The Best American Poetry 2014

by David Lehman

with the left. Before a doctor shot light

  into the twitching thing, before I realized

  how little light I could handle, I never

  thought much of the boy who clawed up at me

  from beneath my punches, how a fingernail scraped

  the eye, or how it closed shut

  like a door to a room I could never leave.

  ••

  I could see the reflective mesh of his shoes,

  the liquor bottle tossed in an arc

  even before it shattered at my feet, and I am embarrassed

  at how sharp my eyes were, how deft my body,

  my limbs closing the distance—how easily

  I owned his face, its fear, and fought back tears—

  all of it mine. I don’t want to remember the eyes

  that glanced over shoulder just before

  I dragged him like a gazelle into the grass

  that was a stretch of gravel and glass

  outside a liquor store. How easily this becomes that.

  ••

  On a suspension bridge I close my bad eye

  and it’s like aiming through a gunsight;

  even the good eye is only as good as whatever glass

  an optometrist can shape. I watch sundown

  become a mouth. Broad and black-throated,

  it devours the skyline and every reflection.

  Horns sprout from the head of my silhouette

  rippling dark, dark, dark against the haze of water

  and I try to squint that monster

  into the shape of a man.

  from Ploughshares

  SHARA MCCALLUM

  * * *

  Parasol

  You could still become a queen.

  When, a slip of a girl,

  you directed trees

  to lower their limbs,

  neither fire ants nor sap

  could stop your climb,

  nor rain that lightly fell,

  misting leaves.

  Inside a story’s spell,

  you find your way back,

  where a stone on a path waits

  for you to stumble.

  Like the kaleidoscope’s contents,

  time is jumbled, opening at will.

  Now: a too-bright sun and you,

  teetering on a wall,

  parasol clutched tight as you tumble.

  This parasol is, for a moment,

  everything you’ve lost

  and all that can console.

  from The Southern Review

  MARTY MCCONNELL

  * * *

  vivisection (you’re going to break my heart)

  the frog ready for inspection, skin flaps

  opened and pinned back, organs

  arrayed for the taking—this is how

  I approach you. and you. here, my spleen

  for the squeezing. my intestine

  to be strung out, perhaps wrapped

  around the neck like a lariat. not

  for the squeamish, my heart thudding

  to be plucked out with a delicate thumb

  and forefinger, dinner for the willing,

  and beautiful, and broken. I am not smart

  about love, is what I’m saying. not even

  smart about whose face I will take

  in my hands and press against my face

  until we are a single organism. the mouth

  is not an organ but I give it to you

  anyway, I give it all away is what

  I’m saying. I’m easy to adore. my torso

  a life raft strung with Christmas lights

  and full of all your favorite things, beer

  and expensive cheese and songs

  about leaving. I’m so beautiful

  splayed out on this tray full of tar

  and entrails. I’m so useful

  I could be a meal for an army

  of traumatized surgeons, I’m full-time

  at this job of bleeding, my esophagus

  a stripper pole or cocaine straw.

  when I say eat me I mean

  suck the bones clean, leave nothing

  for the waiting, nothing for the vultures

  or the travelers to come.

  from The Carolina Quarterly

  VALZHYNA MORT

  * * *

  Sylt I

  Lie still, he says.

  Like a dog on the beach

  he starts digging

  until the hole fills up with water.

  He has already dug out two thighs of sand

  when she finally asks, what’s there,

  convinced there’s nothing.

  There’s nowhere he can kiss her where she hasn’t already been kissed by the sun.

  Every evening she goes to the ocean with her three sisters and their old father.

  They strip in a row,

  their bodies identical as in a paper garland.

  Bodies that make you think of women constantly chopping vegetables

  —it is like living by the train station,

  their father swears—

  and always putting the last slice into their mouths.

  For her, there is not even a knife left in the whole house.

  The sound of a cuckoo limps across the dunes.

  She takes a beam of sunlight sharpened side by side with stones

  and cuts with it

  and you can tell her vegetables from the others’

  by how they burn.

  By now they already stand wrapped in cocoons of white towels,

  her teeth, crossed out by a blue line of lips, chatter,

  scratching the grains of salt. Her bitten tongue

  bleeds out into the mouth a red oyster,

  which she gulps, breathless.

  Their father turns away to dry his cock,

  but the girls rub their breasts and crotches openly,

  their hands skilled at wiping tables,

  their heads as big as the shadow of the early moon,

  their nipples as big as the shadows of their heads,

  and black so that their milk might look even whiter.

  She, too, is rough and indifferent toward her full breasts,

  as if she were brushing a cat off the chair

  for her old father to sit down.

  They drink beer in the northern light that illuminates nothing but itself.

  Sailboats slip off their white sarafans

  baring their scrawny necks and shoulders,

  and line up holding on to the pier as if it were a dance bar.

  It bothers her, what did he find there after all?

  So she touches herself under the towel.

  It is easy to find where he has been digging—

  the dug-up spot is still soft.

  The water is flat like fur licked down by a clean animal.

  A bird, big even from afar,

  believes the ocean is its egg.

  So the bird sits on the ocean patiently

  and feels it kick slightly now and then.

  from New Letters

  HARRYETTE MULLEN

  * * *

  Selection from Tanka Diary

  I’m seeing lots of dead zebras lately

  on floors of elegant homes pictured in

  interior decorator magazines.

  WE PROUDLY HARVEST RAINWATER—a sign

  in a neighbor’s yard. With a deep barrel

  I could humbly and thankfully harvest rain.

  Several homeowners organize a neighbor-

  hood watch patrol after discovering used

  rubbers discarded on their lawns.

  Folded cardboard tent-shaped trap

  hanging among dark leaves of the lemon tree

  to capture the galling Mediterranean fly.

  A profusion of oleanders—to beautify

  the freeway and filter the air, though

  leaf, stem, and blossom are all poison.

  Dried-out snake on
the road

  I brought as a curiosity to the child—

  who insisted we give it a proper funeral.

  Urban tumbleweed, some people call it,

  discarded plastic bag we see in every city

  blown down the street with vagrant wind.

  from The Harvard Review

  EILEEN MYLES

  * * *

  Paint Me a Penis

  If the best thing the world discovered today is that at the inside

  of the universe is a cat

  I love your braids; I love your peaceful eating

  I hate that the sum total effect of the schedule

  was sadness. Do you read the schedule. Nope.

  I’m jealous. If he used the same words

  over and over in plays and movies and commencement

  addresses is that wrong. Is it wrong. What if art is wrong.

  Is there only one sun. Some planets have two.

  When the rain was pouring I wanted to be in there

  silent with you. In the dog’s beady black gaze. In the room

  with the sleeping dog. With you leaving the room.

  I’ve stopped the rain, I’ve silenced you.

  I think the story was that one woman had gotten

  the painting from the other and they were dating

  but she never paid for it and then she moved out.

  The painting sat in the second floor window and the painter

  saw it and demanded it back. No. So the painter wrote

  Marie O’Shea give me back my painting and put

  it in the window opposite. She’s a mess. We call her

  cunt face. Twat. When it blasted I asked you to put

  your headphones on. The dog’s wheezing. I think

  smack in the middle of that time was a virus

  and it gave itself to everyone freely. We learned that

  everything was related to everything else. Just as everything

  was getting more separate and no longer a simple bowl

  of fruit everyone was dying of the same thing. Not everyone.

  Later when they hit the buildings it was just like everyone

  in the city felt it. Not the same. We felt the shake. The request

  in the air was how are we all feeling it now. It wasn’t the same.

  It was like you kept breaking off another square of the

  bar and tasting it. He came running back into the room.

  He was moaning. And now he just stares. And the rain

  starts up again. I’ve never been invited to one meeting.

  Do they have them. I remember the time I was invited

  and we went around the room saying how we came

  to be here. I was invited and everyone

  stared and they never let me know when they were

  meeting again. She wore a yellow dress. Everyone’s watching you. He stands

  in the doorway watching you eat. It stopped.

  I want the painting in the window. Yeah. And you can

  really ask her questions when you get her alone. And you were reading all the

  time. And you said it a lot, that you wanted one which

  you don’t remember. I guess I wanted one. Now some

  people in that mysterious time there it goes again

  decided to in a very dedicated way begin talking about it

  because there wasn’t enough of that. That part had waned. Otherwise

  you could just take it off the walls, you could go to funerals

  and get fucked. You could recite it so that all they saw

  was you. Huge numbers of them banded together marching

  slowly into the room. There’s footage of us dancing. I wouldn’t ask

  the stars to be quiet but I’m closer to them now. She was so

  smart. I’m serious. I bet she’d make a good one. Since I didn’t grow

  my own I’d like to see what she’d make me. If he demands that no

  one tells theirs at the breakfast table I think he probably pulls

  it out of his pajamas and slaps it on the table. Dreams to me are

  always receding. It’s the only perfection: it’s vanishing, stoking my

  appetite so I’m drawing it for you as it becomes less the experience

  that just happens as I’m resurrecting it for you. I’m making it

  for you. I’m asking her. Make it for me. I’d like that. I’m putting it

  in real deep. Out there, where everyone is.

  from Green Mountains Review

  D. NURKSE

  * * *

  Release from Stella Maris

  “So you’re saying there is no self?” I asked the doctor.

  “Well . . .” he said. He took off his glasses and breathed

  on the lens—for a moment an extraordinary radiance

  hardened there, then he flicked it with his cuff.

  He coughed, painfully, and swallowed hard.

  At once you heard the other patients bickering

  along their waxed corridors, and I counted myself

  lucky to be alone with the master surgeon,

  the one whose lab coat bulges with key rings.

  Perhaps this I who still speaks

  was just the experience

  of watching snow fly in a dim window?

  That might be a great happiness.

  When the head rose, I rose also, when he pulled on

  his gray calfskin gloves, I rubbed raw knuckles,

  braced for the wind that blows from the mind itself.

  from FIELD

  SHARON OLDS

  * * *

  Stanley Kunitz Ode

  Ninety-five years before he died,

  Stanley found an abandoned kitten

  in the woods of Worcester. Stanley’s father

  had drunk Drano in a public park, while

  Stanley had still been turning, a nebula

  slowly taking human form

  inside his mother. And when he found

  the lost cat, he took it home

  and gave it a box in the attic, under

  the stars where his father was wheeling, and he raised

  his feline companion—I don’t know girl

  or boy—without his mother much noticing,

  hard as she worked, silent as she kept.

  And his pet grew, and when they got to the woods he would

  take off the collar and leash and they would

  frolic together, she-he/he-she would

  teach Stanley, already sinuous,

  to slink and hunt. And I don’t know who it

  was who suddenly saw that Stanley’s

  companion, growing stronger and bigger and

  lither, was a bobcat, and none of us

  was there the night Stanley released her-him

  or there when it rose in him, the desire

  to seek a feline of his own species.

  And when he was 98, and Elise

  had gone ahead, leaving her words and

  images behind her, casting the skin of them,

  I saw, in a city in Ohio, an elegant

  shaving-brush-soft replica bobcat,

  and brought it back to West 12th, along with the

  usual chocolates, and flowers, and a demo of my

  latest progress toward a model’s sashay on the catwalk.

  And after that, when I’d come over, in those

  outfits I wore then, Diana-ing

  for a man, Stanley would be holding the stuffed

  animal, and petting it,

  nape to rump, nape to rump,

  stub of the bob tail—98,

  99, 100, those huge old beautiful

  hands, stroking the world, which hummed when Stanley stroked it.

  from The Harvard Review

  GREGORY PARDLO

  * * *

  Wishing Well

  Outside the Met a man walks up sun

  tweaking the brim sticker on his Starter cap

&n
bsp; and he says pardon me Old School he

  says you know is this a wishing well?

  Yeah Son I say sideways over my shrug

  at the limpid smooth as spandex behind me.

     Throw your bread on the water.

  I tighten my chest wheezy as Rockaway beach

  sand with a pull of faux smoke from my e-cig

  to cozy the truculence I hotbox alone

  and I am at the museum because it is not a bar.

  Because he appears not to have changed

  them in days I eye the heel-chewed hems

  of his pants and think probably he will

  ask me for fifty cents any minute now wait

  for it. A smoke or something. Central Park exhibits

  the frisking transparency of autumn. Tracing

  paper sky, leaves like eraser crumbs gum

  the pavement. As if deciphering celestial

  script I squint and purse off toward the roof

  line of the museum aloof as he fists two

  pennies from his pockets mumbling and then

  aloud my man he says hey my man I’m going

  to make a wish for you too.

     I am laughing now so what you want

  me to sign a waiver? He laughs along ain’t

  say all that he says but you do have to

  hold my hand.  And close your eyes.

  I make a sabbath of my face before

  he asks are you ready. Yeah dawg I’m ready.

  Sure? Sure let’s do this his rough hand

  in mine inflates like a blood pressure cuff and I

  squeeze back as if we are about to step together

  from the sill of all resentment and timeless

  toward the dreamsource of un-needing the two

  of us hurtle sharing the cosmic breast

  of plenitude when I hear the coins blink against

  the surface and I cough up daylight like I’ve just

  been dragged ashore. See now

  you’ll never walk alone he jokes and is about

  to hand me back to the day he found me in

  like I was a rubber duck and he says you got to let