loop.I scroll the internet strapped.Buckled in. Ready to ride outanything disturbingto my Cancer quintessence.That’s how I nearly missed it,the baby elephant. Hanging halfwayoff a steep cliffside. Flailing.Losing purchase at the edgeof its dewy mortality. In a 1:00 AM-WorldStar video, threateningto swell or demolish my heart.& because, dear absent, I havepictured us as kin, & can sense youare also a cautious browser,allow me to spare you:the elephant survives.Hand to God, an excavator armcareens across mountain & sky.Swoops in like a guardian angelon wings of yellow steel, liftinga giant shovel to the calf’s rear end.Levitating its hooves & swishing tailto higher ground. A glorious greenforest clearing, where the elephantcoils its trunk around the machine’sarm in…

The Alewife (Jerry) It was the summer the alewife ran aground earlyand the summer before they closedthe beaches at dusk. It was the summer after thechild nearly drowned in the quiet waters beyond the first sandbar, and it was the summer Ilost my favorite necklace to the hungrysandin the dark, whipping someone’s abandonedcharcoal grill into the sniveling waves that breached clamorously against the shore, steppingover themselves nearly, their vulgarcomplaints keeping coming, warning us to keepour feet out of their spray. And it was somany summers ago when he was still alive, Comstock,or Jerry, but really Comstock because thatwasthe street he lived on the end of, or maybe it wasin the middle, and we called each other by either a last name or street name or the name ofthe bicycles we…