The Best American Poetry 2014

by David Lehman

  isn’t ugly he is beautiful leaning over to look at himself

  in pond water or leaning over

  masculinity itself leaning over the family

  he has made for himself and the pond

  is male because he owns the pond

  and the guns are male because he owns the guns

  and what’s happening is male because he owns the factors

  that go into the car is male because he owns the police

  and Home Depot is male because he owns and owns

  and owns and all he can do is own

  everything that will rot

  like privacy or speech or porn or black swans

  or my big tits which he misses

  Fucking swans! A man decides to sit

  next to me and he is frantically hitting

  his Egg McMuffin on the table and then walks

  outside and smokes a cigarette and returns

  to his seat and starts hitting

  his wrapped Egg McMuffin again

  and then he sees my computer and asks

  to check his Facebook so I let him

  and then he wants to be friends on Facebook

  and leaves his phone number on my page

  and I “like” it and then in the background

  the little boy’s like “She’s ugly, mommy

  She’s so ugly mommy” and the mom

  is like “Is she? Is she ugly?” And I think the mom

  is ugly even though I don’t want her to be

  and the other kids at the booth

  are drinking milk and they are chubby

  and eating fries and saying

  “Yeah she’s ugly

  Yeah mommy she’s so ugly

  You wouldn’t want to meet her

  because she’s so ugly”

  from The Awl

  JANE SPRINGER

  * * *

  Forties War Widows, Stolen Grain

  For decades we’d witnessed dark murders

  descend through crop-facing windows—

  so left our eggs un-whisked in batter

  for chase from sheer anger, suds rising, hot

  faucet streams, we forgot our spatulas

  forging to skillets, despite smoke we

  flung coats on, knocked bills akimbo,

  squashed pajamas in galoshes—Christ

  Armageddon—we left our cats crouched

  feral at raw bacon’s ledge as we winged

  doors free, fell to knees, field-edge, braced

  12 gauges—shot the thieves.

  Someone has to clean up the

  shells, toss grease-soaked papertowels, lick

  the whisker, soap grass-stained knees,

  sweep fresh tracks, fish the envelope

  spilled down floor vent despite ash &

  throw open the sash, zero out the still-

  flaming gas, trash the molten utensil, hang

  suds-logged rugs, straighten curtains on

  the kitchen Idyll, from sheer obligation—

  remake morning, scrub the afternoon clean,

  search the crop-facing window—though the

  crows were the only things we ever got back.

  from Birmingham Poetry Review

  COREY VAN LANDINGHAM

  * * *

  During the Autopsy

  “She hid it well,” they say, gathered around the body. Some standing

  in the gallery think of their god, big as an ox, and are thankful

  for once not to be the chosen one. Her stomach opened to reveal

  the tree growing inside her, seeming to take root near the navel,

  branching out between the ribs. Thick bark falling away under

  the scalpel. A man worries a pair of bats from her throat. Wings

  raw from rubbing against the wood, panicky. Flesh houses

  milk-white bulbs, new life, pale like her throat, a nice one.

  A throat to be stroked nightly by some woodsman. And the bats

  are the most vibrant black the man has ever seen. Their wings

  seem to be living separately from their bodies, trying to detach.

  And so he pictures the woman in the same light, tree its own

  creature, not hers, not her, as he takes a bone saw to a branch,

  or, with the smaller ones, snaps them off with his hands.

  One must, at times, learn to ignore the body. In a dream

  the man was once patron saint of ships. Not only did he build

  the most seaworthy ships of his small town, but he blessed

  all the vessels in the shipyard. Walking from wood hull to wood

  hull, he would press his hands against them, speak to them with his

  palms. And they would speak back. The man would carry their

  stories with him from sleep, so that, in the morning, his hands were

  still full with them, seemed to anchor him to the mattress, hands

  heavy with whale bones and kelp nests. With crates of rotting

  fruit, the smell of too many men together, skin sloughing off

  like flakes of sel de mer. And the man had forgotten all this, until

  his hands were around the trunk, growing like his own thigh,

  and he could see each layer of the cut-into wood, which looked

  not unlike each layer of the thick skin of the belly, the woman

  not a woman, but a tree now. The tree, with his hands around it,

  sang into him a high-pitched song, song of a siren, a woman’s

  voice asking to be returned to the sea. Any sea. And as he

  washed his hands after, thorough as always, as he walked

  home in the rain to his wife. As he drank the glass of water

  she had poured him from a clay pitcher, he could feel that voice

  in his throat, and that night he woke—suddenly, salt water

  covering his entire body—to that other woman’s song.

  from The Southern Review

  AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER

  * * *

  Passing Through Indian Territory

  On horseback, I tell them to imagine me on horseback

  going back to Boston, an oversized wool overcoat on top

  of layers of things that make themselves warm against me,

  old tops of boxes of pictures of horses pressed flat

  to mesh and weave like cloth, I tell them it might take me

  a few months to get home because I like to stop when I travel,

  pull over so I can rest, and what about falling asleep

  on the horse, what about what I did not imagine, smokestack

  man slumped down snoring in the saddle, sliding over

  to the edge of the grace of horses, their mercy, forgiveness

  even for people who forget how the lines between territories

  are made of the flesh of ghosts who had no words for where

  land ends or where land begins or why there is a horse

  waiting for me to answer for the uncle who killed her.

  from The New Yorker

  ELEANOR WILNER

  * * *

  Sowing

  . . . she glided from the sky and ordered him / to plow the ground and then to plant within / the earth, the serpent’s teeth: these were to be / the seeds of men to come . . .

  —Ovid, The Metamorphoses

  . . . I can’t make up / a name like Turnipseed! Or that // I knew a man who went by such / a goodly name. . . .

  —Maurice Manning

  I knew a man by such a name, though didn’t know

     until you told me so, that a turnip seed is tiny, it’s

  a little bit of hardly anything. I should have known.

     Miniscule—a man, a goodly man, his seed—

  what’s that beside a war, misrule, history looming

     like a tower that throws its shadow

  as it blocks the sun—the way (an old

     story) sin is cas
t on those most sinned

  against; their coffins covered with a flag:

     stripes like the backs of slaves back when,

  and stars—perhaps the last thing that you see

     when the landmine takes you—life and

  limb, as the saying goes. My God. I knew a man,

     hardly more than a boy, though the word’s

  forbidden when the young man’s black,

     as if you meant him disrespect. But he wasn’t yet

  out of his teens, a sweet kid name of Turnipseed,

     Carl as I recall, and I’ve always wondered how

  the war turned out for him. Afraid, in fact, to know.

  Showed up in class one day in uniform, but not

     to stay—to say goodbye—resigned, a fatalist.

  Why struggle in a net that tightens

     when you fight its hold? Just say so long, and go.

  All I could find to say was, please, take care

     of yourself. I mean, what good are words. A little

  bit of hardly anything. And seeds?

  What good, as they said in ’Nam, when you

     bought the farm—the field plowed with dragonseed,

  from which those fratricidal armies sprang

     and fell upon each other’s throats, and fell like dominoes

  to join the ranks of headstones, row on row on row . . .

     And Turnipseed? That seed was meant to grow.

  from The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review

  DAVID WOJAHN

  * * *

  My Father’s Soul Departing

  Little soul, charismatic vagabond,

  Honored guest, comrade of the body.

  Now you shall depart into those regions

  Fogbound, anesthetized, and barren.

  Here your laughter served you well.

  There, everlasting, your mouth’s stitched shut.

  —Hadrian, “Animula”

  Assume, dear vagabond, you are permitted

    One last survey. Your 21 grams of sentience,

     Little soul—the weight exactly

  Of a ruby-throated hummer—shall hover

    The foliated stamens of your

     Earthly measure. How you dart & pivot,

  Honored guest, your thirst unquenchable.

   Here is Milbank, South Dakota,

     The saffron dustbowl where your father,

  Dear comrade, raises his belt to crisscross your back:

    The five & twenty lesions. Here the state hospital,

     Your mother ballooning with insulin

  To induce the coma meant to cure the demons

    Marauding the precincts of her abject brain.

     Now you shall depart: a milk run in Duluth,

  A quart bottle bursting on a frozen stoop, then

    A troop ship bound for Tunis, & into those regions

     Of desert where you wander your forty days.

  You rifle the pockets of a dead Wehrmacht corporal:

    Luger & a snakebite kit. & now you lean

     From a baggage car door, hefting a postal sack

  As the train slows for a station—Breckinridge

    Or Sleepy Eye—slows but will not stop

     For twenty-seven years. The railroad men’s

  Hotels along the tracks, pulls of bourbon

    From a dented flask. The white Dakota plains—

     Fogbound, anesthetized & barren.

  Montage of seven Chevy Biscaynes, the songbook

    Of Ernest Tubb. A shingled ranch, deriving from

     The GI Bill. GARDEN SIX TWO FOUR

  SEVEN SEVEN, the receiver lifted from its cradle

    As you weep to a stranger who’s purloined

     Your pension. Pulls of bourbon

  From a highball glass, from a coffee cup, the thrall

    & ratchet of ECT, your dress rehearsal

     For oblivion. What I remember: your laughter

  Did not serve you well. Honored guest, comrade

    Of the body, your farewell is complete.

     Blessèd the descent which beckons.

  There, everlasting, your mouth’s stitched shut.

  from AGNI

  GREG WRENN

  * * *

  Detainment

  In the undisclosed desert facility, they strapped me to a steel table and told me to recite the poem that would save the world.

  (I had arrived there in a windowless, automated van driven inside the hollow mountain—

  through the forest they had chased me to exhaustion.)

  They polished metal tools I’d never seen before.

  To break me down, at first one of them kept tapping on my nose and whispering lyrics, access codes, rapid sequences of Greek letters and English surnames.

  One tried to interface with my brain, injecting a sort of horned electrode into Wernicke’s, then Broca’s. My larynx in spasm. My hands were hooves, then nightingale beaks, the fluorescent tubes above me were my white bones.

  I chanted baby names during sensations of drowning, overwhelming nausea. Back and forth from ice-cold water, mock burials. They crowned me with electrified laurels.

  They touched me, laughing.

  They touched me and I sang and for what?

  from Cream City Review

  ROBERT WRIGLEY

  * * *

  Blessed Are

  You, faithful ravens, staying on and saying

  through the songbirdless winter

  the biblical syntax of your declarations.

  It is with great fascination I watch you excise,

  with inordinate patience, the upward eye

  of the fallen deer below the house.

  I confess the sight through my binoculars

  puts me eye-to-eye with both you

  and the eye you eat and squabble over,

  gustatory, opening now and then your great wings

  in contretemps corvidae vexations,

  like a scrum of omnivorous umbrellas.

  Further plunder will require your partners, the coyotes,

  slinking even now your way and awaiting

  the night your plumage exemplifies

  and under which they will open the carcass

  for your further delectation and caws

  the dozen mornings I imagine it will take.

  Then the snows will bury it, and many mice

  will gnaw its bones until it emerges yet again

  from the melts of spring, a blessing for the blowflies

  and the seethe of their maggots, until the vault

  the empty brain occupied is emptied itself,

  and I retrieve the skull and hang it on my shack.

  There it will be filled with the thoughts of yellow jackets,

  there it will grin its grim, unmandibled

  half-smile out over the distances swallows

  troll for the yellow jackets themselves,

  and one of you will perch yourself upon a bare rib then,

  to recite, for the world, your ravenous beatitudes.

  from Southern Indiana Review

  JAKE ADAM YORK

  * * *

  Calendar Days

  One day you wake and they’re there, flecks of mud

  weed-eaters throw against the window, moths

  in their dark migrations, salmon that taste like dust.

  All month long, they fall from the laundry, dead

  receipts for burritos, coffees, books. They’ve lotused

  toilet water, drinks left out from the night before.

  They rifle into floodlights, their exit wounds

  so much skin, so much powdered glue. April’s cruelty

  is, isn’t it, just a rumor floated by May and June

  while everyone fans the rice pag
es of their Bibles

  in sermons’ hot wind. It’s the dry air makes them rise.

  In these parts now they say sirocco, entirely

  out of place. They say monsoon, which is a way

  of not saying fire, virga, haboob. I’d like to feel

  the milt wind off Erie or Ontario, fresh strawberries

  and airlift oysters to chew, but I’ve got to rise again

  to pull the locust beans from the choking gutters,

  which I explain as a prayer for rain. Tomorrow’s

  my birthday day in another month, a twelfth

  of a reminder of something I can’t remember,

  though they say I was there, Polaroid, Panavision

  images dreamed or dreamed for me, half-holy

  half-haunted, like the streets of Jackson slowly going

  Kodachrome, gelatin silver, dim,

  my father’s menthol still reporting in the tray.

  You have to look away so the smoke’s cursive’s

  written clear, my grandmother’s card, her best

  farmer’s Palmer method, Our pride & joy,

  flutter of money, even after all these years,

  take the day off. But there are bills to pay,

  even without stamps, days in advance

  so they’ll post on time, someone born or someone

  dying so near midnight, one day’s clocked,

  the next not yet in. It takes a while to sort it out.

  You may already be a winner. I check, of course,

  the numbers each day, though I’ve often forgotten

  to buy a ticket, as my father reads the obits to see

  if he’s still alive. It would be a great excuse,

  he says, call in dead for work. In the joke, God says

  give me a chance. You should know, he says,

  the trade-in on your car in case you want to ditch

  it in a quarry, set it on fire, though the heat’s never

  hot enough to melt it back to stone. The fireflies