The Best American Poetry

"Caress" [by Ron Padgett]

In a dream I caressed you
and when I woke up
I caressed the memory
of the dream.
I never caressed you
in “real life.”
I never even wanted to
though I was close
to liking the idea of caressing you.
If I had caressed you
I would remember it,
which is what I did last night.

"Days of Winter" and "Limbo" [poems by Sean Singer from "Today in the Taxi"]

Days of Winter

Today in the taxi I brought a Chinese couple, parents of a student at Columbia, from Amsterdam Avenue to JFK. The girl was crying, the mother was crying, etc. The parents sat in silence for most of the trip. They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Chinese. I did offer them a little package of tissues. On the other hand, the sun came out and it warmed to 24 degrees.

A driver should find a fixed object on the road, such as a sign or a tree, and when the car in front passes it, count three seconds before his own car passes it. Then add a second for each hazard—rain, or darkness.

The road is not unlike a little pressed-between vessel that the car pushes along its black bloodstream. A psalm instructs that It will be as it is said.

Limbo

Today in the taxi, driving a commercial real estate type from 43rd and Madison to 57th and Park I said, “Would you prefer to go up Madison, or Park?” He said, “It doesn’t matter. Either way we’re fucked.”

And it was true when a black pier of birds burst from the building, like fulfillment.

I too, seek to weave a memory from foam. A black bottle opener and the blackest bottle, and the flow of liquids. You cannot know it; you can see it.

General “Beedle” Smith reported that in April 1945 when they liberated Buchenwald, he witnessed:

“General Eisenhower go to the opposite side of the road and vomit. From a distance I saw Patton bend over, holding his head with one hand and his abdomen with the other. I too became sick.”

When the oncoming headlights are too bright, it is said you should look to the side at the lines on the road. You would stop yourself from being blinded, and stop yourself to imagine the road ahead, unstrung, and the rubber against it.

Sean Singer was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, in 1974. He has an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. Singer is the author of three books of poetry: Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022). In 2005 he was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Find out more about Sean Singer here.  You can purchase Today in the Taxi, from Bookshop, Amazon, and Tupelo Press.

"The Value of Stones" [by Michael Quattrone]

The Value of Stones

It’s never what they weigh; it’s not the depth
of silence they have known; it’s not the round-
or hardness of their edges, certain color
or uncertain age that proffer worth. Metals,
crystals, precious on their own, may dwell
within the body of a rock, but never mind
those false alarms of wealth. The treasure
of each stone lives in its skill: the subtle art
of timing, moving even still, invisible
for eons—until now, when heavy, sad,
I sought a place to put my head, first walk
without the old dog; not wanting to
remember, nor forget the creamy softness
of her faithful fur, one velvet ear; her
eager and then fallen eyes, her earthy
nose, dank breath; her batting tail and puppy
temperament, until her body failed. I
sank down and something bore me up: a piece
of bed unnoticed on the overlook
we’d risked each day on our six aging legs—
but here it was: a stone that never left
a man unturned. I sat and stayed, I curled
up and yelped. It polished me, the surface
of the hurt I felt. Such is the kindness
of a rock: however ancient, deep or sharp,
it waits, the patient body of the earth
immune to what afflicts our softer flesh,
as we dig up what modest giftedness
we can in human time. The measure of
a stone, and what it marks, is never mine.

Michael Quattrone is the author of the chapbook, Rhinoceroses (New School, 2007). His poems have appeared in journals like Barrow Street, New York Quarterly and Pool, as well as the Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008) and the Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2018). Click here for the poem as it appeared in Streetlight.

Sherman Alexie: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gentrification

 

Let us remember the wasps

That hibernated in the walls

Of the house next door. Its walls

Bulged with twenty pounds of wasps

 

And nest, twenty pounds of black

Knots and buzzing fists. We slept

Unaware that the wasps slept

So near us. We slept in black

 

Comfort, wrapped in our cocoons,

While death’s familiars swarmed

Unto themselves, but could have swarmed

Unto us. Do not trust cocoons.

 

That’s the lesson of this poem.

Or this: Luck is beautiful.

So let us praise our beautiful

White neighbor. Let us write poems

 

For she who found that wasp nest

While remodeling the wreck.

But let us remember that wreck

Was, for five decades, the nest

 

For a black man and his father.

Both men were sick and neglected,

So they knew how to neglect.

But kind death stopped for the father

 

And cruelly left behind the son,

Whose siblings quickly sold the house

Because it was only a house.

For months, that drunk and displaced son

 

Appeared on our street like a ghost.

Distraught, he sat in his car and wept

Because nobody else had wept

Enough for his father, whose ghost

 

Took the form of ten thousand wasps.

That’s the lesson of this poem:

Grief is as dangerous and unpredictable

As a twenty-pound nest of wasps.

 

Or this: Houses are not haunted

By the dead. So let us pray

For the living. Let us pray

For the wasps and sons who haunt us.

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Sherman Alexie’s most recent book is You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, a memoir. He has published six books of poetry with Hanging Loose, the most recent being What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned. He lives with his wife and sons in Seattle.

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                                                     Mher Chatinyan (Armenian), Wasp, 2021.

 

"Ode to My Father’s Manhattans" [by Beth Gylys]

Ode to My Father’s Manhattans

Clink
of ice
in a glass,
crack
of the cubes
as he poured,
bright red
eye
of a maraschino
bobbing
in the brown
gold
slosh
of Jim Beam
and sweet
vermouth.

Surely
we could
swim
in a lifetime
of those drinks,
gallons
upon gallons
swirled, sipped,
swilled
and swallowed,
sticky
on the counter,
the twinkle
of his high.

My father’s
Manhattans
sometimes
made him
want to dance,
to tell
the latest joke.
My shy father
lit
from within
becoming
someone
other
than himself,
sloppy-jolly,
sometimes
standing
(or that
is how
I remember it—
him at the table
standing
(hands
moving
like an Italian
from my mother’s
side of the family),
my father
and the glass
empty
but for
soft stones
of melting ice,
my father
abuzz,
chatty,
full of stories—
then
my father,
spent,
his chin
on his chest.

Wendy Xu: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I Must Change My Form

 

It’s true, nothing is coming out like it used to anymore

Usually I am rather neat and tidy in my work

It is spring, that time of year when all rain is expired cherry blossoms, the ground pink like above us, more pink

Walking through the park with my love I think about Chang-e, goddess of the moon, her exquisitely timed appearances at my moments of deepest need

I’m so tired of the compromises of women in my cultural folklore, as if: sacrifice is defensible as a feminist vision?

For example:

Your husband is greedy and demands ever greater production of silk from you, plucked from your own tender skin, spun overnight to meet his needs

Your husband is hoarding the immortality pills and so now you must live on the moon

Your husband loves you even in your true form, an enormous white snake, but he dies because you’re pregnant

Your husband is a dick, generally, and the other details are fluid

Thank god you are beautiful and a wonder to be regarded from earth

GuanYin remains the champion of mercy except in her punitive dealings with men

As a child I admired her for being above all helpful in my limited aspirations, perhaps I only aspired to that much, to function with use

Do you have context for this legend? Shall I include it here for you?

If I do, who is my perceived audience?

Some of you are my brothers and sisters and I allow you your infinite transgressions

My father writes me:

I just read your new poem NOTES FOR AN OPENING, it makes me think a lot, feel a lot, a lot about my life and our life. It will make me think and feel much more and more about myself and my children and the relatedness of our life in the true meaning of living or simply being alive. I love you Wendy, my daughter. Keep writing it. Let the thoughts flow whenever they come in your poetic form or other forms. Please ask if you need anything from me. I have been thinking a lot lately about our life journey. Nothing is better than writing it out and fully express it although it is really hard to re-experience many things.

Note: punctuation and grammar have been corrected

As per: your convenience

 

Do as much as you can as best as you can

I think about the wonderful hyphen, the place where I am allowed to live and am never followed

Blank Hyphen American

The hurt is the bridge, the bind, the unnatural (Hyper Hyphen Natural) adjoining my frankenparts

A grammar joke is: “Chinese-American” privileges the “Chinese” over the “American”

Get it?

I wish my life were so good that I was frequently bored

“A fatal sickness”

Which is despair but despair does not equal death, so what is unto death?

I am so glad I did not have to love him unto death, though I love him there

All good things must end and give rise to still undetermined things

If I despair of it I am sick with it, an already dead attitude, a levity I no longer feel

I am sick with love for my immigrant parents, the long mirror they hold out towards me

The poem will have no annotation, no disclosure, no burden, no qualifying exam, no end

It will be all language prerequisite

You might focus then on my sickness and use it to betray me

You might have no time no money no inner resources with which to begin

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Wendy Xu’s most recent books of poetry are The Past (2021) and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, New York Review of Books, Tin House, and widely elsewhere. She is assistant professor of writing at The New School, where she teaches poetry.

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   Panel with the Moon Goddess and Attendants. 12th–13th century China.  Metropolitan Museum of Art. The ornate style of clothing worn by these four women suggests they are immortals. The osmanthus leaf held by the largest figure, at the right, identifies her as the Moon Goddess Chang’e, who inhabits her celestial palace along with a rabbit that prepares the elixir of long life.

"In night when colors all to black are cast": Fulke Greville's Great Sonnet

In night when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

Now read it a second time. The key word appears to be "inward." What governs the "inward sense"? Let's take it one step at a time. It is possible to have the power to see and be blind; that paradox we can figure out. But who has "placed" the eye there as "a watch?" Is there an appeal to a belief system the reader is presumed to understand and identify on the basis of the language and probable date of composition? The second stanza raises the possibility that "the inward sense" singular may be different from the "inward senses." And both are corrupt and susceptible to panic and fear. The eye can at least give a "proper reflection of the error." What's there is nothing, "the nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens would have it. And the news confirms the neuroses. The devil is a manmade expression of "inward evils" based on illusory images. And yet, saying all this, one feels one has left out something crucial to the poem: the darkness, the night, and the power of sight to see error or to see erroneously.

The late Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, did his best to promote the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville, Tayler believed that Greville's importance was on a par with that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. For a final paper Tayler had us analyze this sonnet. A piece of cake it ain't.

Aldous Huxley chose the following lines by Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- DL

Now read it a second time. The key word appears to be "inward." What governs the "inward sense"? Let's take it one step at a time. It is possible to have the power to see and be blind; that paradox we can figure out. But who has "placed" the eye there as "a watch?" Is there an appeal to a belief system the reader is presumed to understand and identify on the basis of the language and probable date of composition? The second stanza raises the possibility that "the inward sense" singular may be different from the "inward senses." And both are corrupt and susceptible to panic and fear. The eye can at least give a "proper reflection of the error." What's there is nothing, "the nothing that is," as Wallace Stevens would have it. And the news confirms the neuroses. The devil is a manmade expression of "inward evils" based on illusory images. And yet, saying all this, one feels one has left out something crucial to the poem: the darkness, the night, and the power of sight to see error or to see erroneously.

The late Edward Tayler, professor at Columbia, did his best to promote the English Renaissance poet Fulke Greville, Tayler believed that Greville's importance was on a par with that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. For a final paper Tayler had us analyze this sonnet. A piece of cake it ain't.

Aldous Huxley chose the following lines by Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound,
Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- DL

"Girl Reading a Letter" [by William Carpenter]

A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
I haven't got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can't
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don't worry, the thief says, we're both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late. He's
in the picture. He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there's no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead -
time to stop thinking about him - the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes, but it's
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

-- from The Best American Poetry 1995 edited by Richard Howard

Thomas Devaney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Devaney. Photo by Patrick Montero.

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Oregon Ave

 

You can’t find a place to smoke anymore

Ro says, smoking and rifling

through her handbag looking for a number.

She sits in the backseat with Meg.

They’re not singing.

The ballgame’s on inside and outside

the game is always on.

Actually, sometimes they do sing.

What year is the car, a ’98?

A Ford? A Focus?

They always tip too.

 

There is dust, always; and terrible dirt;

but if that’s what you see you’re hardly looking.

We believe in the front stoop.

We believe in banging pots and pans and honking horns.

We believe that in the heat of day shadows come back.

Trashcan on fire says Things are hotting up.

The street’s a mix, water, water ice, LIVE CRABS,

jumbo jets, firecrackers.

Summer days are huge and often overlap late into fall.

Seriously, when you have a good spot, why move the car?

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Thomas Devaney is the author of You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2020) and Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019). He wrote and co-directed the film Bicentennial City (2021) about the 1976 Bicentennial in Philadelphia. He teaches creative writing at Haverford College.

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    Philadelphia Muses by Meg Saligman. Photo by Steve Welnik.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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No Apology: A Poemifesto

Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes
in my head.” Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize
for the sight in my eyes. Susan Briante

I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at Kroger.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination.

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Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, Her forthcoming book. Nostalgia Has Such a Short Half-Life, will be published in 2023. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she is a Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She has served as the publisher of Noemi Press since 2002.

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                                      Roberta Levitow, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 2020.

 

The Enemy (L'Ennemi) by Charles Baudelaire [trans. Sandra Simonds]

The Enemy 

My youth was so full of rage
that only the most brilliant of suns
could puncture it. Thunder and rain
ravaged me until my garden filled
with venom. But now my mind
has come to the autumn of its ideas
and one must rearrange this earth
with a shovel and rake. Flowers
are holes as big as graves. What are
these new futures I dream of?
Futures that burst from a soil
of grief. What mystical alignment
gives them such vigor?
Oh, sweet things! Time is a strange
enemy that gnaws at my heart.
It is blood and blood
alone that fortifies it.

Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books books of poetry, most recently : Triptychs (forthcoming Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), and Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, 2009). Her poems and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here. 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

Jerome Sala: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A History of White People

 

white people were paid well

not to witness

the fact that they were white

 

you know the theory

white isn't a color

but color's unlimited absence

 

white goes with anything

that's why it seemed fair that white people

conquered the world

 

they were the real invisible men

cause they could perch on top of a country

and say they weren't there

 

they could move through its neighborhoods

like mysterious aliens

with this difference:

 

in ufological lore

aliens often infiltrate a world

without its inhabitants knowing about it

 

but when white people invaded

everyone could see them

but themselves

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Jerome Sala’s books include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books),The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). His poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Boundary 2, Rolling Stone, The Best American Poetry series, and many others. His blog–on poetry, pop culture and everyday life, is espressobongo. [“A History of White People” originally appeared in Hanging Loose magazine (circa 2004) and Look Slimmer Instantly 2005.]

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                            Emma Amos, About Whitness, 1995. Oil and laser transfer on paper. Whitney Museum of American Art

"The Trouble with David Lehman Is" [poem by Ken Lauter]

(ed note: Today is David Lehman's birthday and this poem, which came in "over the transom," seems just right! Thank you Ken Lauter. sdl)

The Trouble with David Lehman Is

that he’s like a huge hurricane spun up
in the Atlantic Ocean of Erudition
or he’s just a fucking non-stop reader

who blows in on our Coast of Lethargy
with a new introduction to a new BAP
that shreds our sheds of poetic assumptions

and prejudices and leaves us gasping for
poems, poems, and more poems which
Mr. Lehman, thank god, promptly delivers.

                               -- Ken Lauter

Emily Fragos: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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The Sadness of Clothes

 

When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived

their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.

You talk to the clothes and explain that he is not coming back

 

as when he showed up immaculately dressed in slacks and plaid jacket

and had that beautiful smile on and you’d talk.

You’d go to get something and come back and he’d be gone.

 

You explain death to the clothes like that dream.

You tell them how much you miss the spouse

and how much you miss the pet with its little winter sweater.

 

You tell the worn raincoat that if you talk about it,

you will finally let grief out. The ancients forged the words

for battle and victory onto their shields and then they went out

 

and fought to the last breath. Words have that kind of power

you remind the clothes that remain in the drawer, arms stubbornly

folded across the chest, or slung across the backs of chairs,

 

or hanging inside the dark closet. Do with us what you will,

they faintly sigh, as you close the door on them.

He is gone and no one can tell us where.

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Emily Fragos is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize  from the Library of Congress, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry, Unrest, Saint Torch, Hostage, and Little Savage, and the editor of seven poetry anthologies for The Everyman’s Pocket Library: Music’s Spell, Art & Artists, The Great Cat, The Dance, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Poems of Gratitude, and Poems of Paris. She has also written numerous articles on music and dance, and served as guest poetry editor for Guernica. Her work has been translated into Spanish by Natalia Carbajosa and into Japanese by Yuka Urushibata. Emily Fragos has taught at Columbia, Yale, and NYU. She lives in New York City.

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                                                      Király Nikoletta, 1978. Hungarian Painter.

Sean Thomas Dougherty: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sean Thomas Dougherty, 2021. Photo by Melanie Rae

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Snowglobe

 

It is late and I want to sleep

but the two girls who work at the gas-station-convenience store

next door have gotten out of work and it’s 2AM and they are laughing

and scraping their cars and I want to peek out the window to see

them push their little plastic scrapers over their early 90s models

Fords and toss snowballs and talk about “Jaime just called” and “God girl, you’re

graced” and I wonder how they will spend the minimum wage

they made tonight, a slow night, with everyone staying in

because of the storm, whether Jaime will take the tall one

out (I recognize her voice from when I buy milk every other

day for my child) and whether she will say My Treat!  Or

maybe they will go to a bar, since they seem like they may

almost be that age, though I doubt it, it is so hard

for me to tell now, and they will drink beers

and dance and tenderly wipe the sweat

off of each other’s faces, but then I wonder about the other

girl, where will she go, now that they have started their cars

and I hear their engines about to roar but they don’t, only idle

and idle and I figure they are warming them to get the ice that was too hard

for their little plastic scrapers but they just sit there

so finally I rise from my chair and peek out my curtain

and am startled to see them both in the front seat of the tall girl’s car

and the other one, the one who I think is prettier and who says to my son,

hey sport when he comes in and once tugged his hat over his eyes, she is crying,

crying and saying something I can’t hear over the engine’s

idle, some song is playing something hard on their radio and the snow

is falling and the tall girl is staring up through the windshield and I can’t make out

her expression through the fog whether she is upset or wondering come on

how can I get out of this and get home cause I’m tired when I see her bend

over and take the other girl’s head in her hands and now I can’t get to bed

because it has been almost an hour and their cars are still outside idling

and they are still holding onto each other and the whole world is snowing all at once

like a snowglobe and everything has become fragile and holy, amen.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of twenty books, including the The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things, winner of the 2021 Jacar Press Poetry Prize. “Snowglobe” is taken from his collection, All You Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems, published by BOA Editions in 2014. His book The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018) received both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Housatonic Book Award from Western Connecticut State University. Over the decades he has worked in factories, in a newspaper plant, as an untenured college lecturer, and in a pool hall. He now teaches writing part-time for the Master of Fine Arts Program of WCSU, and works as a Med Tech and caregiver for people recovering from traumatic brain injuries in Erie, Pennsylvania. More info on Sean can be found here.

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Two girls in a burnt-out car, 1980s. Photo by Peter Anderson

"Poem with Horse and RB" [by Daniel Lawless]

This is the poem where no one drowns in summer
Or propranolol, gyves or sluices or falls in love with Sister Wendy.
No one pisses off a dock, no one is pixilated
Or doll-like, no one gets high and sticks up a bodega;
No one wakes this morning believing his or her life is like
The reassembled pieces of a torn up letter, nothing clots or tethers.
This is the poem where no one fingers
A violet scar on the back of a cowboy’s neck, no one pleasures
Herself in the rank nest of her father’s deer stand.
Nothing is pale, nothing shattered, nothing crevé or pálida.
This is the poem that does not collage, appropriate, ventriloquize
Frank O’Hara or holla,  that does not try to squeeze
Into the skinny jeans of erasures or pantoums.
This is the poem from which the ornate nomenclature of ornithology,
Minerology, cytomorphology and all the other ologies is absent
Together with the word “absent”; in which nothing scuds.  There are no tufts 
And the tin cans of romance remain undented.
This is the poem in which there are no apparently endless permutations
Of light and darkness, where constellations do not wheel
And sex is not like anything except perhaps a brief shriek down a forever
Recycling water slide.
This is the poem that does not invoke abstruse principles
Of particle physics to delineate certain properties of fifties hairdo’s,
Does not pretend to tap the phone lines of the dead
Or ingenuously indulge in the fantasy of the soul.
This is you’ll be glad to know the poem bereft of sun-spunk.
That does not keen the passing of passenger trains
Or Mr. Furman my fifth grade teacher.
This is the poem without scent, without footsteps.
In other words this is the poem that closes the door
And locks itself in behind it.
No castanets, no pie, no drones or luminescent,
No hickies  or Sweet Jesus, no animals whatsoever.
Well, maybe one. Because how strange, how cynical and impoverished
Would a poem have to be to refuse admittance to a horse,
And while we’re at it while he’s still around, say,
Good old Robert Bly to see it with such clear eyes,
The white flake of snow that that has just fallen on its mane?

from The American Journal of Poetry  Drawing of Daniel Lawless by Nin Andrews.

Sally Wen Mao: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Inviolacy

 

Tonight, we shrink for no one.

           Tonight, we are afraid of nothing.

                       Not torpedoes, not the long

 

bodies of submarines or tiger sharks

             that circle beneath us. Not wilt, not tornados,

                         not the dark camps moored to erasure.

 

We will reel them in, shear their teeth.

               Their husks stew the sea. Tonight, awaken me

                            from this dream of apple blossoms, we’ll follow

 

the kingfisher downstream, forget what we’re

            confronting. It’s better this way. To mythologize:

                        city of endless crayon, endless sod;

 

boy riding wild horse in Mongolia.

            Chimeras cannot hurt us

                        even if they were once matter, pestle

 

grinding mortar. Even the abattoir

            feels unreal— it’s unlikely that we’ll ever

                        witness: creature turning

 

into meat. The duck hangs whole

            in the restaurant window. We believe

                        it is whole. When we order it plump,

 

it is cut to pieces in the back room.

            Even invincible, we envy the luxury:

                        a room to bleed in, break apart accordingly.

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Sally Wen Mao is the author of Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). The recipient of an NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, she currently lives in New York. 

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                     Zhang Xiaogang, The Dark Trilogy Fear: Meditation, Sorrow, 1989-1990. Oil and collage on canvas, in three panels.

Greg Masters: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greg Masters. Photo by Kate Previte

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At 20 minutes, 37 seconds

 

At 20 minutes, 37 seconds

into track one of a box-set

reissue of the Miles Davis Quintet

recording “Freedom Jazz Dance,”

a previously unissued rehearsal take,

the raspy-voiced bandleader instructs

drummer Tony Williams to play triplets.

Up to this point in the ensemble’s

working out of the tune, he’d,

uncharacteristically, 

been lagging, playing as if he were

still with Jackie McLean,

accompanying with a ring-a-ding-ding

on the ride cymbal.

But after first working out a bass part for

Ron Carter and a few run-throughs—

Wayne Shorter certainly had the head down

and Herbie Hancock seemed assured

with splashes of chords—

Miles instructs his teenaged drummer

to lay down a triplet pattern and, after a

few attempts, he hits on the pulsating

underlying momentum that, still,

50-plus years after recording,

transforms the seven-minute

master track into a miracle.

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Greg Masters co-edited the poetry magazine Mag City from 1977–85. In 1977–78, along with a crew of poet comrades, he produced a cable TV show, Public Access Poetry. From 1980–83, he edited The Poetry Project Newsletter. Over the past decade, he has issued 10 books of his writing from his imprint Crony Books. “At 20 minutes, 37 seconds” is from It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This (Crony Books, 2020).

[To hear the track referred to in the poem, go here.]

[For more on Tony Williams, click here.]

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"Mount Washington Kroger is Out of Bananas”

"Mount Washington Kroger is Out of Bananas”

Yes, we have no bananas today,
but Cheetos and nacho chips—                                                                                                         
seven different brands—and instant
mashed potatoes complete with sodium                                                                                                  
acid pyrophosphate, and sodium bisulfite.
We have gummi bears and red cinnamon                                                                                         
candy hearts.  Ranch dressing, a whole row
of plastic-wrapped, sliced meat. Line up
for your diacetyl, your free glutamic acid,
your butylated hydroxyanisole.
We have everything but bananas,
those bright phallic bunches, those wrapped
wands of fruit-meat, potassium
hunger bombs, soft, sweet monkey crack.

Gylys writes:
"The poem emerged after my friend Jennifer sent the quotation that is the title as a writing prompt. It’s a bit of a playful rant against processed food.  I wrote it with that old Louis Prima song, “Yes, We Have No Bananas” running through my head.  so the playful energy probably emerged from that tune as much as from the quote."

The poem first appeared in the Crab Orchard Review in March 2019, and then in Gylys's most recent book, Body Braille (Iris Press, 2000). The poem will also asppear in the forthcoming book The Conversation Turns to Wide-Mouthed Jars.

"B-Flat Elegy" [by Stanley Moss]

Stanley tells us he wrote this poem as an elegy for Richard Howard. "The poem is not a home run, it's a bunt, and I'm running as fast as I can to first base."

B-Flat Elegy

Three cheers and chairs for Richard who died,
the cause was complications of dementia,
Finders keepers, losers weepers,
along the Seine, the Thames, the Sligo and Hudson.
God knows why it makes a poet friend recall
a kind, contrary Irish lady, Bridget Boland, 
film writer, novelist, and gardener,
my close, close, close friend
I never slept with,
my devout Roman Catholic friend
lost her faith, couldn’t bear to hear music
for some reason hidden from her.

Incidentally I cheer
for a graduate student librarian,
Willa, whose mother is a horticulturist.
Her daughter can’t stand or abide flowers, 
ugly roses, tulips, or violets.
I bet God loves Mr. Auden
who received a letter from his mother
after she died, he could not read,
it would have broken his heart forever.

Listening to Mozart and Bach, I think about
a lady who lost her father, husband, and children
at Dachau. She made out okay, but fell down,
got torn apart when she heard music.
I refuse to defend myself.
Bridget, my Irish lady born in London,
and the death camp lady
were somehow sisters. It’s strange.
Cheer if it pleases you, cheer
for the joy of not remembering your name.
Notre-Dame is on fire, in Madrid the Gran Via
snakes to the Palace Hotel.

Unkempt hair
almost rhymes with dementia.
In the Ukraine a loudspeaker tells the static news:
a boy, six years old, watched his mother raped
for two days by Russian troops.
The six year old son’s hair turned gray.
I hide feelings from myself
my inappropriate, demented preoccupations,
I mourn for a dozen eggs,  Richard, and Bridget.

-- Stanley Moss. Photo credit: Bill Hayward.

Mary Ruefle: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Ruefle, photo by Hannah Ensor, 2017

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Little Stream

 

My heart was bright and shining

like a lobster boiling in water.

And then I was just a child

eating the leftover snow.

I’d lost my mittens and my belly button

was as good as gone, meaning

I couldn’t be born again, ever,

so I sat by a little stream

with my eyes closed.

I saw a woman carrying a child’s coffin

on her head. I saw a rat so friendly

he shined my shoes with his tongue.

I saw my mother leave the room, saying

“Now I am going to go drink some vinegar.”

I saw a surfer drink a wuthering wave

and go down gently into that good night.

I saw the daffodils praying together.

I saw a hummingbird cry out

for a comma between decades.

I saw the quick trimming the hair on their necks

and the wicks of their packaged feet.

I saw something small and in constant danger

of being blown away, like pepper.

I saw a monk set an umbrella on fire, for fun.

I saw an old man dwelling in a tiny fishing village

with a tangible vibrancy that was truly inspiring.

I saw a Venus flytrap eat a cheeseburger.

I saw my struggles were coming to a close.

I saw I would grow so old I would stop wondering

what life on Napa Rui was like, and forget

the first apple tree was in Turkey.

I had the constant feeling something of vital importance

had been lost sight of, was perhaps even gone.

It’s hard to say hello to every atom.

I got to know protozoans, though.

It took three days for my umbilical cord

to swim past. At the end,

the tattered carnation of my navel

seemed most like me, so I threw it in

and at once my eyelids opened,

never to close again.

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Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate. [“Little Stream” from Dunce. ©2019. Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books.]

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                        Hieronymus Bosch, The Concert in the Egg, ca. 1475