The Best American Poetry

Gregory Pardlo: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Raisin

 

I dragged my twelve-year-old cousin

to see the Broadway production of A Raisin

in the Sun because the hip-hop mogul

and rapping bachelor, Diddy, played

the starring role. An aspiring rapper gave

my cousin his last name and the occasional child

support so I thought the boy would geek to see a pop

hero in the flesh as Walter Lee. My wife was newly

pregnant, and I was rehearsing, like Diddy

swapping fictions, surrendering his manicured

thug persona for a more domestic performance.

My cousin mostly yawned throughout the play.

Except the moment Walter Lee's tween son stiffened

on stage, as if rapt by the sound of a roulette ball.

Scene: No one breathes as Walter Lee vacillates,

uncertain of obsequity or indignation after Lindner offers

to buy the family out of the house they've purchased

in the all-white suburb, Walter might kneel to accept,

but he senses the tension in his son's gaze. I was thinking,

for real though, what would Diddy do? "Get rich

or die trying," 50 Cent would tell us. But my father would

sing like Ricky Scaggs, "Don't get above your raisin',"

when as a kid I vowed to be a bigger man than him.

That oppressive fruit dropped heavy as a medicine

ball in my lap meant to check my ego, and I imagined

generations wimpling in succession like the conga

marching raisins that sang Marvin's hit song. Silly,

I know. Outside the theater, my cousin told me

when Diddy was two, they found his hustler dad

draping a steering wheel in Central Park,

a bullet in his head. I shared what I knew of dreams

deferred and Marvin Gaye. (When asked if he loved

his son, Marvin Sr. answered, "Let's just say I didn't

dislike him.") Beneath the bling of many billion

diodes I walked beside the boy through Times Square

as if anticipating a magic curtain that would rise,

but only one of us would get to take a bow.

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Gregory Pardlo is the author of Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem, winner of the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden, and a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. His third poetry collection, Spectral Evidence, is forthcoming in 2024.

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Tara Borin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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List of Duties in a Subarctic Dive Bar

 

If the temperature outside is twenty-five below

            or colder

leave all faucets running and flush the toilets

            hourly.

 

R. has a two-drink limit. A. likes a coaster. Remember,

            Mrs. O. takes a chilled pilsner glass

with her bottle of Blue. Never

            keep her waiting.

 

If someone reveals residential school horrors,

            listen with your whole body.

 

If a customer becomes unresponsive,

            and overdose is suspected,

 

call the nursing station, then administer the naloxone

            kept behind the bar.

Be sure to write everything down in the incident book.

            This is your therapy.

 

At the end of each shift, pour a kettle of boiling water

            into the ice well drain. It keeps down the bioslime.

 

Wrap your cash in the blue vinyl bag and feed it

            to the Snake.

 

You are entitled to one staff drink. Choose wisely.

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Tara Borin is a poet and writer living in the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Dawson City, Yukon. Their debut full-length poetry collection, The Pit, was published by Nightwood Editions in March 2021; their poetry has been anthologized in the League of Canadian Poets Feminist Caucus in Conversation chapbook (LCP Press, 2022), Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021) and Best New Poets in Canada 2018 (Quattro Books), as well as published in various literary journals both online and in print. Tara is the 2022 winner of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Borealis Prize: Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution.

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      Emily Rapport, Wednesday Night, 30x40, aqua-oil on canvas, ca. 2004. Used by permission of the artist.   

J. Tarwood: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Pause in Our Divorce

 

Tomorrow, we start again,

those leaflets on the blood of the lamb

swirling about my blockade of shot glasses.

Like a coffin with its lid kicked open,

our trailer will shake

when I blast out the door,

stuffed tigers tumbling from crooked shelves

to claw the carpet bought at Goodwill.

Apple tea in hand,

you will watch me tramp that gravel path

smeared with snow, my breath

a fist trembling open

once my back’s to you. But tonight

is a butterfly on our bayonet,

you in the rocker, wet black hair hanging

like a nun’s habit; and me wedged

in the easy chair, a whiskey-stained Othello

in my lap. We wonder how we’ll end,

like those enemy soldiers in World War I

who played football in no man’s land before Verdun.

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J. Tarwood has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. After a life spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, he currently lives in China, and has published six books: The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And for the Mouth a Flower, What the Waking See, The Sublime Way, and The World at Hand. 

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                                                                  A re-enactment of the 1914 Christmas Truce

Nicky Beer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Marlene Dietrich Plays Her Musical Saw for the Troops, 1944

 

See how the silver snaps in a lone spot,

the sound flirting with coyotes,

castrated foghorns, distant siren.

Observe how that polished body curves

in the strategy of lights, how its voice

is like a parody of mourning,

and so even more mournful

immersed in its high-pitched joke.

Admit that some other instrument

would fail—wood-honeyed curve,

funneled brass—when what’s needed

now is a tongue with the chill of steel.

Watch how the thighs hold that music

steady, how the dust and moths draw

closer to the song, a song that’s dying

even as it hovers in the dark,

a lost mouth moaning vowels

that are too close to your name.

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Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022). Her first two books, The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) and The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015), were both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.

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                                              Marlene Dietrich, by Luana-Beatrice Lazar, 2014.

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Phillip B. Williams: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Epithalamium

 

A kiss. Train ride home from a late dinner,

City Hall and document signing. Wasn’t cold

but we cuddled in an empty car, legal.

Last month a couple of guys left a gay bar

and were beaten with poles on the way

to their car. No one called them faggot

so no hate crime’s documented. A beat down

is what some pray for, a pulse left to count.

We knew we weren’t protected. We knew

our rings were party favors, gold to steal

the shine from. We couldn’t protect us,

knew the law wouldn’t know how. Still, his

beard across my brow, the burn of his cologne.

When the train stopped, the people came on.

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Phillip B Williams is a Chicago native and author of Mutiny (Penguin, 2021), winner of the American Book Award, and Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He received a 2017 Whiting Award and was a Helen Putman fellow for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is founding faculty of Randolph College low res MFA.

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                     Vintage photo of two Black men at the beach, from the Flickr exhibition Hidden in the Open, curated by Trent Kelley

Melissa Studdard: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher

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A Little Bit Rain

 

It seemed this bicycle was faster

when I first started. Now the afterlife

is gaining on me, and every billboard I pass

 

has the same five words. I know

you’d like to know what they say, but

if you’re ever going to build up those quads,

 

you’ll need to enter this race yourself.

I even hired the Rockettes to adorn the finish line

with their legs. All for you. That’s how much

 

I love you. The moon used to be yellow,

but I painted it green for your green-loving eyes,

then left a pack of cigarettes and two aspirin

 

on the nightstand. Maybe don’t get so drunk

next time, okay? I like it when you do that thing

with your tongue. It makes me want to get

 

matching tattoos. We could translate our bodies

into a new language. Your mouth a little

bit summer. My mouth a little bit rain. 

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Melissa Studdard’s most recent poetry collection is Dear Selection Committee. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and The Guardian and has garnered awards such as The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Tom Howard Prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

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                                     Samantha Thompson, Back stage--Radio City Rockettes, oil on canvas, 2022

Tony Towle: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In Progress

 

We adjust the background

so that I am still in a forest,

but the traditional kind,

not one made of cement and glass,

but composed primarily of wood

and auxiliary vegetal matter,

aerated with avian sonorities,

and partly veiled by more “air products”:

innocuous mist or fog —

for there is such a generous

spacing between predators

that it would make our Paleolithic relatives,

wherever they might be watching from,

think that living in our world

would be a safe and wonderful thing.

 

I pause in the mist or fog, because

it is a good place for retrieving ancient data

to supplement the present with;

that is, what’s left of the present

after the morning news

has finished most of it off —

 

and I found something: When Phil Niekro

retired from the Atlanta Braves

there was no longer anyone

playing in major league baseball

older than I was. He achieved

this distinction in 1987             

and will never relinquish it.

 

What has happened since then?

 

Honestly, I don’t keep track of him.

Oh, you mean to me? Well, lots of things,

really, but I’ll get to them later,

since I’ve often admonished myself

for living in the past, although

I only did that when living in the past.    

The Phil Niekro discovery

came through one of the newspapers

I perused during the eons of down time

consequent to proofreading at Forbes,

where in two years my only noteworthy

“catch” was pointing out that Luxemburg

was not a principality, as written—a synonym

for a minuscule polity—but a grand duchy.

In the following week, while

resting imperceptibly on my laurels,

I missed a typo so egregious that my luster

was tarnished beyond reclamation.

 

So back to the present, or what’s

left of the present after the evening news

has chewed it to pieces —

but there was not a word

about the Somali pirates

who attempted to seize my poems

and hold them hostage.

 

What were your poems doing

in the Strait of Hormuz?

 

You mean the Gulf of Aden.

You may well ask.

I wish I were at liberty to say.

                        *

So that’s as far as I got with the first draft on my laptop,

while sitting unnoticed for an hour in the shoe store

except by the guy in the chair on the other side of the aisle,

who was keeping an eye on me until my contact showed up—

2 o’clock was that approaching hour—and then he abruptly left

a minute before she, the no-nonsense-taking Mrs. Blackstone,

walked in from a long-past-due assignment,

and when I mentioned the departed observer, she said

that he wasn’t one of hers; and I looked down at my watch  

to evade the stare that italicized my blunder,

and saw it was a quarter to three—I had just lost 45 minutes!

but in fact it was 55 years that I needed to go back and fix.

Those alterations will never fit in the space at the end of the file,

though they set off reflections enough to beguile the obfuscating eye.

                                                                                     

  2019-20

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Tony Towle began writing poetry in 1960. His connection to the New York School dates from 1963, when he took workshops at the New School with Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara. Since then, he has published thirteen books of poetry, most recently Noir (Hanging Loose Press, 2017); as well as a book of prose: Memoir 1960-1963 (Faux Press, 2001). My First Three Books (Vehicle Editions, 2020), combines an interview, photographs, and a CD of Towle reading some of his early work. More of Towle’s poetry, interviews, readings, etc., can be found at his website and at Penn Sound.

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                                                                         Vintage photo of men in shoe store

Nin Andrews: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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If anyone reads these poems

 

they will think they know what kind of person I am. They will, I am certain,

imagine me as someone else, someone I can never be—simply because I have

written poems about you love, and about orgasms, and the poems about love

and orgasms will do that to them, and to me.  They will make me appear to be

the kind of person who is in the position to write about our orgasms, who

knows all about these orgasms: their songs and dances and secret languages.

Some might go so far as to compare me to Noah Webster, claiming that just as

he compiled an entire opus of words, carefully defining and distinguishing each

one’s particular origin, pronunciation, spelling, and proper usage, so I have

collected an opus of orgasms. And I will have to admit, with surprise, that even

if I do not imagine myself to be that sort of person, even if I don’t consider

myself an author, much less an author of an opus of orgasms, even if I no

longer want to converse with orgasms, the orgasms continue to seek me out, as

orgasms will, as if needing my blessing, as if I and only I can hear their pleas,

their wishes, their last breaths.

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Nin Andrews’ poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, and four editions of Best American Poetry. The author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length poetry collections, she has won several awards including two Ohio individual artist grants and the Ohioana 2016 Award for poetry. She is also the editor of a book of translations of the Belgian poet, Henri Michaux, Someone Wants to Steal My Name. Her most recent book, The Last Orgasm, was published by Etruscan Press in 2020.

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                      Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866–1932), After the Ball (or Young Decadent)

Doug Lang: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doug Lang at the Rodin Museum in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann

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Lang’s Special Fortune Cookies

 

Nothing special is coming your way.

Your luck will not change today.

Your sense of humor is of no use to you.

No one is thinking of you this evening.

Your determination has gotten you where you are today.

You will always be surrounded.

If you see someone, why not have doubts?

You have no sense and you don’t know what time it is.

Nothing in this one.

 

Please ignore the music. it is not for you.

If you stop looking for what you want, you will be sure to find it and lose interest in it.

Everything will now come your way and go right past you.

You do not need to be patient anymore: do not think, do not listen, do not heed signs.

You should regard delays and setbacks as normal.

Versatility is beyond your reach.

A good home is too expensive.

 

You are unable to show your true self to others. You have no true self.

You will conquer all obstacles and achieve world domination, but first you must shave your mustache.

You will notice that nothing has changed in the near future.

You are capable of repeating everything endlessly.

Don’t put your egg in one basket.

A true friend always walks away when you start whining.

A small house will not hold as much as a big one. This should not be a problem for you.

You have a superficial understanding of the arts and music.

You will never forget a friend who owes you.

You will go a long way.

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Doug Lang was from Swansea in Wales. He came to Washington DC in 1973, the year that his novel, Freaks, was published by New English Library. He ran a now legendary reading series at Folio Books in Dupont Circle from January 1976 to June 1978. His erudite command of literature, cinema, music, and visual art, along with his wit, intellectual generosity, and good will, made him the most popular professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, where he taught writing for 37 years. His most recent book is In the Works, Selected Poems 1973–2013, from DC’s Edge Books. An earlier collection, dérangé, was published by Primary Writing in DC in 2013. For more of Doug’s poems, see the Beltway Poetry Quarterly. For his 2008 post on the poetry of the 1970s, click here.  His film blog from 2007 is also worth checking out. For a multi-part, six-hour conversation between Terence Winch and Doug Lang, visit PennSound. The Doug Lang Papers are held by the Burns Library at Boston College.  [editor’s note: Doug passed away on 22 November 2022. Today, April 11, 2023, would have been his 82nd birthday. This post first appeared in October of 2020.] 

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   Doug Lang with Blaise Cendrars book in Paris, 1996. Photo by Sandra Rottmann.

Paul Hoover: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Driver’s Song

 

I shall never reach Danville, Ohio,

Danville distant and lonely.

 

Black car, small moon,

in the back seat beer.

Because I’ve forgotten the roads

I shall never reach Danville, Ohio.

 

Over the plains, through Indiana,

where I was lonely also.

Black car, yellow moon.

My dead father keeps watch over me

from an upstairs window.

 

What a long way from California

and in what a fast car—

invisible to the soul.

 

Ahead I see death moving slowly on the road.

I know I will touch her clothing

before I ever reach Danville, Ohio.

 

Danville, distant and lonely.

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Paul Hoover's most recent poetry books include O, and Green: New and Selected Poems (2021) and The Book of Unnamed Things (2018).  With Mexican poet Maria Baranda, he co-edited and translated The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz (Milkweed Editions, 2021).  Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco University, he also edited and, in part, translated, The New World Written:  Selected Poems of Maria Baranda (Yale University Press, 2021).

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    Old abandoned farmhouse, Danville, Ohio

Natalie Shapero: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sunshower

 

Some people say the devil is beating

his wife. Some people say the devil

is pawing his wife. Some people say

the devil is doubling down on an overall

attitude of entitlement toward

the body of his wife. Some people

say the devil won’t need to be sorry,

as the devil believes that nothing

comes after this life. Some people say

that in spite of the devil’s public,

longstanding, and meticulously

logged disdain for the health

and wholeness of his wife, the devil

spends all day, every day, insisting

grandly and gleefully on his general

pro-woman ethos, that the devil truly

considers himself to be an unswayed

crusader: effortlessly magnetic,

scrupulous, gracious, and, in spite of

the devil’s several advanced degrees,

a luminous autodidact. Some people

say calm down; this is commonplace.

Some people say calm down;

this is very rare. Some people say

the sun is washing her face. Some

people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.

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Natalie Shapero is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Popular Longing. 

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             The Devil Beating His Wife, photograph by Brian Wallace, taken in Pasadena, Maryland

 

Anniversary of Walt Whitman's Death [Terence Winch]

131 years ago today, Walt Whitman died at age 72. 

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Here is one of his most famous exhortations, from the preface to Leaves of Grass:

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

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Many years ago, I worked at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, located in the historic Patent Office Building in D.C., the very same place where Whitman himself tended to wounded Civil War soldiers. You could sense his presence there. The museum owns the 1875 chalk on paper drawing, shown above, of Whitman by Thomas Wilmer Dewing. The drawing is not often on display, but I would regularly ask the curators to retrieve it and let me have a look. I've never known another drawing to have such life to it. 

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For a reading of the above text, watch this video:

 

Maurice Manning: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Steve Cody

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The Slate

 

Way back, the men had funny names

like Tiny, who was anything

but small, and Tiny’s son was called

Tiny Too or Double T,

and Tiny’s wife who was big and mean

was known as Honey, and everybody

called Honey’s sister, Birdie, and Birdie,

who couldn’t talk much less whistle,

was beautiful but touched in the head,

so Birdie lived with them way down

in Fog Town Holler, beside

the green waters of Shoestring Branch,

and only the land was rightly named,

for it was foggy half the day down there

and the branch was skinny and whipped across

the mossy roots and rocks like a snake;

but by the time I came along,

Tiny and Honey were already planted

and Birdie was bent-over and old

and Tiny Too was getting on

and sleeping in the chicken coop

with fourteen chickens and a rooster

named Mister Sump, and Sump was short

for Something, and Tiny Too just said

he liked the company, and besides

he had to guard the chickens against

Redleg Johnny who was a fox,

because Mister Sump was only good

at making chickens, and Tiny Too

would have winked about that sort of thing,

and all of this—I learned it young,

when I was just a scratch of a boy

and I skipped down Shoestring Branch

to Fog Town Holler and found

Old Tiny Too, who told me where

I was from, and who my people were,

and how they named the world around them.

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Maurice Manning's eighth book of poems, Snakedoctor, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2023.  His fourth book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, and his first book, Lawrence Booth's Books of Visions, was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.  A former Guggenheim fellow, Manning lives with his family on a small farm in Kentucky and teaches at Transylvania University.

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                      Angelo Maria Crivelli, Animals Scene. 17th-Century. Oil on canvas.

 

 

Joanna Fuhrman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Poetry Reading

 

The mustached cowboy-hatted thrice-divorced

old-man poet famous for sleeping with flaxen-haired

(or was it flax-seed eating) quote-unquote

nubile graduate students is at the podium

reading his poem personifying a wedding dress—

how sad it is, all alone in a dusty closet, how

it longs to be laid on a funeral pyre or set ablaze

next to the replica of Plath and Hughes’ robin’s-

egg-blue Terra Cruiser gas range, or was it     

the neglected moonlit member of the old man

poet “breaking into blossom” or recoiling

from the memory of time passing faster than

the dust can settle on his brand-new Honda

Civic LX or ranch-style remodeled sunroom?

The audience is trying to remember what

ingredients they need to pick up for tomorrow’s

paella, what that email said about the time

of that meeting with Suzanne about assessment.

They are alternately trying to remember

if they remembered to order that Minecraft book

for a nephew’s 8^th birthday party and worrying

if their Facebook-level “friends” notice that

their purple cat socks clash with their scuffed

burgundy clogs, and at a certain point, the poem

has gone on for so long no one can tell if

the old-man poet is still personifying that

wedding dress or if a headless wedding dress

has taken his place at the podium. We look up

from the cell phones we are hiding in our laps,

and there it stands—smoky and lacy

in front of the glowing microphone

in the corner of the basement bookstore,

104 miles from the nearest artist colony,

the flaming dress is burning like a 12-hour

candle, or like the lost poetry of an elderly

Rimbaud written on the slats of sunken ships,

and the dress itself has grown a mouth

and in the middle of its flames its lips

belt out a new poem, about fake

cowboy poets, how sad they are, how alone.

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Joanna Fuhrman is an assistant teaching professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era. Her next book, Data Mind, a collection of surreal, darkly comic prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. After publishing with them since she was a teen, she recently became editor at Hanging Loose Press.

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                                          Lorette C. Luzajic, The Blood Jet Is Poetry---Sylvia Plath, acrylic, collage on canvas, 2022

Lawrence Raab: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Original Sin

 

That was one idea my mother

always disliked. She preferred her god

to be reasonable, like Emerson or Thoreau

without their stranger moments.

Even the Old Testament God’s sudden

angers and twisted ways of getting

what he wanted she could accept

as metaphor. But original sin

was different. Plus no one agreed

if it was personal, meaning

all Adam’s fault, or else some kind

of temporary absence of the holy,

which was Adam’s fault as well.

In any case, it made no sense

that we’d need to be saved before

we’d even had the chance

to be wrong. Yes, eventually everyone

falls into error, but when my sister and I

were babies she could see we were perfect,

as we opened our eyes and gazed up at her

with what she took for granted as love,

long before either of us knew the word

and what damage it could cause.

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Lawrence Raab is the author of ten books of poems, including Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and named one of the Ten Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times, and What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993), a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award. His latest collection is April at the Ruins (Tupelo, 2022). [“Original Sin” appears in Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts].

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           Lucas Cranach the Elder, Detail of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, 1530, Oil on Panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

                                                                

Leah Umansky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In My Next Life, I Want to Be an Ad Man

 

I want to be donned in somehow. Donned in everything. Donned in

the forgotten and the ecclesiastics of sex. Drape me in the charged. Drape me

in the raptured. Drape me in meaning and keep it private. I want two

lives: one in the city and one in the country. Two women: a blonde and a

redhead. Drape me in wealth. Drape me in booze. Don me in diamonds

and fur. Drape a secretary, here, and then, there.

 

[Executive is the word that comes to the lips

and they smile for you, sister.]

 

Don me in designer suits. Don me in a new age. Don me in what’s coming.

Drape the future round my shoulders.  Drape the next life across my lap.

Drape me in the madness.  Don me in the twoness of passion. Don me in

pieces of last, of force; pieces of shaken and possible then drape me

in manhood.   Drape me in machinery and steel. Don me in utterly and plush

utterings and, [do I sound like I’m stuttering?] Make me look good; the

world is dangerous.

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Leah Umansky is the author of three books of poems, most recently Of Tyrant, forthcoming from The Word Works in 2024. She is currently working on a hybrid-memoir called Delicate Machine, an exploration of womanhood, hope, and heart in the face of grief and a global pandemic. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in such places as The New York Times, Poetry, The Bennington Review, and Guesthouse. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.

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                                                                                      Don Draper, collage by Borbay

 

Roger Reeves: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Cyclops and Balthazar

 

I was not a very good dog in my former life. I bit

My owner, James, often. When he prayed, I howled

His one eye opening. He said I sounded like a cyclops

That had fallen into a ravine. I heard raven.  As I said,

I was not a very good dog, more so a ravine

Bringing the howling darkness to my owner’s ears.

A raven that took flight only when watching the other ravens

Lift from the pines like scabs ripped open to reveal

What life runneth under. Towards the end of my life,

A donkey with a white flower and a crown of leaves

Befriended me at the edge of a field. At night,

His head moved “like a veil across the stars”

Revealing for me, for the first time, the stars.

Balthazar, the donkey, once, asked me if I ever thought

Of the consciousness of trees, their reflection

In the river. Or if there was an etiquette to dying.

I said, “stop that. You sound like a man

With his back to heaven.” He said, “someone will

Always have their back to heaven,” then walked

Into a pasture of sheep and died. “Goliath,

Goliath,” said the sheep’s bells around their necks.

“No,” I said. “Balthazar. It is Balthazar that has died.”

And when I called out to him behind the door of the house

Of the dead, the night called back in my own voice.

And I, like a good dog, ran toward it with both eyes closed.

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Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a 2015 Whiting Award, among other honors. Best Barbarian, his second book of poems, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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                                        Olayanju Dada, At the Lagos Dog-Show, acrylic and oil painting on cardboard panel, 2015

Sarah Arvio: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sponge

 

Soul like a dirty sponge that soaked up all the dark bits

from yours   all messed up and mixed in

 

with the dirt of the days   the old hairs and hatefulness

Oh my god I knew there was hate in the human world

 

but I didn’t know it was the job of my soul

to clean it up   How can I clean it up if my soul

 

is the sponge sponging it up   In the end   it doesn’t

go anywhere except into my dirtier and dirtier soul 

 

And I say   well   crying will clean it up   but then I’m

bent over crying because my beautiful sponge of a soul

 

that lay in the depths of a cool warm aquablue tropical

sea with little fishes flitting about in their exquisite

 

jewel colors   and rays of sunshine raying through 

has been used to sop up an angry man’s leftover

 

cruelty   Yes   cruel does sound like jewel and there

should be a jewelty   How can I squeeze it out   I'll

 

need a new sponge   but I can’t throw out my soul and if

each tear is one drop of an aquablue tropical sea       

 

maybe I can cry back my sea   It’s not so easy

to clean a soul   some say weeks   and some say centuries

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Sarah Arvio’s new book of poems is Cry Back My Sea (2021), which has been called “an ode to love.”  Earlier books are Visits from the Seventh (2002), Sono: Cantos (2006), and night thoughts: 70 poems & notes from an analysis (2013), which is a hybrid of poetry, essay, and memoir.   Her translation of poems and a play by Federico García Lorca, Poet in Spain (Knopf, 2017) has been received to wide acclaim. Among her honors are the Rome Prize and fellowships from the Bogliasco and Guggenheim foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Poems have appeared in such places as Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Boston Review, as well as in many anthologies, including two editions of The Best American Poetry.  A poem from Poet in Spain appears this winter in 100 Poems That Matter, curated by the Academy of American Poets.  Arvio worked for many years as a conference translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland.  A graduate of the Columbia School of the Arts and a lifelong New Yorker, she now teaches poetry and literary translation.

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Michael Mark: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet

 

For the fourth time my mother

asks, “How many children

do you have?” I’m beginning

 

to believe my answer,

“Two, Mom,” is wrong. Maybe

the lesson is they are not mine, 

 

not owned by me, and 

she is teaching me about

my relationship with her. 

 

I wash my dish and hers. 

She washes them again. I ask why.

She asks why I care.

 

Before bed she unlocks and opens

the front door. While she sleeps

I close and lock it. She gets up. Unlocks it.

 

“What I have no one wants,” she says.

I nod. She nods.

Are we agreeing?

 

My shrunken guru says she was up all night

preparing a salad for my breakfast.

She serves me an onion.

 

I want her to make French toast

for me like she used to. 

I want to tell her about my pain,

 

and I want her to make it go away.

I want the present to be as good as

the past she does not remember.

 

I toast white bread for her, butter it,

cut it in half. I eat a piece of onion. 

She asks me why I’m crying.

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Michael Mark is the author of the chapbook Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, which won the 2022 Rattle Prize. His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, The New York Times, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Southern Review, The Sun, and elsewhere. His two books of stories are Toba (Atheneum) and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). [This poem originally appeared in The Sun.]

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              Attributed to Vincenzo Campi (1530-1591), Old Peasant Woman with a Distaff and Spindle

Bianca Stone: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Daniel Schechner

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Set Designer

 

Once, Mark Leidner talked me into doing set design,

unpaid, in the Poconos

where I would be forever traumatized

by the overpopulation of deer,

growths on their bodies and bald patches,

limping and scarred from being hit by cars,

and the one the crew called “jawbone”

that kept coming around

because its jawbone was hanging off, unusable, from its head

while the body wasted away

and I brought out mashed potatoes

that it lapped up with a long tongue.

 

We had to fire the creepy sound guy

who was clearly on drugs

and I found a big plastic gallon of Dewar’s                                    

in the Airbnb cupboard

and a guitar

and got drunk alone on the deck of the cabin

amazed no one would join me.

I woke in the middle of the night

for my usual routine of self-hatred

until I realized how excruciating it all was

and instead wrote down on the set schedule

“remember how good it feels to be good to yourself”

carrying it around with me ever since.

Hoping I will.

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Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else's Wedding Vows (Tin House Book / Octopus Books, 2014), The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. She hosts Ode & Psyche Podcast, and lives in Vermont.

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                                    Detail from the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries (medieval French; now hanging in the V&A, London)