The Best American Poetry 2021
Page 6
I love that the tallest mountain in our solar system is safe and on Mars.
I love dancing.
I love being in love with the wrong people.
I love that in the fall of 1922 Virginia Woolf wrote, “We have bitten off a large piece of life—but why not? Did I not make out a philosophy some time ago which comes to this—that one must always be on the move?”
I love how athletes believe in the body and know it will fail them.
I love dessert for breakfast.
I love all of the dead.
I love gardens.
I love holding my breath under water.
I love whoever it is untying our shoes.
I love that December is summer in Australia.
I love statues in a downpour.
I love how no matter where on the island, at any hour, there’s at least one lit square at the top or bottom of a building in Manhattan.
I love diners.
I love that the stars can’t be touched.
I love getting in a car and turning the keys just to hear music.
I love ritual.
I love chance, too.
I love people who have quietly survived being misunderstood yet remain kids.
And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended the eulogy by saying, “I cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will say au revoir.”
I love the different ways we have of saying the same thing.
I love anyone who cannot say goodbye.
from The American Poetry Review
RITA DOVE Naji, 14. Philadelphia.
A bench, a sofa, anyplace flat—
just let me down
somewhere quiet, please,
a strange lap, a patch of grass…
What a fine cup of misery
I’ve brought you, Mama—cracked
and hissing with bees.
Is that your hand? Good, I did
good: I swear I didn’t yank or glare.
If I rest my cheek on the curb, let it drain…
They say we bring it on ourselves
and trauma is what they feel
when they rage up flashing
in their spit-shined cars
shouting Who do you think you are?
until everybody’s hoarse.
I’m better now. Pounding’s nearly stopped.
Next time I promise I’ll watch my step.
I’ll disappear before they can’t
unsee me: better gone
than one more drop in a sea of red.
from The Paris Review
CAMILLE T. DUNGY This’ll hurt me more
Don’t make me send you outside to find a switch,
my grandmother used to say. It was years before
I had the nerve to ask her why switch was the word
her anger reached for when she needed me to act
a different way. Still, when I see some branches—
wispy ones, like willows, like lilacs, like the tan-yellow
forsythia before the brighter yellow buds—I think,
these would make perfect switches for a whipping.
America, there is not a place I can wander inside you
and not feel a little afraid. Did I ever tell you about that
time I was seven, buckled into the backseat of the Volvo,
before buckles were a thing America required.
My parents tried, despite everything, to keep us
safe. It’s funny. I remember the brown hills sloping
toward the valley. A soft brown welcome I looked for
other places but found only there and in my grandmother’s
skin. Yes, I have just compared my grandmother’s body
to my childhood’s hills, America. I loved them both,
and they taught me, each, things I needed to learn.
You have witnessed, America, how pleasant hillsides
can quickly catch fire. My grandmother could be like that.
But she protected me, too. There were strawberry fields,
wind guarded in that valley, tarped against the cold.
America, you are good at taking care of what you value.
Those silver-gray tarps made the fields look like a pond
I could skate on. As the policeman questioned my dad,
I concentrated on the view outside the back window.
America, have you ever noticed how well you stretch
the imagination? This was Southern California. I’d lived
there all my life and never even seen a frozen pond.
But there I was, in 70 degree weather, imagining
my skates carving figure eights on a strawberry field.
Of course my father fit the description. The imagination
can accommodate whoever might happen along.
America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire
you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface
looking placid though you know the water deep down,
dark as my father, is pushing and pushing, still trying
to get ahead. We were driving home, my father said.
My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way
home. I know you want to know what happened next,
America. Did my dad make it safely home or not?
Outside this window, lilac blooms show up like a rash
decision the bush makes each spring. I haven’t lived
in Southern California for decades. A pond here
killed a child we all knew. For years after that accident,
as spring bloomed and ice thinned, my daughter
remembered the child from her preschool. And now,
it’s not so much that she’s forgotten. It’s more that
it seems she’s never known that child as anything other
than drowned. My grandmother didn’t have an answer.
A switch is what her mother called it and her grandmother
before her. She’d been gone from that part of America
for over half a century, but still that southern soil
sprang up along the contours of her tongue. America,
I’ll tell you this much, I cannot understand this mind,
where it reaches. Even when she was threatening
to beat me, I liked to imagine the swishing sound
a branch would make as it whipped toward my body
through the resisting air. She’d say, this is hurting me
more than it’s hurting you. I didn’t understand her then,
but now I think I do. America, go find me a switch.
from Literary Hub
LOUISE ERDRICH Stone Love
I spent a star age in flames
Bolted to the black heavens
Waiting for you.
Light crept over the sill of the earth
A thousand upon ten thousand
Upon a hundred thousand years
But no light touched me
Deep in depthless time
Waiting for you.
Fate flung me out,
Hauled me here
To love as a stone loves
Waiting for you.
Touch me, butterfly.
Like you, I have no hands.
Kiss me, rain.
Like you, I have no mouth.
Snow sit heavily upon me.
Like you, I can only wait.
Come to me, dear
Unenduring little
Human animal.
I have no voice
But your voice.
Sing to me. Speak.
Let the clouds fly over us.
I have spent a star age in flames
Just to hold you.
from Freeman’s
KATHY FAGAN
Conqueror
The lights are green as far as I can see
all down the street, sweet spot pre-dawn,
a Sunday, no one out. I measure time
in travel now. This route’s a favorite, half
derelict, half grand, an oak hydrangea
blooming on old wood. I left a note
in felt tip for my dad, prepped him, then
reminded him last night, but at 4 I had to
mime and mouth for him Go back to bed,
my head tilted on sideways prayer hands.
He looked blank, obeyed. The ophthalmologist
explained how hard it is to see behind
his pupils; I forget the reasons why.
I’m at the terminal with the other early flyers,
thinking of the faces of the ancient kings
I’ve seen, their ears of stone, and their eyes,
no matter the direction or the time, looking,
as we must presume, ahead, and not inside.
from The Kenyon Review
CHANDA FELDMAN They Ran and Flew from You
Your days are ordinary to and from school along the park esplanade.
The children alert as birds and as flitting and as chirping. The sunlight
through the Ficus and jacaranda canopy. The children run and fly
from you to perch on the rainbow half shell egg seats. Children alight
above your head onto the mama bird’s yellow-ringed neck. A yellow
clump of wildflowers they pull from the ground and suck the stems.
They warn you not to eat the petals, which are poisonous. Into the red
birdhouse, children chatter and cor-cori-coo in echoing loops and
in the echo’s end, they call out again. You watch them kaleidoscope
like butterflies. They flap and fight over the lavender and spring yellow
and peach winged seats. You watch the clambering onto the royal blue
musical instruments emerging from the ground; curling into the body
of sound, into the shape of tuba and trombone bells. The children take off
their socks and shoes to scale a snail’s hump. The reward is a tree
dangling its baubles of pitanga cherries—and adjacent a fence’s vines
laden with passionfruit—children rip open the top with their teeth and
slurp out the seeds and neon juice. You watch the children assemble a row
before the national flags and the banners sketched with national songs.
You listen as the children pitch their voices in unison.
from The Southern Review
NIKKY FINNEY I Feel Good
On the occasion of the state of South Carolina taking control of the $100 million James Brown I Feel Good Trust, willed to the education of needy students, and after the death of Prince
Whores raised him with intellect
and savoir faire, teaching:
pack your fragrant pants proper
like a mattress, stock the edges
for comfort, with newspaper
headlines & purple velvet cock feathers,
scrupulously tilt the tucked
microphone like it’s your johnson,
hips travel best when horizontal of how
the crow flies, keep spinning and splendor
in your daily moves, know sound
is gilt-edged & saturnalian like lightning,
meant to enter but never land, cotton-slide
your closed eyes all the way back to Watusi land;
caterwaul & amplify,
exalt yourself on your backside,
spell yourself out with your alligator feet,
the world will prefer you in heels,
when you open up the door
sport hot curls and a sexy cape,
drop to your knees before, during, and after
the end of every song,
clothes are tight for a reason,
sweat is money in any season,
men pretending to be wallflowers
are all ears and antsy in the parlor,
straining at the bit
for you to finish your dying.
from The Atlantic
LOUISE GLÜCK Night School
I am against
symmetry, he said. He was holding in both hands
an unbalanced piece of wood that had been
very large once, like the limb of a tree:
this was before its second life in the water,
after which, though there was less of it
in terms of mass, there was greater
spiritual density. Driftwood,
he said, confirms my view—this is why it seems
inherently dramatic. To make this point,
he tapped the wood. Rather violently, it seemed,
because a piece broke off.
Movement! he cried. That is the lesson! Look at these paintings,
he said, meaning ours. I have been making art
longer than you have been breathing
and yet my canvases have life, they are drowning
in life—Here he grew silent.
I stood beside my work, which now seemed rigid and lifeless.
We will take our break now, he said.
I stepped outside, for a moment, into the night air.
It was a cold night. The town was on a beach,
near where the wood had been.
I felt I had no future at all.
I had tried and I had failed.
I had mistaken my failures for triumphs.
The phrase smoke and mirrors entered my head.
And suddenly my teacher was standing beside me,
smoking a cigarette. He had been smoking for many years,
his skin was full of wrinkles.
You were right, he said, the way
instinctively you stepped aside.
Not many do that, you’ll notice.
The work will come, he said. The lines
will emerge from the brush. He paused here
to gaze calmly at the sea in which, now,
all the planets were reflected. The driftwood
is just a show, he said; it entertains the children.
Still, he said, it is rather beautiful, I think,
like those misshapen trees the Chinese grow.
Pun-sai, they’re called. And he handed me
the piece of driftwood that had broken off.
Start small, he said. And patted my shoulder.
from The Threepenny Review
NANCY MILLER GOMEZ Tilt-A-Whirl
It was a hot day in Paola, Kansas.
The rides were banging around empty
as we moved through the carnival music and catcalls.
At the Tilt-A-Whirl we were the only ones.
My big sister chose our carriage carefully,
walking a full circle until she stopped.
The ride operator didn’t take his eyes off her
long dark hair and amber eyes, ringed
like the golden interior of a newly felled pine.
She didn’t seem to notice him lingering
as he checked the lap bar and my sister asked
in her sweetest, most innocent—or maybe
not-so-innocent—voice, Can we have a long ride
please, mister? When he sat back down
at the joystick, he made a show
of lighting his smoke and the cage
of his face settled into a smile
I would one day learn to recognize.
Here was a man who knew
his life would never get better,
and those dizzying red teacups began to spin
my sister and me into woozy amusement.
We forgot the man, the heat, our thighs
sticking to the vinyl seats, our bodies glued
together in a centrifugal blur of happiness
beneath a red metal canopy
as we picked up speed and s
tarted to laugh,
our heads thrown back, mouths open,
the fabric of my sister’s shirt clinging
to the swinging globes of her breasts
as we went faster, and faster,
though by then we had begun to scream, Stop!
Please stop! Until our voices grew hoarse
beneath the clattering pivots and dips,
the air filling with diesel and cigarettes, and the man
at the control stick, waiting for us
to spin toward him again, and each time he cocked his hand
as if sighting prey down the barrel of a gun.
from New Ohio Review
JORIE GRAHAM I Won’t Live Long
enough to see any of the new
dreams the hundreds of new kinds of suffering and weeds birds animals shouldering their
demise without possibility of re-
generation the heart in your tiny chest opening its new unimaginable ways of
opening and to what might it still
open. Will there still be
such opening. Will you dare. I will not be there
to surround you w/the past w/my ways of
knowing—to save
you—shall you be saved—from what—
home from fighting are you, remembering how he or she or they looked at you
while you both fed the machine or built the trough in dirt
where it will be necessary to
plant again—will it open—will the earth open—will the seeds that remain—will you know to
find them in
time—will those who have their lock on you
let the openings which are
chance unknowing loneliness the unrelenting arms of
form, which knows not yet the form
it will in the end
be, open and
form? Will there be islands. Will there be a day where you can afford to think back far
enough to the way we loved you. Words you said
for the first time
as we said them. Mystery your grandfather said one day, after saying shhh listen to the
birds & you sat so still,
all your being arcing out to hear,
and the bird in its hiding place gave us this future, this moment today when you can recall—