The Best American Poetry

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.

Laura Orem: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bald

 

Remember, remember that boy

who could not love you

because you were not pretty,

whose terrible honesty you’ve carried

for thirty years, the truth you mined from him

like some strange gemstone made of your

own desperation that you still wear

around your neck.

 

And now this boy, your boy, who carefully wields

the electric razor until, stroke by stroke,

your head is shaven, austere as a nun’s,

beauty or lack of it as irrelevant as it is to God. This is

about power. This is about mess. This is what you do

to claim some purchase on this absurd slide

down a hill of talus looking for meaning

or Jesus or some way to make sense.

The boy reminds you as he shifts

to a disposable razor and, surgically careful,

scrapes away the tiniest stubble, black and gray

as a prophet’s beard. Your choice, he says. My choice,

like forcing truth from another boy thirty years ago.

See, says my son. Look. It’s not so bad.

You can stand it. You already have.

Stand it some more.

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Laura Orem is a writer, artist, and educator. Currently a board member of the Baltimore Wisdom Project, a multi-faceted education program for inner city youth, she taught writing for many years at Goucher College. She is the author of two books of poetry, Castrata and Resurrection Biology.  She lives in Palm Coast, Florida.

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This transformed image of the iconic Mona Lisa from a 2013 poster is the “perfect emblem of the upheaval that cancer brings with it, the enormity of its impact on the life of a person and of the inestimable stakes,” says the National Cancer Association Foundation of Italy, a nonprofit organization that provides free palliative care and pain management services to cancer patients throughout Italy.  

 

 

Diane Burns's "Sure You Can Ask Me a Personal Question" [ chosen by Terence Winch]

 

I can't remember when I first encountered this poem.  I know I stumbled on it accidently, I think while doing some on-line research during my days as an employee of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.  We had launched a poetry feature called "Pulling Down the Clouds"  for our membership magazine, and I was always on the lookout for interesting Native work to run as the focus of the feature.  

I knew immediately I wanted this poem in the magazine.  I loved its directness, its snarly, unapologetic, in-your-face attitude. Its completely sophisticated, contemporary use of language.  This was not work that catered to white assumptions and stereotypes: just the opposite, in fact.  Hers is a complex voice in which humor, bitterness, and hipness all coexist in service to the poem. This was a voice like that of many of my Indian friends and colleagues, but one rarely heard by the non-Native world (at least beyond the pages of a Sherman Alexie book).     

Further investigation revealed that the poem was written in 1989 and that Diane Burns, a Lac Courte Oreilles/Chemeheuvi, was born in 1957 and had passed away in 2006. She "first emerged," we told our readers, "as a powerful literary voice in the 1970s working as a poet and model in New York City. Burns’s first and only book of poetry, Riding the One-Eyed Ford (Contact II Publications, 1981), further established her reputation as a unique talent by challenging Native American stereotypes through sharp wit and honesty. In the 1980s, Burns joined a circle of poets and writers in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, reading her work at the renowned Bowery Poetry Club and Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery." 

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Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question

How do you do?
No, I am not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I am American Indian, Native American.

No, not from India.
No, not Apache
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
No, we are not extinct.
Yes, Indian.

Oh?
So that's where you got those high cheekbones.
Your great grandmother, huh?
An Indian Princess, huh?
Hair down to there?
Let me guess. Cherokee?

Oh, so you've had an Indian friend?
That close?

Oh, so you've had an Indian lover?
That tight?

Oh, so you've had an Indian servant?
That much?

Yeah, it was awful what you guys did to us.
It's real decent of you to apologize.
No, I don't know where you can get peyote.
No, I don't know where you can get Navajo rugs real cheap.
No, I didn't make this. I bought it at Bloomingdales.

Thank you. I like your hair too.
I don't know if anyone knows whether or not Cher
is really Indian.
No, I didn't make it rain tonight.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Spirituality.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Spirituality. Uh-huh. Mother
Earth. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Spirituality.

No, I didn't major in archery.
Yeah, a lot of us drink too much.
Some of us can't drink enough.

This ain't no stoic look.
This is my face.
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For more information on Burns, check out this obituary. I don't know if this is Burns herself reading the poem in this clip, but perhaps someone else out there would know.

Joe Wenderoth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My Life

after Henri Michaux

Somehow it got into my room.

I found it, and it was, naturally, trapped.

It was nothing more than a frightened animal.

Since then I raised it up.

I kept it for myself, kept it in my room,

kept it for its own good.

I named the animal, My Life.

I found food for it and fed it with my bare hands.

I let it into my bed, let it breathe in my sleep.

And the animal, in my love, my constant care,

grew up to be strong, and capable of many clever tricks.

One day, quite recently,

I was running my hand over the animal's side

and I came to understand

that it could very easily kill me.

I realized, further, that it would kill me.

This is why it exists, why I raised it.

Since then I have not known what to do.

I stopped feeding it,

only to find that its growth

has nothing to do with food.

I stopped cleaning it

and found that it cleans itself.

I stopped singing it to sleep

and found that it falls asleep faster without my song.

I don't know what to do.

I no longer make My Life do tricks.

I leave the animal alone

and, for now, it leaves me alone, too.

I have nothing to say, nothing to do.

Between My Life and me,

a silence is coming.

Together, we will not get through this.

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Joe Wenderoth has published a variety of books, all of which are available for sale. He is from Baltimore.

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                                                                                Lion Man, Photograph by Bilal Arslan

Sommer Browning: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Great Things from the Department of Transportation

 

My mother desires to track my location on her phone.

My mother announces that she’s “latex intolerant.”

My mother is horrified that the children’s cartoon character Caillou is bald.

My mother to the server at a terrible restaurant: I don’t want a box—I want a flamethrower.

One’s mother might be the most famous person one knows.

My mother says, There is no Denny’s, only Zuul.

My mother on penises and traffic cones: On occasion they’re both orange, aren’t they?

The young lungs of my mother fill with fine particulate matter on the streets of Clairton, PA.

My mother on the X-rated hypnotist: He was only concerned with having the hypnotized persons act sexually stupid.

One night in the 1970s, in the Mojave Desert, my mother ceases to feel apart from the world.

My mother pays my sister and me $40 each to not have birthday parties.

My mother’s soulmate is not my father but her dog, Six.

The only thing I don’t like about John Wick is that he never washes his hair.

My mother’s father, a bipolar beer distributor, laughs at least once that I know of because it echoes through me for 40 years.

On the whole my mother likes Miranda July’s novel, The First Bad Man, but could have done without the sex parts.

I listen to my mother tell my child a story as if I were my own daughter.

My mother tells me there were some skanks on America’s Next Top Model.

My mother asks, Didn’t someone famous say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”

My mother prays for her children every night.

My mother prays for children every night.

I bet you never thought you’d marry, have a baby, and get divorced before you’re 40, she tells me.

My mother expects great things from the Department of Transportation.

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Sommer Browning is a poet, writer, curator, and artist. Her latest book is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). She's the author of two other collections of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I'm Celebrating, as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book, You're On My Period (Counterpath), and others. In 2017, she founded GEORGIA, an art space in her garage in Denver. Her poetry, art writing, and visual art have appeared in Lit Hub, Bomb, jubilat, Chicago Review, Entropy, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a Librarian. ["Great Things from the Department of Transportation" first appeared in the American Poetry Review.]  _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                      René Magritte. The Double Secret, 1927. Oil on canvas. 114 x 162 cm (44.8 x 63.7 in). 

Richard Vargas: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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13 Angels Rising

 “Starting early in February investigators recovered 13 sets of skeletal remains from a once-remote section of mesa now being developed as a residential subdivision. Four have been identified… They are among a list of 16 women reported missing between 2001 and 2006.”  —Local Albuquerque TV news, krqe.com, 3/27/09

 

they say good is greater than evil
and if it is then the dead
shall rise and walk again
right out of their Westside graves
past the tracts of generic
cardboard neighborhoods
past the cars cruising Central Ave
driven by men with bloodshot eyes
and Budweiser breath who wave
dollar bills in the air
like honey coated flypaper

and if so inclined the dead
will reinvent their renewed lives
so that closed fists open up
become soft as pillows where
dreams of violence fade away
the way a bruise heals when
kissed by a seraph’s lips

families, babies, and friends rejoice
embrace their return from
the eternal night
the cruel night
especially now as
the sun’s light
shines down and
warms the sidewalk
beneath their feet

especially now as butterfly wings
with a gossamer sheen sprout
from the satin skin stretched
over once battered
shoulder blades
healed and whole

especially now as they
show us how to fly
and rise above the
nature of our sin

not a moment too soon
to come back and save
us from ourselves

inclined to walk unafraid
among the demons we
all have within
and show us

how like a pebble
dropped in water
calm and still
our inhumanity
ripples outward
touching one
and all

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Richard Vargas earned his BA at Cal State University, Long Beach, where he studied under Gerald Locklin and Richard Lee. He edited/published five issues of The Tequila Review, 1978–1980, and twelve issues of The Mas Tequila Review from 2010–15. Vargas received his MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico, 2010. He was recipient of the 2011 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference Hispanic Writer Award. He was on the faculties of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference and the 2015 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. Published collections: McLife, 2005; American Jesus, 2007; Guernica, revisited, 2014; How A Civilization Begins (MouthFeel Press, Summer 2022). He currently resides in Wisconsin, near the lake where Otis Redding’s plane crashed. [For more on Richard Vargas, click here.] 

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Seven Angels Pouring Vials of the Wrath of God upon the Earth. By a British School Painter influenced by William Blake. 19th century.

 

Abbie Bradfield Mulvihill: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Ciara Mulvihill

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We Can Move Forward Now

 

My nose is burning from the Urine Destroyer.

 

I’m speaking to the judge with my bare feet

Perched on the cedar chest in front of me.

I move the socks from my pocket

To the couch cushion next to me.

Why wear socks when

The aging dog

Has suddenly sprung a leak?

 

The judge thinks my husband called in.

We’re going to wait for him to call back.

I take a deep breath and explain,

“That was me.

I needed to be sure

I’d have audio on the Zoom call.”

 

We can move forward now.

 

It’s not emotional

Except for my disgust

For the attorney’s failure to tell me

I needed to have the Separation Agreement

On hand.

 

Of course I have it.

I’m always prepared.

 

I am getting divorced

In the same house

In which I was married.

Two rooms away.

 

What if I’d worn the same dress

Stood in the same spot

And placed the iPad judge

Where the officiant had stood?

Would I have erased time?

 

10 minutes.

 

It’s over.

I still feel nothing.

 

I move to the room

Between marriage and divorce

Where once we celebrated with

Coconut cake and a toast to our

Future.

 

Now, I sit alone at the table and play

(for the umpteenth time)

Mika singing, “Happy Ending” with

The Sinfonia Pop Orchestra.

 

The pets have concerns

About this behavior.

But I’m trying to add emotion after

The cold, masked Zoom call.

I need to cry

And I want céad míle slán.

 

Today is my childhood best friend’s

56^th birthday.

I don’t know where she is or

What she’s doing.

I haven’t seen her in decades

But I’m glad today is her birthday.

She is the only other person I know

To be divorced

Twice.

 

A “two-time loser.”

Evidence that “you’re the problem.”

This is what people say

Out of fear.

 

Ultimately,

No one remembered this day, but me.

I am relieved

Because it’s not the champagne day

Everyone wanted.

 

What now?

Return to telework?

Dairy Queen instead of champagne?

Drive around the Beltway

In my own personal Freedom Convoy

While blasting Life in Cartoon Motion?

 

It’s raining

Tears of joy

Or sorrow

Or Urine Destroyer.

 

Traffic will be a disaster.

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Abbie Mulvihill lives in the Washington, DC area where her federal government work focuses on webs, spiders, bugs, and taxonomies in the digital realm. "We Can Move Forward Now" is her first published poem.

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Jeffrey McDaniel: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Narcoleptic’s Marathon                                                              

 

The hetero married version of a 69 is: she does the dishes

while he folds the laundry. The sadomasochistic version

 

of a hand job involves sandpaper gloves. My body

is an old house; you fix one thing and something

 

else breaks. Today at the beach, a dolphin

sucked the wedding ring right off someone’s finger.

 

The decay is down to your gums, said the dentist.

This cabinet will have to come out. The narcoleptic’s

 

marathon involves twenty-six beds and strategically placed

alarm clock stations. In Sweden, there is a little jar

 

for you to spit your dreams into, in the bathroom

when you wake up. In France, married couples

 

must have sex in front of beginners once a year.

Encularnuit. I never liked that molar anyway.

 

The hole in my mouth where tooth number eighteen was

feels like a burnt-out bedroom. When I was twenty,

 

this girl literally set my futon on fire, and the firemen

chucked my stuff from the kicked-out dorm window.

 

When I was twenty-one, a different classmate

metaphorically set my bed on fire and left claw marks

 

on my vertebrae, and we role-played a couple firemen

squirting us with water pistols. She had great teeth

 

and now she has a couple kids and a wedding ring

the size of a strobe light. When I see her

 

at our fiftieth reunion, I’ll whisper in her flower petal ear:

honey is the only food that never goes bad.

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Jeffrey McDaniel’s seventh book, Thin Ice Olympics, is coming out in September 2022 from Write Bloody Books. He is the author of six previous books of poetry, most recently Holiday in the Islands of Grief (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Other books include Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (Pittsburgh, 2013), The Endarkenment (Pittsburgh, 2008), The Splinter Factory, The Forgiveness Parade, and Alibi School, all published by Manic D Press. McDaniel’s poems have appeared in numerous places, including The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times, and Best American Poetry 1994, 2010, and 2019. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape, 1942, collage on paper, 255 x 305 mm.

           

Toi Derricotte: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toi Derricotte. Photo by Ted Rosenberg

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Lauds

 

Good morning, fat chair.  Your frame is slight-

Ly askew, your wooden bones tilt, but padded

With foam & polka dotted, you seem sprite-

 

Ly, good-natured.  I’ve known a chair to rise

Out of a night’s darkness & provide a ride

For me, above the furry carpeting, defy-

 

Ing gravity.  Even one cock-eyed, cheap,

Can be a tilted ship climb-

Ing waves of mourning.  Whatever light

 

Shines through this morning’s slatted blinds—

Smoky with undelivered rain—I’ve turned aside

To praise my last-legged you, for (like Jessye

 

Norman’s lungs) your soul breathes blithe

Operatic air, & your polka dots climb

Atmospheric strophes like poems I memorized

 

In school.  Do not go gentle, fat chair.  What we write

About we are, so you are me, plumped with an extra

Twenty pounds, a bear, lumbering. But, in a poem, we

Dance with a relic of imagination &, by imagination, live.

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Toi Derricotte is the recipient of the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, for outstanding artistic achievement in the art of poetry over a poet’s career, and the 2020 Frost Medal from Poetry Society of America for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.  Her sixth collection of poetry, “I” New and Selected Poems, was published in 2019 and shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award.  Other books of poetry include The Undertaker’s Daughter, Tender, Captivity, Natural Birth, and The Empress of the Death House.  Her literary memoir,The Black Notebooks,won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. With Cornelius Eady, Derricotte co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation in 1996. She is Professor Emerita from University of Pittsburgh and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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                                                      Susan F. Campbell, Armchair, color pencil drawing, 1987 

Martin Stannard: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Princess of Thieves

 

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine,

And I have something else I want to say:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

I have not slumped into a terminal decline

And Celia, I welcome each new sunshiny day.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

It may be that you think I have no spine

But you’re wrong, and the truth is here to stay:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

Celia, I have never been the sort to whine,

And this is what I simply have to convey:

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

As I crack open another bottle of wine

The absence of that record causes me dismay.

Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

 

It is not in my nature to weakly repine

And every day I go out with my friends to play.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely bloody fine,

And Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

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Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, in quiet retirement with his cat, Xiao Mei. He was the editor/publisher of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978–1993, where he championed New York poets including Paul Violi, Tony Towle, and Charles North. His poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s, his most recent titles being The Review (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2020) and Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters (Leafe Press, 2020). “Princess of Thieves” is one poem in a short sequence now called “To Celia” that was originally written as a (slightly humorous but at the same time very serious) series of blog posts called “How To Write Poetry,” with tutorials on the sonnet, villanelle, triolet, sestina, and pantoum. These very useful guides can be found here.  

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Alicia Jo Rabins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Alicia J. Rose

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Sunday School

 

Look around this cafe, everyone is reading the New York Times and talking,

which all adds up to a clamor of breakfast noises and a mosaic of Sunday papers.

Look at this messy cartoon I call my “life,” which does not know

whether it is living or being lived

It happened again on the way here:

a man looked at me on the subway, directly, meaningfully, brazenly.

This is a different way of being a woman,

which I always disdained, complained, refrained from and now

something must cry look at me, look at me!

And the thrill of being looked-at quivers me to attention.

Being noticed, like noticing, has a sharp blade.

I too cannot help but notice all the beautiful women who populate this restaurant,

it seems they are too beautiful to possibly be real;

and what is it all for anyway, all this ungraspable perfection, because

although right now their beauty is as full as a ripe boysenberry,

crushable, staining, straining their own edges, aching

to be popped in the mouth and tasted

(and they offer it as such)

soon it will be over, their beauty, and only the desire will remain.

All the fucking in the world never erases desire,

and moreover it creates a Next Generation with desire of their own.

So any cessation of desire becomes futile, impossible.

And so we keep putting on our strappy heels day after day,

just “not feeling right” if we wear sneakers or flip flops,

offering ourselves up for this one day:

offering our beauty on the altar of this particular Sunday

like a coffee and a newspaper, to be swallowed and read

and left behind on the cafe table,

leaving faint black smudges on our one-day-older fingertips.

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Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer, and Torah teacher. She is the author of two poetry books, Divinity School (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (a finalist for the Jewish Book Award). As a musician, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah currently being developed into a musical. Most recently she is the creator, star, and composer of A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, an indie feature film based on her one-woman chamber-rock opera, which The Atlantic calls “a blessing.” 

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   Francis Luis Mora (Uruguayan-born American, 1874-1940). Subway Riders in New York City (AKA Evening News), 1914.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Proposition

 

That the smell of cows drifting through the open window is, indeed, that of a living beast.

That I too am a living beast.

That the body I possess is inhabited only by me.

That my body is neither at rest nor occupied by dramatic motion.

That I am, by my best account, fully alive.

That the room in which I am seated is in Germany, in a town called Worpswede.

That a poet I admire once lived here too, though he is long since dead.

Rilke wrote, “That I gently wipe away the look of suffered injustice sometimes hinders the pure motion of spirits a little.”

That there are such things as “spirits.”

That we were born suffering, but that we are not meant to suffer.

That the wind blows and the birches outside my window sing a little.

And that cooing and chucking of the dove I hear is also a kind of song.

That the difference between the living and the dead is mostly one of conjugation.

Er starb. Er istgestorben.  Ein gestorbenes Mensch.

That what we make when we speak is a kind of music, but disjointed and that music seeks

a unity that our speech does not possess.

Once I felt as though I was dead, but now the reasons for that feeling baffle me.

I marvel at what it is to feel the sun on my skin.

“Burnish,” is the word that comes into my head.

“Burnished by the sun,” as if my torso was a copper shield.

That my torso is a kind of shield protecting the inside from the outside.

Though we all know we are penetrable in many ways.

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Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness, published in 2021 by Graywolf Press.  His other titles include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award.  He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Amy Lowell Trust, and elsewhere and has published individual poems in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine  He serves as the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program, and lives near the village of Catskill in New York's Hudson Valley.  

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   Jonathan Meese, DR. Z.U.K.U.N.F.T. FÜHRT, WIE SAU, COOL COOLISM… (ZEDADDY), 2017. Acrylic, Caparol-dispersion binder and mixed media on canvas; 2 panels.

Olena Kalytiak Davis: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hello Poem

 

Aren’t you supposed to be all alive and tell me what is going on? What is

A-happening?

Poem, why so nonplussed? So hors-rendu? So hasard? So misérable?

Poem, you are supposed to be for me

Not against me.

Do not tell me that part of the problem is I know I am hot!

It’s spring, Poem, take us outside.

Poem, why did I come home from France without any idée and an Italian

Vogue?

Poem—so silent so—handsome, Poem.

So Mediterranean.

Poem, you have a nice face,

A good form, but

Poem—you are wrongheaded.

Poem—I want to be left alone.

Such a dabbler you are, Poem—a dilettante

And a renaissance man.

So hard to tell, Poem, till you take off your clothes.

Poem, I think you are straight.

Poem, I know Hemingway baise-ed you in the derrière.

Poem, I know you are freer from history than prose fiction or drama!

Poem—do you want to be translated into French?

Poem—avez-vous ce que vous voulez?

French poem, you are very sexy.

Poem—did you depart for Marseille?

Poem—votre train is retarded! Quelle voie? Quelle garde?

Dream poem, you have shaved genitals!

Poem you are a plump pretty girl with feather earrings and a quick thick

Unread book.

Poem, eat my poussez!

Poem, Kay Ryan doesn’t like you!

Not at all!

Poem, you have a engraved stone for a heart!

(No, I will not tell you with what.)

A sheep for a lover.

Poem, you farted in your sleep.

Poem, you only have to do it once. . .

Poem, you get so sad at all the right/wrong places.

Poem, I’m afraid your strangeness is still not that true.

O Poem, we could have been so good together!

Poem, you think you are working, but

Poem—get a job.

Poem—get a life.

(Then, of course,

You of all people

Poem, must

Change it.)

 

Poem—you say too little.

Poem—you are so not enough.

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Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author of four full-length collections, including Late Summer Ode, out this fall from Copper Canyon Press. (See also this link.)

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    Hannah Hoch, Modenschau (Fashion Show),detail, 1925.

 

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.

 

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.

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.

 

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

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.