The Best American Poetry

Kaveh Akbar: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kaveh Akbar. Photo by Paige Lewis

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Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

 

I can’t even remember my name, I who remember

so much—football scores, magic tricks, deep love

so close to God it was practically religious. 

 

When you fall asleep in that sort of love

you wake up with bruises on your neck. I don’t

have drunks, sirs, I have adventures. Every day

 

my body follows me around asking

for things. I try to think louder, try

to be brilliant, wildly brilliant. We all want

 

the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,

like the first man to hear a parrot speak) but we live

on an enormous flatness floating between

 

two oceans. Sometimes you just have to leave

whatever’s real to you, you have to clomp

through fields and kick the caps off

 

all the toadstools. Sometimes

you have to march all the way to Galilee

or the literal foot of God himself before you realize

 

you’ve already passed the place where

you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember

the being afraid, only that it came to an end.

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Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (Penguin Classics 2022). In 2024, Knopf will publish Martyr!, Kaveh’s first novel.

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                                         Fiona Banner, Simpleton, Simpleton, Simpleton, oil on found painting, 77 x 127.5cm, 2021.

                              

 

Renia White: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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sometimes I flash forward and cry

 

I am afraid to have this thought.

a 1.5 bedroom apartment in a city I can bear,

metallic hangers and art featuring dark girls,
their faces obscured by large flowers
and overgrown fruit

a bed so heavy it startles the sinking hips

a man with my feet in his hands
who half-coos, “I bet you were hard
to find before I found you”

all the things glimmering,

the man’s eyes growling,

each fruit unripe

everything wishing
to be unfound

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Renia White is a poet and instructor originally from Maryland. Her first book, Casual Conversation, was named a BOA Editions, Ltd. Blessing the Boats Selection. She earned her BA from Howard University and her MFA from Cornell. She teaches writing in NYC, where she lives. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Recluse, Southern Indiana Review, Slice, and elsewhere. 

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                                              Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Drown, 2012, acrylic, colored pencil, and solvent transfer on paper. 

Daniel Wolff: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Drift of the World

 

You are not forgotten. How could so large a part of us ever be?

When you left this life, a marker dropped. Time swirled slowly past, and who

we remembered you as worked itself free. But even if current carried your memory

off, tide brought you back. We forgot a little, then remembered more. And through

that give and take, you stayed right here. The only thing that washed downstream

was the way we remembered you. All we need is to narrow our vision—

focus on what matters—and back you come, perfect, as if in a dream,

your one hand lifted in a wave. You remember us! And we have forgotten

nothing, nothing. How could we? If we forgot you, we would be lost. Never

mind that other shore—where we supposedly go and you are supposed to be

waiting. In this world, this world, we have to have you, have to remember.

Why won’t life stop? Why must it always pull everything, even you, away? We

stand right here where this all began and watch as the memory of you (who

we are – what else?) drifts. We do what we can: we keep forgetting you.

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Daniel Wolff's latest book of poems is More Poems about Money (Four Way Books, 2022). [“The Drift of the World,” written for poet William Bronk, first appeared, in a slightly different version, in The Literary Review.]

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                                               Daniel Leary, Bill in a Red Chair, monotype, 20 x 16, 1997. Portrait of William Bronk (1918--99).

Cathy Eisenhower: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Things to Do in a Post-Doug Lang DC

 

Be sad. Be very, very sad. Worry about Sandra, Phyllis, Terry, and Bernie. Worry about Rod

and Dan. DM Sandra. Text Phyllis. Text Tom. Cry while watching the crane a block away building a

Whole Foods where  Walter Reed used to be. Try to right a line about regret and fail. Text

Leslie. Walk down 9th street toward Dahlia and begin to cry. Drink tea. Drink seltzer. Drink red

wine. Drink coffee. Eat loads of dark chocolate. Cry in an ugly way with chocolate in your mouth.

 

Read aloud from dérangé with Ken, Lorraine, Ryan, Sasha, and Tom. Listen to Ethiopian jazz

with Ken, Lorraine, Ryan, Sasha, and Tom. Listen to Aldous Harding’s “Horizon” on repeat. Cross

Columbia Road on 18th wearing a thin coat against the cold. Imagine Doug standing outside

DCAC smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. Hallucinate Doug smoking a cigarette on the

sidewalk. See Doug’s crinkly-eyed smile hovering over the landscape. Write a line about regret and erase it.

 

Feel depressed. Feel really fucking depressed. Sink into such a deep depression you don’t leave

the house and you consider starting a new political party called “Doug Lang’s Party for Psycho-

economic Derangement.” Try to remember if such a political party already exists. Listen to

Lemonade. Think about death.

 

Be full of dread

Be full of dread

Be full of dread

Be full of dread

 

Listen to jazz while full of dread

 

Walk through Rock Creek Park mumbling there’s nothing to be grateful for. Get weepy with

gratitude for the sky, telephones, and the scene in Mad Men when Don Draper barks at Peggy,

That’s what the money is for. Decide to pretend Doug has just moved back to Wales. Scroll

through facebook looking for posts about Doug. Click the thumbs up, click the heart, click the

crying yellow face. Become obsessed with the Real Housewives. Make soup. Make scrambled

eggs and eat them while watching the Real Housewives. Sleep. Toss and turn. Sleep some more.

 

Listen to Mulatu Astatke with Ken. Hold Monkey and cry. Consider tying a bit of rag to a metal

nut and throwing it ahead of you to navigate all the way from Takoma to Adams Morgan, like

they do in Stalker. Sip two double Johnny Walker reds and have a great time with the poets.

Down two double Johnny Walker reds and leave before they hit.

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Cathy Eisenhower lives and works as a psychotherapist in Washington, DC, and is the author of Language of the Dog-heads (Phylum 2001), clearing without reversal (Edge 2008), would with and (Roof 2009), distance decay (Ugly Duckling 2015), and animalitos (Primary Writing 2017). She has translated the selected poems of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi and co-curates a reading series at Rhizome DC. Her work has appeared in The Recluse, Aufgabe, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence.

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                                                  Tom Green, Corpus, 1994

Tom Mandel: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Between Past and Future

 

I. (In the academy: a conversation between master and student)

Rabbi, when will the Messiah come?

 

Why do you ask me? Go ask him.

 

But Rabbi, how will I find the Messiah?

 

No problem. He sits among the sick and homeless at the

gates of the Pentagon.

 

But Rabbi, by what sign will I recognize the Messiah?

 

Look among the “lepers” (those afflicted with AIDS). You

will see him untying and retying his bandages one by one.

“I may be summoned,” he thinks; “let me not be delayed by

these bandages.”

 

 

II. (At the gates of the Pentagon)

 

Peace upon you, my Master and Teacher.

 

And upon you, son of Levi. What can I do for you?

 

When will you come, Master?

 

Today, my son. I will come today.

 

 

III. (Back in the academy)

 

So, out with it. What did the Messiah say to you?

 

Rabbi, he lied. He said he would come today. But Rabbi,

the Messiah has not come.

 

Here is what he said to you: “Today, if only you hearken

to His voice.” (Ps. 95:7) Ears open, my son; it’s always today,

and never for long.

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Tom Mandel’s many books include Letter to Poetry (Chax, 2022), To the Cognoscenti (Atelos, 2007), Prospect of Release (Chax, 1996), Letters of the Law (Sun & Moon, 1994), and Realism (Burning Deck, 1992). He is a co-author of The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography. Mandel’s work is widely anthologized, including In the American Tree, The Norton Anthology of Post-Modern Verse (1st Edition), multiple volumes of Best American Poetry, and 49+1: Poètes Americain. Born in Chicago, Tom Mandel was educated in its jazz & blues clubs & at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He has taught at three universities & worked as a consultant to UNESCO, acquisitions book editor, door-to-door salesman, network technology consultant, & short order cook. For two decades, he was a serial technology entrepreneur, pioneering the development of social software on the Web. He has lived in New York, Paris, San Francisco, and Washington DC. At present, he and his wife, the poet Beth Baruch Joselow, reside in a small town on the Atlantic Coast.  [This poem is the author's version of an old rabbinic tale from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 98A)].

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                                                    Maurycy Gottlieb, Jews Praying in Synagogue on Yom Kippur, 1877.

                                                  

Janet Hamill: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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When It Snowed

 

It was almost holy when it snowed

waiting to see Santa at Sears

for a photo in a plaid coat & mittens

the real one was at Macy’s in Herald Square

 

Waiting to see Santa at Sears

Daddy took us to pick out the tree

the real one was at Macy’s in Herald Square

topped with an angel’s folded feather wings

 

Daddy took us to pick out the tree

I need a two-gun holster & a saxophone

topped with an angel’s folded feather wings

our house   Silent Night & blue lights

 

I need a two-gun holster & a saxophone

when we finish caroling on Ryeside

our house   Silent Night & blue lights

it was almost holy when it snowed

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In May of 2022, Janet Hamill was inducted into the Inaugural 100^th Anniversary Hall of Fame of her hometown of New Milford, NJ, in the category of Arts & Letters.  She is the author of ten books, most recently A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems 1975-2017 (Spuyten Duyvil, NY, 2020) and Baby Parade (Vehicle Editions, NY, 2022), and the recipient of Publishers Weekly Book of the Year and the Pushcart Prize. Hamill has collaborated with poets and musicians Bob Holman, Maureen Owen, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, and Moving Star, artists/photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Ken Tisa, and Michael Sypulski. Surrealist-influenced, Hamill has been an active member of the Seligmann Committee, which seeks to make the Swiss-American surrealist’s home in Sugar Loaf, NY, a protected site.

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                              Robert Henri, Snow in New York, 1902. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art (Wash. DC)

        

 

Pilgrims on the Ocean [by Terence Winch & Eileen Estes]

 

    Terence Winch & Billy McComiskey, 2016                                                        Eileen Estes, Susan Campbell, & Chérie Campbellcat

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Last year I collaborated with one of my all-time favorite singers, Eileen Estes, on a song called “Pilgrims on the Ocean.”  Eileen wrote a beautiful air to my lyrics, and late last year we recorded the song at Blue House Productions in Silver Spring, Maryland, with Jeff Gruber at the controls. We asked our friend Billy McComiskey, the great Brooklyn-born button accordion player now at the center of Baltimore’s Irish music scene, to lend a hand. For an outro to the song, Eileen had the very good idea to have Billy go into a tune by the legendary Clare fiddle player Junior Crehan. The tune has a number of names, all variations on “With Her Long Dark Hair Flowing Down Her Back.”

The lyrics are below, and the song can be heard by clicking

Pilgrims on the Ocean

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Pilgrims on the Ocean  

 

There’s an awful thing that happens when the people go out marching.

There’s a sad but true confusion when the walls come tumbling down.

When the emcee takes the microphone and shoves it in our faces

and the castles feel the tremors shake, and crumble to the ground.

 

We were stumbling in the darkness when the houses caught on fire.

We were eating late-night dinners when the cops came cruising by.

But we sold our books and diamonds and stripped off our posh attire

and surrendered to the gender squad when they all began to cry.

 

[bridge]

Where the mountain meets the lake

where the lovers hearts all break

in the greening without meaning

when the give all turns to take

 

We’re the pilgrims and the children all forsaken on the oceans

where the storms divide and waves collide and we’re about to drown.

That’s what it’s like down here tonight drenched in our emotions

but swimming for the sunlight and the sight of higher ground.

 

©words Terence Winch/music Eileen Estes

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                                                                                        Junior Crehan

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lipstick Elegy

 

I climb down to the beach facing the Pacific. Torrents of rain

shirr the sand. On the other side, my grandmother sleeps

soundlessly in her bed. Her áodài of the whitest silk.

My mother knew her mother died before the telephone rang

like bells announcing the last American helicopter leaving SàiGòn.

Arrow shot back to its bow. Long-distance missile.

She’d leap into the sky to fly home if she could. Instead she works

overtime. Curls her hair with hot rollers. Rouges her cheeks

like Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern. I’m her understudy. Hiding

in the doorway between her grief and mine, I apply her foundation

to my face. I conceal the parts of me she conceals, puckering my lips

as if to kiss a man that loves me the way I want to be loved.

I speak their bewitching names aloud. Twisted Rose. Fuchsia in Paris. Irreverence.

I choose the lipstick she’d least approve of. My mouth a pomegranate

split open. A grenade with a loose pin. In the kitchen,

I wrap a white sheet around my waist and dance

for hours, mesmerized by my reflection in a charred skillet.

I laugh her laugh, the way my grandmother laughed

when she taught me to pray the ChúĐại Bi, when I braided her hair

in unbearable heat, my tiny fingers weaving the silver strands

into a fishtail, a French twist. Each knot a future she never named, buried

in the soil of her, where she locked away the image of her sons and daughters

locked away. I’m sorry, mother of my mother, immortal bodhisattva

with a thousand hands, chewing a fist of betel root, your teeth black as dawn.

No child in our family stays a child their mother can love.

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Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin, 2022). Their work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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                     Man Ray, A l’Heure de l’Observatoire les Amoureux (Observatory Time: The Lovers), 1932–4.

Ann Pedone: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Third Poem

 

1          A month after I quit grad school, I got a birth control patch.

            Two days later, I met my ex-boyfriend

 

1.1       An alphabet emerges

 

1.11     Aggressions, chicken bones, young boys with long index fingers

 

1.12     I often wonder how much I should withhold in my

            writing. Or should I confess

 

1.13     In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes states, “where there

            is a wound, there is a subject.”

 

1.14     I told myself, being a student of semiotics, that he was a

            site of continuance

 

1.15     Of course I ignored the fact that he was married

 

1.16     That woman, the one over there,

             who’s eating a Chinese egg tart with both hands

 

1.17     I was taught to have no sympathy for metaphor in poetry

 

1.18     Turtle soup, Calabrian olives, Hippodrome

 

1.19     He was a mouth breather, yes; but it was gargantuan

 

2          I am always ready to pick up codes

 

2.1       Punched holes in a piece of paper, Courbet

            in search of pomegranates

 

2.11     That weekend we went to his mother’s house in Palm Desert,

            I let him ass-fuck me out in the pool house.

 

2.12     Or what I meant to say, I always try to surround myself

            with as much irony as possible

 

2.13     Not all husbands have read Moby Dick

 

2.14     You don’t need to take your clothes off

            to find the spot where lust takes root

 

2.15     When he texted me to say that his wife had filed, I was

            at the hardware store buying turpentine and hand soap

 

2.16     Turn the fax machine off, I screamed inside his mouth

 

2.17     Since childhood I have suffered from somatic omissions

 

2.18     Dark blue taffeta, cold liquid warmed between a woman’s legs

 

2.19     Maybe the trouble was, for the 18 months we

            were together, I let him convince me

            that I was the punctum

 

2.20     A man who stutters, later Wittgenstein,

            the way a woman becomes her own cunt

 

2.21     Last night I dreamt that I saw David Reiff at a bar in Westchester.

            He was drinking a vodka gimlet. There was a ukulele in his lap.

            His hands coiled around it like a snake.

 

2.22     When I went over to say hello, he pretended to know my sex,

            and photographed it.

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Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks (spring 2023, Etruscan Press), The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53), as well as the chapbooks The Bird Happened, perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho, Everywhere You Put Your Mouth, Sea [break], and DREAM/WORK. Her work has recently appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Louisville Review, Gigantic Sequins, New York Quarterly, Narrative Magazine, and Conduit. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net.

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                                     Gustave Courbet , Still Life with Apples and Pomegranates, 1871. Oil on Canvas, National Gallery, London

Benjamin Garcia: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Le Daría Mis Pulmones

 

Toward the end, she could only

lift a cup of coffee. Closer still,

even that became too much for her,

my mother. A sponge, then,

I’d dip in coffee, or dip pan dulce,

and put that to her lips to suck. That

was all the cancer let her manage.

 

The IV was her sugar water, and she

the hummingbirds she loved to watch,

busy at the red and yellow feeder.

Those plastic flowers welded on

were poor excuses, but they worked. Whatever

 

worked, I guess, my mother thought,

lived. On the bed in the living room,

her body of sleeping birds, her dream

of a thousand green wings shimmering like

shreds of aluminum, that could, at any moment,

unloose on the wind. Toward

 

the end, the sponge and the coffee, the cancer.

She couldn’t smoke anymore either, of course,

because even drawing her own drag: impossible.

So she had me smoke for her—nine years old—

I was her lungs. I blew the smoke right in her face, right

in her face. Just like that, over and over:

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Benjamin Garcia’s first collection, Thrown in the Throat, won the National Poetry Series and the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. His video poem “Ode to the Peacock” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/AIDS.

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      Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (la camo volando), 1932. Collection of Dolores Olmedo Mexico City, Mexico.

Kathleen Rooney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Western

 

My favorite flavor of Western is revisionist; my second favorite flavor, spaghetti.

Unforgiven is the best Western of all time; don’t at me.

An acidic landscape, accelerated, unstructured. How long before no vestiges of wild country remain?

The Best Western motel chain began in California in the 40s, but can now be found all around the nation.

I really liked The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but I could not stop thinking how all three of those guys needed to drink a lot more water. The sun above a red-hot poker, stoking greed, stoking wrath.

One of Custer’s many nicknames was Old Iron Butt.

Fistful of dollars, fistful of fists. The best revenge is not living well; it’s simply not wanting revenge to begin with.

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” said a minor character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Entertaining for sure, but bad for democracy.

The noun meaning “a book or movie about the Old West” is first attested from 1909.

I like when a character lays his ear to the rail to listen for the heartbeat traversing the train tracks.

Bemused fatalism may be the most effective bravado.

The sun may be unforgiving because we are unforgivable.

According to Evan S. Connell, the early Mandans believed “there was not only a benevolent spirit but an evil spirit which came to earth before the good spirit and whose strength was greater.” Seems pretty accurate.

Abolish the Second Amendment.

For the notorious Mexican standoff scene in the cemetery, Leone told Morricone to compose a track “like the corpses were laughing from inside their tombs,” and that’s what it sounds like. It sounds exactly like that.

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Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, has just been released by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023.

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Mountain Chief, Blackfeet War Leader by Terrance Guardipee, Siksika (Blackfeet), 2008

Kit Robinson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Eric Breitbard

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This Poem

 

This poem is incredible
You should immediately memorize it and tell it to all your friends
If you read this poem over and over
You will be better able to read and understand other poems
Any poem!
Life goes on and off
Death goes off and on
Shit happens
Just like in this poem
Which is like an elixir or vaccine

Sometimes this poem is like overhearing a conversation in the next yard
A moment of relaxation
In your otherwise busy day
Other times it’s more like thinking about something
Then thinking about something else
It never stops
Even when interrupted by a passing train
In that sense, this poem is immortal
In so far as it is always on the move
To no particular end

When you dream a poem
The poem is often odd
Weird, asyntactic or wild
This poem is totally normal
It teaches one how to live normally
Under the most abnormal of conditions
Put one foot in front of the other
Is how the ancestors put it
They even put it into this poem
So that anyone would be able to see what this poem of our life on earth is made of

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Kit Robinson is a Bay Area poet, writer, and musician. He is the author of Quarantina (Lavender Ink, 2022), Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019), Leaves of Class (Chax, 2017), Marine Layer (BlazeVOX, 2015), and 20 other books of poetry. His essays on poetics, art, travel, and music appear online at Jacket2, Open Space and Nowhere. He plays Cuban tres guitar in the charanga band Calle Ocho.

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                                                                Autobiography, collage by Ray DiPalma ca. 2015

A poem from Tony Hoagland on his birthday [ed. Terence Winch]

 

My Father’s Vocabulary

 

In the history of American speech,

he was born between “Dirty Commies” and “Nice tits.”

 

He worked for Uncle Sam,

and married a dizzy gal from Pittsburgh with a mouth on her.

 

I was conceived in the decade

between “Far out” and “Whatever”;

 

at the precise moment when “going all the way”

turned into “getting it on.”

 

Sometimes, I swear, I can feel the idioms flying around inside my head

like moths left over from the Age of Aquarius.

 

Or I hear myself speak and it feels like I am wearing

a no-longer-groovy cologne from the seventies.

 

In those days I was always trying to get a rap session going,

and he was always telling me how to clean out the garage.

 

Our last visit took place in the twilight zone of a clinic,

between “feeling no pain” and “catching a buzz.”

 

For that occasion I had carefully prepared

a suitcase full of small talk

 

—But he was already packed and going backwards,

with the nice tits and the dirty commies,

 

to the small town of his vocabulary,

somewhere outside of Pittsburgh.

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For more on Tony Hoagland (19 Nov 1953--23 Oct 2018):

Wikipedia

Poetry Foundation

 

 

Maureen McLane: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Laura M. Slatkin, 2016 Paris

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Belfast

 

Your velvet hills came to me

last night in the pool

how they hugged the fraught city

the pubs filled and buzzing

the Europa unbombed now for years.

Your political murals are kitsch

and history’s a ditch

for lying if we let                                                                   

the gravediggers

name us. Let’s bury

our pseudonyms                     

all undisclosed.

Was Scarlett O’Hara’s father

a blustering Ulsterman

or was he a peasant                                       

like granddad from Wicklow

tender and fond amidst the riot                    

and kind to his slaves

but for the obvious?               

White people are weird

with their vitamin D

and sunravaged skin.

So far from an equator

it’s hard to walk the line        

in a cleaved world.                                        

Orange, green, navy blue

the colors are weapons

as were some horses                                     

in the 19^th century.                             

Freed by machines

see how they race

on fragile ankles—

beauty a late flower

of disuse. Your storefronts

were boarded, your university

Victorian, the linen quarter

defunct. The solid brick

that shelters us unmortared

smashed a window.

Your sky hung low your beer

rode high your visiting Masons

sober and punctual.

A Days Inn here

is a Days Inn anywhere

but for the marchers gathering

their ribbons’ gaud at odds                                        

with their drawn gaunt faces

shut like a purse

around an old watch

that still keeps time

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Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published seven books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism (My Poets), two monographs on British romantic poetics, and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Czech. Her most recent book is More Anon: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021); her next book, What You Want: poems, will be out in spring 2023 from FSG. She is the Henry James Professor in English and American Letters at New York University.  [“Belfast” is from This Blue, FSG 2014]

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     Belfast mural

Richie Hofmann: Pick of the Week [ed.Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Male Beauty

 

I bought a bag of hard green pears today.

I came home and sat in our room

listening to music for hours,

solo piano, things from France, from the beginning

of the century.

When we were very young, your forgiveness

humiliated me. I knew

you would be asleep when I got back.

It is night outside

and raining. It is the same night

that fills the ruins.

You are naked, drowsy, lost. Stay like that.

In my favorite recordings,

you can hear the pianist breathing.

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Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems is A Hundred Lovers, published by Alfred A. Knopf. He is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. The recipient of Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships, he teaches at Stanford University.

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                                                Troy Caperton, Sleeping Endymion. 2016

KC Trommer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Off the Roosie

    after O'Hara

I get off the 7 and head home, past the Chase and the Jackson Heights penguin

            that, last week, someone dressed as a bunny, and I’m thinking

of Frankie’s I-do-this-I-do-that poems, and my phone is dead again and

            I can’t afford to replace it. All I want to hear is Spoon

singing got no regard for the thing you don’t understand

            but maybe, as Lorna said, it’s a gift and there’s a poem across the street

waving Yoo hoo! Over here! and trying very hard to get

            my attention. I get onto 37th, near what’s left of the Brunson Building

after the fire on Easter Monday and I head past the Met (not that one)

            which they renamed Foodtown but which Honor and Joe and I will

always call the Met (not that one), and then a left onto 77th

            and past our coffee shop where Afsal stands outside, talking, but

for once does not say hello even though he looks

            straight at me, and it’s fine, I walk past the Berkeley and over 35th Ave., and

I guess I’m home, considering that my keys have opened

            the door even before I realized I had them in my hand, and everything is

where I left it, even in the bedroom where I keep waking alone quite

            suddenly to find—yes, I left you. You’ve never even been here.

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KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and The Hasp Tongue (dgp, 2014) and is founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein on a song cycle based on poems from her first collection. Since 2020, she has curated and run the Red Door Series, a reading and meditation series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens. She has been poet in residence on Governors Island since 2021, first through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program, then through Works on Water, and now through the NYU Gallatin WetLab. She is the Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights with her son.   [To hear KC Trommer reading this poem, click here.]

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                                        1941 photo showing 37 Av W. at 90th St Jackson Heights Queens New York City

Amaud Jamaul Johnson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Spirit of the Dead Watching

"Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”

                                                            —Jean Toomer

Like so many stones, a handful

of jasper or black opal scattered

along the banks of the Papenoo,

 

Gauguin has fixed his eye upon

a native girl working among the women.

She twists and beats the wash dry

 

for her mother, readying the bundles

to be carried back to their village,

and Gauguin is in love again.

 

Long from those indifferent hours,

long from the doors of the Maison du jouir

and the affected gaze of his mistresses.

 

In this paradise, all of his desires

collapse into color, become baskets

of guava, plantain, and avocado.

 

Tonight, he will offer her chocolate

and hold a red silk scarf before the fire.

Beneath banyan, palm, and sweet gum,

 

he will try to divine the body’s secret,

unburden himself of the thought of history

and paint his language into their silences.

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Born and raised in Compton, California, Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, Imperial Liquor (Pitt Poetry Series 2020), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;  Darktown Follies (Tupelo Press 2013), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Red Summer (Tupelo Press 2006), winner of the Dorset Prize.

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Paul Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892, oil on burlap mounted on canvas, 116.05 x 134.62 x 13.34 cm (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY).

Elisa Gabbert: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Adalena Kavanagh

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Bright & Distant Objects

 

I read a headline that said, “Human hair behind pigeons’ lost toes, study finds.”

I thought it meant that pigeons were growing human hair. . . behind their toes, their lost toes?

I felt sick with fear.

I read a headline that said, “Just thinking about bright objects changes the size of your pupils.”

So how do we know that we’re actually experiencing anything?

How do we know that we’re not just thinking about objects, bright and distant? Concepts? The future?

What do we know of “the actual”?

If you think about greyhounds, your pulse rate goes down.

I am thinking about 16 Psyche, a metallic asteroid so massive it exerts gravitational disturbances on other asteroids.

Some speculate it’s composed of gold and platinum, which would make it worth “quintillion dollars,” or billions of times all the money on Earth.

In these terms everything in the universe is money, a concept humans made up, like emotions.

In the future, objects in the universe will be so far apart that distant civilizations could never discover each other, even theoretically.

They could not even think about each other.

Sometimes, during a period of dread, I momentarily forget the thing I’m dreading, but continue to feel the dread.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m about to remember something, but the memory never arrives—just the all-consuming feeling of about to.

Or the memory has arrived, but it’s a memory of nothing, with nothing to be about.

The feeling of pure, empty remembering.

If things are just themselves, what do we know of things?

The moon? Clouds? Herons?

Are they decorative objects?

Details on the surface of the actual?

What is a human skull worth—really, what is the cost?

I want to purchase a human skull.

I want to know what happens to desire when you’re dead—should your desires be respected?

You can have your ashes embedded in a record, so your survivors can listen to your death.

You can turn all the carbon in your body into artificial diamonds—you can want that.

My friend the undertaker wanted to be turned into a diamond, then embedded in his own skull, a decorative object.

An undertaker takes the body under, a coincidence of language. (It’s just a euphemism: an undertaking.)

What you wanted, once you’re dead, is the real without feeling.

Desires with no one to want them.

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Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Normal Distance (out from Soft Skull in September 2022) and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020), a New York Times Editors' Pick and finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared recently in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Believer.

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                         Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767- -1849), Nine Greyhounds in a Landscape, oil on canvas, ca. 1807

 

Grace Cavalieri's Milestone Birthday [Terence Winch]

Happy 90th birthday to the extraordinary & indefatigable Grace Cavalieri, an inspiration to all who know her. Poet, playwright, painter, and long-time host of “The Poet and the Poem” interview program from the Library of Congress, Grace deserves all the love she asks for.

 

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This Poem Is Asking for Your Love

This poem is not usually like this
I don’t know what came over it
It’s mostly violet under the sun
with a large yellow parasol and a pond
with a center that never freezes
I swear I had no idea
I’m so used to trees of hearts and
cherries within its branches
I can’t imagine
what woke this poem up
with a truth I never wanted
It called out the tower window and said
I was alone
That in itself is a morbid lie
I have long shadows in Autumn and clouds
anytime there is a sky
In fact everything was going so well until
this poem wanted to undress me
and bring back my love
and hold me close and rub
my forehead when I had fever
It had no idea what trouble could come
from this so I wrote it
then I ran from it
now I can erase it
to show I never needed it after all
because don’t you know, Poem,
if you have to ask for something
it’s no gift.

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                                                                                Autobiography, mixed media, by Grace Cavalieri

Jack Skelley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Skelley, photo by Gary Leonard

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Green Goddess

 

Who made the salad

Whose tangy vinegar made me wince

Who played pouty Venus to my impudent Caesar

Who taught me to renounce meat

Who flowed forth lubricants

Who performed dark sacraments

Whose tart shrub tangled my tongue

Who with unctuous poses oiled me

Who received my verdant sacrifice

Who, as I reclined panting, poured herself into her dressing

Who lured me to the garden and dragged me into deep greens

Who instructed me on the use of the proper fork

Who inserted an oblong cucumber

Who shredded slender carrot sticks

Whose burning bush consumed the sky god’s timbers, shaking his heavens to the rafters

Who roused me in damp chambers, dousing reasonable fires to consume knowledge raw

Who at the crack of the vernal equinox, broke seasoned bread into bite-sized croutons

Who parted beet-red vestments

Who swelled my painted cave-beast proud and pregnant

Who put me in the red-pepper pink

Whose celestial power I would enviously drink

Who succored me when I lay pallid

Who made the salad

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Jack’s Skelley’s “Green Goddess” appears in his latest collection, Interstellar Theme Park: New and  Selected Writing (BlazeVOX books). Other books include: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), and Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), spring 2023). He is also songwriter and guitarist for psychedelic surf band Lawndale which just released a new album, Twango.

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    “Product Placement”—one of nine collages by Erin Alexander for Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing by Jack Skelley.