Best American Poetry 2017

by David Lehman

     cat and mouse of masters and skeletons laid to rest at last.

  The heartless turnkey, the nerveless safecracker, the latch-key kid

     scared shitless, the relentlessly dauntless escape artist

  trussed in shackles and manacles in shot after shot: who among us

     could even make up stuff so specious, so spurious?

  No cutpurse to fleece us, no jackboot to roust us, no half-assed excuse

     to detain us, remand us, debase us, reform us,

  no iron fist or invisible hand to quash or unleash us, no righteous

     crusade to destroy us to save us: just us, just us.

  All of us no longer shiftless, feckless, careless, faithless: no losses to cut,

     no charges to press, nothing to witness, nothing to confess,

  no one to cast into the wilderness, no caste to dispossess, no shamefulness,

     no shamelessness, no cease and desist, no underhandedness

  under duress, nothing to peer into or peep at with a flickering eyelash,

     each cloudless passing hour lusting after less and less.

  Should be, so be it: so trustworthy, so noteworthy, so rock-steady,

     so truth-hungry, so war-weary, so far from foolhardy,

  so otherworldly already, no guest or ghost would guess that any of us

     were ever less than blameless, faultless, spotless, blessed.

  Needless, useless, pointless, crap: the polygraph, the wiretap, the clink of cuffs,

     the accordion gate, the ankle bracelet, the honeycombed spy-cams,

  the blueprints for the deluxe panopticon, all that superfluous refuse shipped off

     to the pawn shop, the swap meet, the flea mart, the boundless

  county dump, the bottomless dustbin of clueless things past, all dead as

     the doornail that held fast against the hopeless crush of us.

  No senseless wishfulness, no useless ruthlessness, no goods to get on us

     to bust or traduce us, no clauses to bind us, no cause

  for redress, no one on the loose, on the make, on the case, nothing for us

     to jimmy or pick, nothing gone missing, not a thing amiss,

  no No Tell Motel, no Big House, no Pale beyond us, no tragic chorus in a rumpus

     over the worst in us getting the best of us in spite of us,

  just all of us lapsing less and less regardless how rootless, witless, gutless, pissed,

     all that thankless cussed nonsense now behind us: just us, just us.

  from The American Scholar

  DAN BEACHY-QUICK

  * * *

  Apophatic

  for Peter Gizzi

  nothing changes nothing

  grows wild nothing grows

  tame nothing bends weird

  the mind-space into shape

  of tether and memory of

  ankle gone lame the whole

  hurt song called irony can-

  not know how chaos aches

  beneath the facts it wears

  for a face the fact of a

  blank page being a form

  of a map that is a kind of

  mask missing a mountain

  or a mouth or a marble

  pedestal from which the riddle

  pours down and you know

  a man is the answer a man

  but nothing changes nothing

  bends absence bright into a

  silence called paper white

  sun circle or solar sail or lonely

  wind across vast despair or

  blank hope bearing small repair

  that this finger I point at

  myself answers the question

  what is not is everywhere

  from Harvard Review

  BRUCE BOND

  * * *

  Homage to a Painter of Small Things

  for Matthew Cornell

  Begin, not with home, but with one home

  among the tiny many you will paint,

  each consumed in silence, its obsessions,

  its hunger for the small within the small,

  the eye that pins a window to the world.

  Begin with a broken cubicle of light,

  the green hush that makes a cricket sing,

  each brushstroke concealed in the next,

  wave on wave, until the last one sinks

  beneath the blue crush of all those hours.

  And if you must begin, begin again

  somewhere in the middle, with a boat

  just beneath a radium of porch light,

  leaned the way a chill leans against

  the glass to press a child to the fire.

  Start with a home that is not your home.

  No home is. And so they all might be.

  All return you to the smallness of one,

  the ache a lantern casts across an alley.

  So close these walls, so reticent the dark

  proximities that tempt a boy to look.

  The painter knows. A pupil threads needle

  after needle, untouched by what it sees,

  let alone what it will not. Night falls so

  slowly it feels like stillness coming down.

  Ask the boy he was if he must invent

  the lives of the strangers to find his place.

  Does he slouch like a microscope,

  the scholar of a solitude that has no end.

  Twilight puts its pressure to the stars.

  Begin here, with the sound of dishes,

  the wind-chime of the sink. Begin with hands

  one never holds, a radio that plays just

  one station, broken since the 1950s.

  Begin with the music of that station,

  with a black sedan out back that runs fine

  and goes nowhere, though it is good to think

  it could, any day now you could pick up,

  leave, begin again. You could, echoes the song

  you cannot hear. Believe me, love, you could.

  from Raritan

  JOHN BREHM

  * * *

  Intrigue in the Trees

  Horse-collared by the high heat

  of mountainous afternoons,

  dogged by furious

  dissatisfactions,

  snakebit, buffaloed,

  bird-brained. Thank you,

  animals, for giving us so many

  useful metaphors, and forgive

  us for disappearing you,

  daily and eternally.

  Often I wonder:

  is the earth trying to get

  rid of us, shake us off,

  drown us, scorch us

  to nothingness?

  To save itself and all other

  creatures slated for destruction?

  The trees around here

  seem friendly enough—

  stoic, philosophically inclined

  toward non-judgmental

  awareness and giving

  in their branchings

  perfect examples

  of one thing becoming two

  and remaining one—

  but who knows

  what they really feel?

  Just last night I was walking

  to my favorite café,

  The Laughing Goat,

  when I saw a murder of crows

  circling raincloudy sky,

  arguing, speaking strangely,

  suddenly alight on

  a maple tree, dozens of them

  closing down their wings

  like arrogant, ill-tempered

  magistrates. Everybody

  was looking up and

  watching. Some kind of

  consultation was happening there

  (animals think we’re crazy

  for thinking they can’t think),

  and I said to a woman

  pa
ssing in the crosswalk:

  I wonder what they’re

  planning. She laughed and

  kept right on going,

  happy as a lark.

  from The Sun

  JERICHO BROWN

  * * *

  Bullet Points

  I will not shoot myself

  In the head, and I will not shoot myself

  In the back, and I will not hang myself

  With a trashbag, and if I do,

  I promise you, I will not do it

  In a police car while handcuffed

  Or in the jail cell of a town

  I only know the name of

  Because I have to drive through it

  To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,

  But I promise you, I trust the maggots

  And the ants and the roaches

  Who live beneath the floorboards

  Of my house to do what they must

  To any carcass more than I trust

  An officer of the law of the land

  To shut my eyes like a man

  Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet

  So clean my mother could have used it

  To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will kill me

  The same way most Americans do,

  I promise you: cigarette smoke

  Or a piece of meat on which I choke

  Or so broke I freeze

  In one of these winters we keep

  Calling worst. I promise that if you hear

  Of me dead anywhere near

  A cop, then that cop killed me. He took

  Me from us and left my body, which is,

  No matter what we’ve been taught,

  Greater than the settlement a city can

  Pay to a mother to stop crying, and more

  Beautiful than the brand new shiny bullet

  Fished from the folds of my brain.

  from BuzzFeed

  NICKOLE BROWN

  * * *

  The Dead

  It was the ones no one remembered who pulled at me.

  —Dorothy Allison

  So tell me, who remembers Topa, her daddy, his face marked with smallpox

  or his two sisters, one that died one day, the otheren the next?

  Who remembers quarantined houses marked with a red card, the brain

  fevers and blood fluxes, or the uncle who found a rafter in the tobacco barn

  for his neck? And wasn’t there a second cousin

  who phoned his brother before making a confetti

  of his own brains? Or that other young uncle—a good-looking

  son of a bitch—who, face down in the river, took mud

  into his handsome lungs? Or the babies—Jesus, always the babies—

  drowned in washtubs or bit by brown recluse, or Claire, a girl born

  four months early, small enough to crib in a shoebox

  and thrived, but her brother—full-term, healthy as a horse—

  who was sleeping sound on his second day when he

  just died?

  And who remembers Yael but me, that girl with the name so pretty

  I could taste the syllables—Yah Elle—

  and called her again and again? She was only

  seven, her blood a sandstorm of cells, at war with itself.

  Or my soft-spoken cousin, that kid

  surfer who thought he could crush time-

  release painkillers with his teeth and

  live? Does anyone remember how impossible

  death seemed in Florida, how like a sun-scorched

  fern his hands curled, two black fiddleheads, the foam at his mouth

  when all his chickenshit friends left him

  for dead? On the way to his funeral, Fanny got after us for wearing black:

  All you young girls always wearing dark, dark, dark, she said. You need to put on a bright

  and purdy color, something that don’t make you look so depressed all the fucking time.

  We laughed, reminded her where we were going, but who can say

  her fussing was a joke—her amnesia seemed

  fender-struck, a switch flipped

  off inside a woman who couldn’t take no more.

  Later that day we walked to church under mangroves swarmed

  with the bright green fluster of wild parakeets.

  I can’t say I remember much more than my aunt, how she looked

  up into the trees, said, Oh, little birds, don’t you know?

  And the birds, briskly chittering back, answered her:

  No.

  from Cave Wall

  CYRUS CASSELLS

  * * *

  Elegy with a Gold Cradle

  Now that you’re forever

  ministering wind and turquoise, ashes

  eclipsed by the sea’s thrust

  and the farthest tor

  (I know you were always

  more than my mother)—

  giveaway flecks tipped and scattered

  from an island palisade;

  now that you’re a restless synonym

  for the whistling fisherman’s

  surfacing mesh,

  the alluring moon’s path and progress

  through a vast chaos

  of unrelenting waves,

  let me reveal:

  in the at-a-loss days

  following your scattering,

  in my panoramic hotel, I found

  a sun-flooded cradle—

  so pristine, so spot-lit, and sacramental

  beside my harbor-facing bed,

  I couldn’t bear to rock

  or even touch it, Mother:

  I marveled at the gold-leafed bars

  and contours—the indomitable,

  antique wood beneath, an emblem

  of unbeatable hope

  and prevailing tenderness—

  then, for a crest-like, hallowing hour,

  listen, my mourning was suffused

  with the specter of your lake-calm

  cascade of hair, inkwell-dark

  in the accruing shadows,

  your rescuing, soothing contralto,

  and oh yes, Isabel,

  the longed-for fluttering

  of my nap-time lids:

  entrancing gold

  of the first revealing dawns,

  the first indispensable lullabies—

  from AGNI

  ISAAC CATES

  * * *

  Fidelity and the Dead Singer

  for Michael Donaghy

  If I set a new stylus on an old record—

  my mother’s teenage single of Roy Head and the Traits,

  a second-hand Howlin’ Wolf, the B-side of Hey Jude

  I played until I couldn’t hear it—it’s the same catch,

  same scratch, same scratch again, same clouds

  of static subsiding into soft focus. The first beat

  brings it all back home, the dead singer’s voice

  alive like a recurring dream, or like a ritual

  as a ritual wishes it could be, unreeling perfectly

  over rhythms cherished to the point of sanctity.

  Not so for poems. The blank before the words

  has no voice of its own, and when the verbs

  unfurl they change a little every time

  —not in errors of transcription but in changes

  of the throat the poem courses through:

  grown lazy, gruff, impatient through the years,

  or passing from your mouth to mine like a flu

  then passing limply through a stranger’s lips

  incognito, stumbling, in strange accents.

  If only you were in the words, or between them.

  I want to hear them again the way you said them:

  the pauses, in accordance with your wishes;

  the full stops, rough with markings for your breath.

  from The American Scholar

  ALLISON COBB

  * * *


  I Forgive You

  I forgive you fingers. I forgive you wrists and palms. I forgive you web of veins, the nameless knuckles, twenty-seven bones, the nails and moons below. I forgive you feet, the toes and toenails, metatarsals arching up, cuneiform, the cuboids, and navicular. I forgive you sole of foot, fibrofatty pressure chambers, dense packed nerve and tissue, the spring ligament. I forgive you ankle, lovely with twin bone swells. I forgive you calf abundant, knee cap, knee joint extra complex and temperamental. I forgive you bone and sinew, blood vessel and braid of muscle. I forgive you tidal lymph. I forgive you skin, the coast on which all washes up. I forgive you thigh and buttock, anus, vagina, clitoris, urethra, mons a rounded mass of fatty tissue, inner and outer lips, the smooth stretch of perineum. I forgive you sacroiliac, the bone wings laced with tendon, the pelvic inlet and the brim. I forgive you coiled intestines lined in tissue soft as velvet, the uterus and eggs inside of ovaries, the fluting tubes Fallopian, the docile stomach sack. I forgive you my esophagus, moist mucosa, heart and lung lobes, liver, kidneys, pancreas and gall bladder, the spleen—all the inner organs curled together in the dark and muttering like clocks, like memories of clocks. I forgive you. I forgive you breasts, your lobes and lobules, ducts and alveoli rising to the darkened areola and the nipple passage outward. I forgive you golden seams of fat in semi-liquid state, encasing in your oily cells the poisons of the world. I forgive you mouth, the teeth and budded tongue, the epiglottis, pharynx and the tough-ringed trachea, the larynx with its cords for making sound. I forgive you nasal cavity and sinuses, the ear canal and clear-walled eyeballs—all the head holes opened to the rain of light, the floating atoms of the air, the jacked together molecules of the stupid human world. I forgive you ropey muscles of the neck and face, so overstrained from constantly composing mirrors. I forgive you brain, three pounds of convoluted meat plastered with grey nerve cells, wrapped in blood-rich tissue, floating in your own sweet bath of fluid. I forgive you spinal column sprouting from the brain stem, flaring wires to spark electric charges through dumb tissue. I forgive you glands, both tubular and alveolar, releasing streams of chemicals and mucus, sweat and milk and oil. I forgive you every hair bulb, constantly dividing, pressing hardened protein shafts up toward the light. I forgive you cells, all one hundred trillion, the inner ocean that has ebbed and flowed across three million years. I forgive you every part performing all the intricate and simple tasks that make this mass alive. I forgive you all for already having died.