The Best American Poetry 2021

by David Lehman

  mrs. ida b. wells-barnett amidst

  whites marchers, gently kicked

  their sister to the curb. but when

  the march kicked off, ida got

  right into formation, as planned.

  the tribune’s photo showed

  her present & accounted for.

  * * *

  one vote can be hard to keep

  an eye on :: but several /a

  colony of votes/ can’t scuttle

  away unnoticed so easily. my

  mother, veteran registrar for

  our majority black election

  district, once found—after

  much searching—two bags

  of ballots /a litter of votes/

  stuffed in a janitorial closet.

  * * *

  one-mississippi

  two-mississippis

  * * *

  one vote was all fannie lou

  hamer wanted. in 1962, when

  her constitutional right was

  over forty years old, she tried

  to register. all she got for her

  trouble was literacy tested, poll

  taxed, fired, evicted, & shot

  at. a year of grassroots activism

  nearly planted her mississippi

  freedom democratic party

  in the national convention.

  * * *

  one vote per eligible voter

  was all stacey abrams needed.

  she nearly won the georgia

  governor’s race in 2018 :: lost by

  50,000 /an unkindness of votes/

  to the man whose job was

  maintaining the voter rolls.

  days later, she rolled out plans

  for getting voters a fair fight.

  it’s been two years—& counting.

  from American Poets

  DARIUS SIMPSON What Is There to Do in Akron, Ohio?

  complain about the weather. wait five minutes

  watch the boys you grew up with outgrow you

  bury your cousin. go sledding on the tallest hill you can find

  keep a family warm until their son thaws out of prison

  ice skate between the skyscrapers downtown

  inherit an emergency exit sign from your father

  spray paint your best friend’s brother on a t-shirt

  daydream your way through a semester-long funeral

  watch jeans and sleeves and family portraits unravel

  play soccer with the black boys who almost evaporated

  with the icicles. kick it outside with the skeletons

  from your childhood. go to columbus and pretend

  to be a grownup. spend a weekend at kalahari resort

  and call it a vacation. go back home. leave. shoot dice

  with the dead boys playing dress up. stay long enough

  to become a tourist attraction in a city nobody stops in

  mount bikes and ride until the sun dribbles

  out of the sky’s mouth. wade through the oatmeal july makes

  of morning air. swim in a public pool where everyone

  is drowning and no one knows how to survive

  what happened last month. stop runnin in and out unless

  you got somethin’ on the gas bill. seal yourself with cold air

  while the trees melt. bet the boy down the street that you’ll have

  the best first day fit. come out amid orange leaves lookin’ fresher

  than all the food in a 5-mile radius of granny’s house

  eat jojos from rizzi’s on sunday after pastor guilt trips you

  on your way past the pulpit. dream about a city

  where headstones don’t show up to dinner unannounced

  where fried chicken isn’t on speed dial and diabetes

  isn’t the family heirloom. where grief isn’t so molasses

  root for lebron in whatever he’s wearing. become

  an athlete as a way out of corner sales. never escape.

  start a pickup game that never ends. rake leaves

  with a rusted afro pick your older brother left you in his will

  let the leaf bags melt into the chimney on the side of the house

  play basketball with the ghosts who don’t know what year it is

  volunteer at your local funeral home. open a cemetery

  across the street from the playground. mow green

  cut ties with your grass-seller. survive the summer.

  from New Ohio Review

  PATRICIA SMITH The Stuff of Astounding: A Golden Shovel for Juneteenth

  Unless you spring from a history that is smug and reckless, unless

  you’ve vowed yourself blind to a ceaseless light, you see us. We

  are a shea-shined toddler writhing through Sunday sermon, we are

  the grizzled elder gingerly unfolding his last body. And we are intent

  and insistent upon the human in ourselves. We are the doctor on

  another day at the edge of reason, coaxing a wrong hope, ripping

  open a gasping body to find air. We are five men dripping from the

  burly branches of young trees, which is to say that we dare a world

  that is both predictable and impossible. What else can we learn from

  suicides of the cuffed, the soft targets black backs be? Stuck in its

  rhythmic unreel, time keeps including us, even as our aged root

  is doggedly plucked and trampled, cursed by ham-fisted spitters in

  the throes of a particular fever. See how we push on as enigma, the

  free out loud, the audaciously unleashed, how slyly we scan the sky—

  all that wet voltage and scatters of furious star—to realize that we

  are the recipients of an ancient grace. No, we didn’t begin to live

  when, on the 19th June day of that awkward, ordinary spring—with

  no joy, in a monotone still flecked with deceit—Seems you and these

  others are free. That moment did not begin our breath. Our truths—

  the ones we’d been birthed with—had already met reckoning in the

  fields as we muttered tangled nouns of home. We reveled in black

  from there to now, our rampant hue and nap, the unbridled breath

  that resides in the rafters, from then to here, everything we are is

  the stuff of astounding. We are a mother who hums snippets of gospel

  into the silk curls of her newborn, we are the harried sister on the

  elevator to the weekly paycheck mama dreamed for her. We are black

  in every way there is—perm and kink, upstart and elder, wide voice,

  fervent whisper. We heft our clumsy homemade placards, we will

  curl small in the gloom weeping to old blues ballads. We swear not

  to be anybody else’s idea of free, lining up precisely, waiting to be

  freed again and again. We are breach and bellow, resisting a silent

  consent as we claim our much of America, its burden and snarl, the

  stink and hallelujah of it, its sicknesses and safe words, all its black

  and otherwise. Only those feigning blindness fail to see the body

  of work we are, and the work of body we have done. Everything is

  what it is because of us. It is misunderstanding to believe that free

  fell upon us like a blessing, that it was granted by a signature and

  an abruptly opened door. Listen to the thousand ways to say black

  out loud. Hear a whole people celebrate their free and fragile lives,

  then find your own place inside that song. Make the singing matter.

  from The New York Times

  MONICA SOK Ode to the Boy Who Jumped Me

  You and your friend stood

  on the corner of the liquor store

  as I left Champa Garden,

  takeout in hand, on the phone

  with Ashley who said,

 
That was your tough voice.

  I never heard your tough voice before.

  I gave you boys a quick nod,

  walked E 21st past dark houses.

  Before I could reach the lights

  on Park, you criss-crossed

  your hands around me,

  like a friend and I’d hoped

  that you were Seng,

  the boy I’d kissed on First Friday

  in October. He paid for my lunch

  at that restaurant, split the leftovers.

  But that was a long time ago

  and we hadn’t spoken since,

  so I dropped to my knees

  to loosen myself from your grip,

  my back to the ground, I kicked

  and screamed but nobody

  in the neighborhood heard me,

  only Ashley on the other line,

  in Birmingham, where they say

  How are you? to strangers

  not what I said in my tough voice

  but what I last texted Seng,

  no response. You didn’t get on top,

  you hovered. My elbows banged

  the sidewalk. I threw

  the takeout at you and saw

  your face. Young. More scared

  of me than I was of you.

  Hands on my ankles, I thought

  you’d take me or rape me.

  Instead you acted like a man

  who slipped out of my bed

  and promised to call:

  You said nothing.

  Not even what you wanted.

  from Poem-a-Day

  ADRIENNE SU Chinese Restaurant Syndrome

  The notion that the children, awaiting dumplings,

  will never know their grandparents.

  The chance that the Peking duck, though crispy

  and succulent, is not the artist’s medium.

  The likelihood that your hometown stopped existing

  before you knew this would be permanent.

  Being recognized each time. The possibility

  that the place will be robbed, due to location,

  its spurning of credit. The years that have passed

  since you saw your uncles. The gratitude

  with which you clean your house, placeless

  and beautiful. The safety of your neighborhood.

  The ritual by which friends who share your heritage

  fight for the check. The appreciation of friends

  who do not, as you explain the pickled cabbage,

  the absence of fish from fish-fragrance. The hands

  of two women in a corner booth, shelling peas.

  Roast pork like your grandmother’s, in vast portions.

  The assumption that rice and tea are always free.

  Your children growing up, seeking their fortunes.

  from Bennington Review

  ARTHUR SZE Acequia del Llano

  1

  The word acequia is derived from the Arabic as-saqiya (water conduit) and refers to an irrigation ditch that transports water from a river to farms and fields, as well as the association of members connected to it.

  Blossoming peach trees—

  to the west, steel buildings glint

  above the mesa.

  In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Acequia del Llano is one and a half miles long and begins at Nichols Reservoir dam. At the bottom of the dam, an outlet structure and flow meter control water that runs through a four-inch pipe at up to one hundred-fifty gallons per minute. The water runs along a hillside and eventually drops into the Santa Fe River. Fifteen families and two organizations belong to this ditch association, and the acequia irrigates about thirty acres of gardens and orchards.

  In the ditch, water flowing—

  now an eagle-feather wind.

  2

  Yarrow, rabbitbrush, claret cup cactus, one-seed juniper, Douglas fir, and scarlet penstemon are some of the plants in this environment. Endangered and threatened species include the southwestern willow flycatcher, the least tern, the violet-crowned hummingbird, the American marten, and the white-tailed ptarmigan.

  Turning my flashlight

  behind me, I see a large

  buck, three feet away.

  Each April, all of the members come, or hire workers who come, to do the annual spring cleaning; this involves walking the length of the ditch, using shovels and clippers to clear branches, silt, and other debris.

  Twigs, pine needles, plastic bags

  cleared today before moonrise—

  3

  The ditch association is organized with a mayordomo, ditch manager, who oversees the distribution of water according to each parciante’s (holder of water rights) allotment. The acequia runs at a higher elevation than all of the land held by the parciantes, so the flow of water is gravity fed.

  Crisscrossing the ditch,

  avoiding cholla,

  I snag my hair on branches.

  Each year the irrigation season runs from about April 15 to October 15. On Thursdays and Sundays, at 5:30 a.m., I get up and walk about a quarter of a mile uphill to the ditch and drop a metal gate into it. When the water level rises, water goes through screens then down two pipes and runs below to irrigate grass, lilacs, trees, and an orchard.

  Across the valley, ten lights

  glimmer from hillside houses.

  4

  Orion and other constellations of stars stand out at that hour. As it moves toward summer, the constellations shift, and, by July 1, when I walk uphill, I walk in early daylight. By mid-September, I again go uphill in the dark and listen for coyote and deer in between the piñons and junipers.

  One by one, we light

  candles on leaves, let them go

  flickering downstream.

  The Ganges River is 1,569 miles long. The Rio Grande is l,896 miles long; it periodically dries up, but when it runs its full length, it runs from its headwaters in the mountains of southern Colorado into the Gulf of Mexico. Water from the Santa Fe River runs into the Rio Grande. Water from the Acequia del Llano runs into the Santa Fe River. From a length of one hundred paces along the acequia, I draw our allotment of water.

  Here, I pull a translucent

  cactus spine out of your hand.

  from The Kenyon Review

  PAUL TRAN Copernicus

  Who doesn’t know how

  doubt lifts the hem of its nightgown

  to reveal another inch of thigh

  before the face of faith?

  I once didn’t. I once thought I was

  my own geometry,

  my own geocentric planet

  spinning like a ballerina, alone

  at the center of the universe, at the command of a god

  opening my music box

  with his dirty mouth. He said

  Let there be light—

  And I thought I was the light.

  I was a man’s failed imagination.

  Now I know what appears

  as the motion of Heaven

  is just the motion of Earth.

  Not stars.

  Not whatever I want.

  from The New Yorker

  PHUONG T. VUONG The Beginning of the Beginning

  Who decides where a river starts? When are there enough

  sources, current strong and water wide enough for its name?

  In Colorado, the Chama begins in smaller creeks and streams,

  flows into New Mexico to form the Rio Grande, splitting Texas

  and Mexico (who decided?) and moves deeper south. I think

  these thoughts by a creek on a beating hot day,

  as water rips by in rapids propelled, formed in mountains far above.

  The water icy even in this summer heat. People grin

  some false bravery, scared to sit in tubes and dip into the tide

  to be carried away. I think of drowning. Of who sees water

  as fun. Who gets to play in a heatwave. Who trusts

  the flow. Migrants floati
ng in the Rio Grande haunt me, so

  I think of families tired of waiting, of mercy that never comes,

  of taking back Destiny. The rivers must have claimed more

  this year. Know no metering but the rush of their mountain

  source’s melt. A toddling child follows her father into water’s

  pull. Think of gang’s demands, of where those come from. Trickles

  of needs meeting form a flow of migrants. Think of where

  it begins. Think of the current of history—long, windy, but

  traceable and forceful in its early shapes.

  from The American Poetry Review

  JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS The Dead Just Need to Be Seen. Not Forgiven

  That old man in the photo our family never talks about,

  known best for tracking runaway slaves; tonight

  we drag him from the basement up these loose

  wood stairs & set out a plate of salted cabbage & rabbit—

  so long since I’ve asked why the empty chair at our table.

  With all the warmth a body has to give, we give up on

  measuring the darkness between men. Dust & dusk enter

  & are wiped from the room. The names we call each other

  linger luminous & savage. Still. That tree I used to hang

  tires from holds tight its dead centuries. The light

  swinging from its branches we call rope-like,

  which implies there’s no longer rope. Tonight, we’ll wash

  the burnt-out stars from his hair, all the crumbs from his beard.

  The misfired bullet of his voice we let burn as it must.

  from Southern Indiana Review

  L. ASH WILLIAMS Red Wine Spills

  I am hovering over this rug

  with a hair dryer on high in my hand

  I have finally, inevitably, spilled

  red wine on this impractically white