Best American Poetry 2018

by David Lehman

  MARY RUEFLE

  * * *

  Genesis

  Oh, I said, this is going to be.

  And it was.

  Oh, I said, this will never happen.

  But it did.

  And a purple fog descended upon the land.

  The roots of trees curled up.

  The world was divided into two countries.

  Every photograph taken in the first was of people.

  Every photograph taken in the second showed none.

  All of the girl children were named And.

  All of the boy children named Then.

  from Poetry

  KAY RYAN

  * * *

  Some Transcendent Addiction to the Useless

  —George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought

  Unlike the

  work of

  most people

  you’re supposed

  to unthread

  the needle.

  It will be

  a lifetime

  task, far

  from simple:

  the empty eye

  achievable—

  possibly—but

  it’s going

  to take

  fake sewing

  worthy of

  Penelope.

  from Parnassus: Poetry in Review

  MARY JO SALTER

  * * *

  We’ll Always Have Parents

  It isn’t what he said in Casablanca

  and it isn’t strictly true. Nonetheless

  we’ll always have them, much as we have Paris.

  They’re in our baggage, or perhaps are baggage

  of the old-fashioned type, before the wheels,

  which we remember when we pack for Paris.

  Or don’t remember. Paris doesn’t know

  if you’re thinking of it. Neither do your parents,

  although they’ll say you ought to visit more,

  as if they were as interesting as Paris.

  Both Paris and your parents are as dead

  and as alive as what’s inside your head.

  Meanwhile, those lovers, younger every year

  (because with every rerun we get older),

  persuade us less, for all their cigarettes

  and shining unshed tears about the joy

  of Paris blurring in their rearview mirror,

  that they’ve surpassed us in sophistication.

  Granted, they were born before our parents

  but don’t they seem by now, Bogart and Bergman,

  like our own children? Think how we could help!

  We could ban their late nights, keep them home

  the whole time, and prevent their ill-starred romance!

  Here’s looking at us, Kid. You’ll thank your parents.

  from The Common

  JASON SCHNEIDERMAN

  * * *

  Voxel

  O newest of new words,

  welcome to my mouth!

  Though you are still not

  in the dictionary (yet),

  you are transparent in meaning:

  a pixel with volume,

  the basic unit of 3-D

  printing, and now that we have

  you, voxel, Plato will have

  to let us back in his Republic

  because we can print beds

  and guns and pots and pans

  and for so long, we thought

  that nothing could be imagined

  until it was imagined by us;

  and if now, like those monks

  in that story, where they

  end the world by finding

  every possible arrangement

  for the letters in the name

  of God, we too can see

  everything that can ever

  be photographed

  or represented visually,

  at least to the sighted,

  then pixels mean

  that we can predict

  every thing that might

  ever be seen by creating

  an algorithm to generate

  every permutation of every

  image that could ever

  be arranged out of pixels

  and yes, the permutations

  are so many as to be infinite

  for all practical purposes

  because we die, because

  we can more easily calculate

  the number of possibilities

  than actually look at them,

  and yes, this was always

  in our eyes, because pixels

  are merely externalized

  rods and cones

  but still, every single one

  of those possibilities is there

  in that algorithm, or in the

  idea of that algorithm,

  and you, little voxel,

  are still a primitive thing,

  a gradation so coarse as to

  evoke Donkey Kong in

  its earliest days

  of blocky charm,

  but refinement

  is our human skill,

  so much more so

  than love or penmanship

  or peacemaking, at which

  we have learned little, but now,

  voxel, everything is contained

  inside you—not fire

  perhaps—but our model

  of fire—not affection,

  perhaps—but our model

  of affection, and dear voxel,

  the smaller your become,

  the more powerful you will be.

  Dear voxel, already

  I am beginning to think

  of myself in terms of you,

  and sweet voxel, the day

  is coming when I will print

  my selfies as tiny dioramas

  made of you, and you will know

  that you contain all

  that is human

  in the universe,

  that you hold everything

  in versatile potential,

  my neurons, my face,

  my planet, my stem cells,

  my lover, my spaceship,

  my coffin, my poems,

  my eyesight, my corpse.

  from The Literary Review

  NICOLE SEALEY

  * * *

  A Violence

  You hear the high-pitched yowls of strays

  fighting for scraps tossed from a kitchen window.

  They sound like children you might have had.

  Had you wanted children. Had you a maternal bone,

  you would wrench it from your belly and fling it

  from your fire escape. As if it were the stubborn

  shard now lodged in your wrist. No, you would hide it.

  Yes, you would hide it inside a barren nesting doll

  you’ve had since you were a child. Its smile

  reminds you of your father, who does not smile.

  Nor does he believe you are his. “You look just like

  your mother,” he says, “who looks just like a fire

  of suspicious origin.” A body, I’ve read, can sustain

  its own sick burning, its own hell, for hours.

  It’s the mind. It’s the mind that cannot.

  from The New Yorker

  MICHAEL SHEWMAKER

  * * *

  Advent

  His mother must have looked away,

  the reckless boy who teeters on

  the railing of the balcony.

  Beneath him, the congregation sings

  a final hymn in a minor key.

  Above, the oculus, gold leaf,

  the folded wings of Gabriel.

  Impossible to say what lured

  him from his seat—the choir’s appeal

  or the angel’s feet?

  What is his name

  so we might call him, safely, down—

  this child who balances between

  what cannot and what can be seen,

&
nbsp; the martyrs and the marbled ground?

  from The Sewanee Review

  CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH

  * * *

  Dispatch from Midlife

  Gender is the civic center

  of my adrenal gland.

  I am bound by certainty

  to keep it in a shell.

  Past fertility, insomnia

  is the new membrane

  around my nights. My

  mortal terror is the now

  with what’s left of me.

  What are you, demand

  the witches from the throne

  of their own infallible

  femininity. I’m a monster

  of my own making who quit

  one guile for this new one,

  wanton with indifference.

  from Colorado Review

  TRACY K. SMITH

  * * *

  An Old Story

  We were made to understand it would be

  Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

  Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

  Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful

  Dream. The worst in us having taken over

  And broken the rest utterly down.

  A long age

  Passed. When at last we knew how little

  Would survive us—how little we had mended

  Or built that was not now lost—something

  Large and old awoke. And then our singing

  Brought on a different manner of weather.

  Then animals long believed gone crept down

  From trees. We took new stock of one another.

  We wept to be reminded of such color.

  from The Nation

  GARY SNYDER

  * * *

  Why California Will Never Be Like Tuscany

  There must have been huge oaks and pines, cedars,

  maybe madrone,

  in Tuscany and Umbria long ago.

  A few centuries after wood was gone, they began to build with brick and stone.

  Brick and stone farm houses, solid, fireproof,

  steel shutters and doors.

  But farming changed.

  Sixty thousand vacant solid fireproof Italian farm houses

  on the market in 1970,

  scattered across the land.

  Sixty thousand affluent foreigners,

  to fix them, learn to cook, and write a book.

  But in California, houses all are wood—

  roads pushed through, sewers dug, lines laid underground—

  hundreds of thousands, made of strandboard, sheetrock, plaster.

  They won’t be here 200 years from now—they’ll burn or rot.

  No handsome solid second homes for

  thousand-year-later wealthy

  Melanesian or Eskimo artists and writers here,

  —oak and pine will soon return.

  from Catamaran

  A. E. STALLINGS

  * * *

  Pencil

  Once, you loved permanence,

  Indelible. You’d sink

  Your thoughts in a black well,

  And called the error, ink.

  And then you crossed it out;

  You canceled as you went.

  But you craved permanence,

  And honored the intent.

  Perfection was a blot

  That could not be undone.

  You honored what was not,

  And it was legion.

  And you were sure, so sure,

  But now you cannot stay sure.

  You turn the point around

  And honor the erasure.

  Rubber stubs the page,

  The heart, a stiletto of lead,

  And all that was black and white

  Is in-between instead.

  All scratch, all sketch, all note,

  All tentative, all tensile

  Line that is not broken,

  But pauses with the pencil,

  And all choice, multiple,

  The quiz that gives no quarter,

  And Time the other implement

  That sharpens and grows shorter.

  from The Atlantic

  ANNE STEVENSON

  * * *

  How Poems Arrive

  You say them as your undertongue declares

  Then let them knock about your upper mind

  Until the shape of what they mean appears.

  Like love, they’re strongest when admitted blind,

  Judging by feel, feeling with sharpened sense

  While yet their need to be is undefined.

  Inaccurate emotion—as intense

  As action sponsored by adrenaline—

  Feeds on itself, and in its own defense

  Fancies its role humanitarian,

  But poems, butch or feminine, are vain

  And draw their satisfactions from within,

  Sporting with vowels, or showing off a chain

  Of silver els and ms to host displays

  Of intimacy or blame or joy or pain.

  The ways of words are tight and selfish ways,

  And each one wants a slot to suit its weight.

  Lines needn’t scan like this with every phrase,

  But something like a pulse must integrate

  The noise a poem makes with its invention.

  Otherwise, write prose. Or simply wait

  Till it arrives and tells you its intention.

  from The Hudson Review

  ADRIENNE SU

  * * *

  Substitutions

  Balsamic, for Zhenjiang vinegar.

  Letters, for the family gathered.

  A Cuisinart, for many hands.

  Petty burglars, for warring bands.

  A baby’s room, for tight quarters.

  Passing cars, for neighbors.

  Lawn-mower buzzing, for bicycle bells.

  Cod fillets, for carp head-to-tail.

  Children who overhear the language,

  for children who speak the language.

  Virginia ham, for Jinhua ham,

  and nothing, for the noodle man,

  calling as he bears his pole

  down alley and street, its baskets full

  of pickled mustard, scallions, spice,

  minced pork, and a stove he lights

  where the customer happens to be,

  the balance of hot, sour, salty, sweet,

  which decades later you still crave,

  a formula he’ll take to the grave.

  from New England Review

  NATASHA TRETHEWEY

  * * *

  Shooting Wild

  At the theater I learn shooting wild,

  a movie term that means filming a scene

  without sound, and I think of being a child

  watching my mother, how quiet she’d been,

  soundless in our house made silent by fear.

  At first her gestures were hard to understand,

  and her hush when my stepfather was near.

  Then one morning, the imprint of his hand

  dark on her face, I learned to watch her more:

  the way her grip tightened on a fork, night

  after night; how a glance held me, the door—

  a sign that made the need to hear so slight

  I can’t recall her voice since she’s been dead:

  no sound of her, no words she might have said.

  from Poet Lore

  AGNIESZKA TWOREK

  * * *

  Grief Runs Untamed

  In one hand the exiles hold a bundle

  with a blanket, medicine, and a comb;

  in the other, a door handle.

  They attach it to every mountain and wall,

  hoping the handle will conjure the door

  that will open and let them in.

  Through the swamps, down the dirt roads,

  through the frigid water the exiles go,

  knowing
they shall never return.

  In their former homes, if there are still homes,

  the wind wails. Spiders weave

  their shrouds over the cupboards and beds.

  Cats, left behind, wait to be scratched under their chins;

  a dog smells the scarf a young girl dropped

  and barks on the cellar stairs.

  Near the road thousands took to flee,

  a carcass of a cow still tied to the olive tree,

  abandoned like their tea sets and pots.

  A widow with children runs from the Guatemalan gangs.

  Newlyweds from Syria huddle in a dinghy

  in the Mediterranean, their wedding rings sold

  to help them pay the way. A couple from Sudan

  limp along on the scorched ground with their epileptic son.

  Those who survive and settle in a new place

  sometimes dream at night of returning

  by foot to their native homes.

  When they wake up, they have blisters on their feet.

  from The Sun

  G. C. WALDREP

  * * *

  Dear Office in Which I Must Account for Tears,

  You were a forest once. I passed through you

  and my garments were torn by thorns.

  After that, I did not venture near the lambs

  that would be charged with your death.

  I did not feed the horses

  toward which you were stampeding.

  We were young then, together, and then

  an art grew up between us.

  I received mail at this address long before

  my vocation took me here; I discarded it

  unopened, a dew upon the stippled grass.