The Best American Poetry 2019
Page 13
already within us: the frank look, the unabashed
leg with which the woman kicks off the covers from the bed
of the man to whom she is not married; the neat,
round muscle of his shoulder pressed against hers
in the dark, his body over and over coming alive
under her hands, a dream or a nightmare
Mary Shelley once had of Clara.
All this time, she told her husband, their daughter
had not been dead at all, only cold, the little body frozen
and waiting to be attended to. And so we rubbed
it before the fire, and now it lives, she told
Shelley in the conversation recorded
in her journal, and cried awhile, and went to bed.
Then woke again the next morning, and remembered.
The midwife, walking back down from the villa
three summers later, having attended the birth
of the duke’s new, less delicate wife, hums a song
to herself that she hummed to the baby
she just left, a girl this time, no pomegranates
for payment; a girl who will, if lucky, inherit
her mother’s strength and her plainness, both traits
the midwife believes might protect her from
and in the birthing bed. She’ll grow up,
the midwife thinks, and marry, and have children
herself, some less or more like her, sons
with obdurate natures, perhaps, or a daughter
who inherits her curly hair, perhaps the sturdy thighs
of a woman like this shopkeeper kneeling now by a store
in the Piazza Grande to retrieve a shower of euros
from someone’s coin purse. The woman stands, straightens,
and I see her mouth thin to a not unpleasant line
as she looks out at me, calculating, perhaps,
the time until lunch as she tugs at the waist
of her linen pants. The yellow pleats sag, slack
at her belly. The weight from a pregnancy
she never lost, perhaps, or the thickening
that comes to anyone, in the later part of life.
from AGNI
SONIA SANCHEZ
* * *
Belly, Buttocks, and Straight Spines
for Sister Wangechi Mutu
(1)
you—enigmatic woman exploding
from clouds and intestines, riverbanks,
kneecaps, veins and horizons
tongues embroidered with eyelashes.
you burn in my throat
i walk your footsteps
singing.
you are here. you are there.
you will never go away.
you kiss your own breath
sleepwalk your eyes
stretch out with moths
singing your legs.
(2)
i know your butterfly sweet
your lips taste of the sea
the years dusty with herstory
anticipate light.
your hands riot with pain
collapse in new prayer
touch this western stained
glass where ghosts commit
themselves to military blood.
the bleating hips
surrounding your teeth
wrapped in laughter
blood laughter
brittle noise
seaweed souls
whistling words
whose lil pumpkin are you?
who is your sister?
where is your mama?
our thumbs bleed ashes.
in this travel dust bowl.
(3)
this is a blues sermon
i think, hanging from
the sky
scratching at the night
where literary brains
demystify deaths.
seen from the angle
of your life,
you turn at the waist
in red and purple confetti
the day stitches up
your python mouth.
you stroll black
beyond the stars
star leaping blk/skinned
woman
seen from the angle
of the camera, you become
the mug shot
mugging a century of
incestuous nipples.
sounds . . . video . . . smell . . .
riding death on
its lens
do not feed the animals
they will bite one day.
who speaks
who has spoken
this squat language
where are the vowels
and consonants and diphthongs?
do not feed the animals
they squat in herds
and will bite one day . . .
(4)
red orange breasts
leaking medical
hieroglyphics
bones for sale
immaculate bones for sale
stage right:
Ethiopian bodies
leaking into the ground
stage left:
old clothes unburied
children’s eyes undressed
men’s pants unzipped
women’s slips slipping
standing still backstage
a-waiting modernity
master monsters with batons
conducting infernos
is God calling
your limbs to pray
to prey on
what’s in a name
a leg, a heart, a skull
an ancestral wind?
your intellect teases us
with zero tolerance for lies.
what’s in a kiss? a smell?
a black woman in white chalk?
a woman sleepwalking
on corners?
what is erotic about
a false step?
yo me espero, yo me espero
i wait for my coming, I wait for my coming.
now as your congregational
knees kneel
now that your birth laughs
a long pause
now that you sigh amid
the pale gaze of thirst,
is that God’s tongue
sliding down your throat?
(5)
yo sé, lo sé, yo sé
i know, i know it, i know
where is this brown skinned woman going
with her military hair
a bright hysterical flower
eating cake smiling cake
regurgitating cake
yo sé, lo sé, yo sé
i know, i know it, i know
smell the jelly roll woman
squatting in her skin
her bright face eating bluesorrow
smell the doctoral urgency
of her shudderings
female pain profiling
her hunger.
who scrubs the day white
while women fall down
with crucifixions?
can you hear
their birdspirits
strumming gravity?
can you hear
the saxophone
bloodletting the ghosts shout?
can you play this woman
with your fingers?
can you hear
her confetti feet
dancing undeposited rhythms?
NOW HEAR THIS. NOW HEAR THIS.
harpsichord teeth
mothbred smiles
put vaginas in a pill
box for awhile . . .
telegraphic buttocks
in bathroom stalls
you are tattooed on our eyes
against the tabloid walls . . .
mouths anointed with
peacock pricks hey, hey, hey
here I am, here i am
come along take your pick<
br />
hey hey hey hey hey hey
listen. listen. listen . . .
woman of eye socket-bone
love can wear you down
to a spinal eye-bone
love can make you drink
your own blood
lessen you got a catcher’s mitt
don’t go playing with love. love. blood.
(6)
silence. silence. ma chère
ca ya te. ca ya te. mi amor
no consecrated birthwaters . . . today
no quicksilver blankets . . . today
no surgical procedures . . . today
just Bantu music with an asterick beat . . . today
just a night shudder under your arms . . . today
just a pistol whipped skin . . . today
just a lost pulse beat . . . today
just a railroad train of butts . . . today
just a machete beat against the sky . . . today
just some cocked cocks standing at attention . . . today
listen. listen. listen. Sister Wangechi
you hear me, don’t you?
and you hear, don’t you, how your
collages dance their amputee delirium.
Sister Wangechi you hear me, don’t you
you hear the sacred music
ease-dropping these gallery walls
praising your beauty and bones
in this hallway of lost sermons,
you hear me don’t you
you hear the children running
a furious circle of legs
jumping adolescent rhymes
as they light up streets
with garbage bag balls as they
spill their magical spines
their genius, their surplus
knees on streets.
it is evening and we have
arrived in your arms of
lost seconds
you hear me don’t you
even as you navigate
this halo of ordained voyages
as you uncork the daylight
past these shadows
past our doors left open
and your gentle breath fills
the day with sweet eyelids
of silver
as you arrive at the arc of your name.
Sister Wangechi Mutu
you hear me, don’t you, and
i invoke your name, your
gallery of female matadors
as they come and dance in thunder . . . (click)
from Valley Voices and Black Renaissance Noire
NICOLE SANTALUCIA
* * *
#MeToo
So #MeToo cuts her ponytail off, walks into a bar and takes a seat next to #MeToo and the bartender serves #MeToo whiskey from an eyedropper she pulls straight out of her purse, but it turns out #MeToo was already in every purse because #MeToo comes as a picture inside every wallet. #MeToo carries tweezers everywhere she goes, plucks chin hairs before her picture is taken. #MeToo slides into a bra strap, tucks into a sock, falls out of a pocket, folds into a shirtsleeve, gets lost in a discount rack. #MeToo Shuts up. Drinks. #MeToo never loses the memory.
#MeToo, like when my high school soccer coach hijacked my shin pads and cleats he drained the water cooler sucked the orange slice out of my mouth the warehouse out of my mind the metal cage out of my lungs the ferris wheel seat that flips inside my gut yes he resigned I was a goalie I wanted to tell his wife wanted to cut his tongue out rip his face off my torso hardened into tree bark when my shirt came off her torso hardened into tree bark when her shirt came off she wanted his wife to yell but it was sunday then tuesday and 16 is hard pavement her head is my head against the curb my hair wrapped around her throat I was 16 I swear I never kissed back
So #MeToo wants to tell his wife, wants his daughter’s name not to be Nicole. #MeToo was kicked off the soccer team. He ran for mayor as a democrat, just like #MeToo. So you lost the sour taste of being a teenager, #MeToo? Me too. Now she stands in front of a classroom twenty years later with hair down to her knees and when a student says #MeToo, she imagines her soccer cleats dangling from his rearview mirror as he gags on a wad of her hair.
from The Seventh Wave
PHILIP SCHULTZ
* * *
The Women’s March
So many mothers are here, daughters and granddaughters.
Mine’s been dead for nineteen years but somehow
managed to come. I’m seeing her everywhere,
in the pleased-with-itself smile of the little girl
riding her father’s shoulders, holding a sign
announcing girl power and the beginning of the
Women’s Century, in the don’t-mess-with-me look
of the much-pierced young woman in black
who appears to have finally found her cadence,
in the excited green-gray eyes of the old woman
in a wheelchair being pushed along at quite a clip
by, I assume, her grandson, who looks absolutely
mesmerized. And just ahead is the forceful stride
of the black drummer banging away for all she is
and wants to be, using everything she has to make
a point about strength and willfulness and sacrifice
that maybe only women have the right to make,
having made all of us, shared themselves so completely.
A point about going too far and not far enough,
about time, and the pain it brings, and yes, here I am,
older than I ever intended to be, enjoying the ringing
in my ears, remembering being lifted into the air
by my mother, trembling with joy, as she enfolded
me into the hospitable wings of her peasant apron.
Yes, she’s here, marching with all the others, all of whom
understand what’s being asked of them, one more time.
from The Southern Review
LLOYD SCHWARTZ
* * *
Vermeer’s Pearl
I used to boast that I never lived in a city without a Vermeer.
—You do now, a friend pointed out, when the one Vermeer in my city was stolen.
It’s still missing.
The museum displays its empty frame.
But there are eight Vermeers in New York, more than any other city—and not so far away.
Sometimes even more.
Once, the visiting Vermeer was one of his most beloved paintings.
It was even more beautiful than I remembered.
A young girl, wearing a turban of blue and yellow silk, is just turning her face to watch you entering the room.
She seems slightly distracted by someone a little off to your right, maybe someone she knows better than you.
Her mouth is slightly open, as if she’s just taken a breath and is about to speak.
The light falling on her is reflected not only on her large pearl earring but also in her large shining eyes (“Those are pearls,” sings Ariel of a man drowned in a tempest at sea, “that were his eyes”).
And on her moist lips.
There’s even a little spot of moisture in a corner of her mouth.
Some art historians think this was not intended to be a portrait, just a study of a figure in an exotic costume.
Yet her presence is so palpable, she seems right there in the room with you, radiating unique and individual life.
Already in the museum is another Vermeer in which a woman writing a letter has a similar pearl earring.
She’s interrupted by her maid handing her a letter—is it from the person she’s just been writing to?
And in a nearby museum there’s a painting of a young woman with piercing eyes and another enormous pearl dangling from her ear (a “teardrop pearl”).
She’s staring out a window and tuning a lute.
Scholars tell us that these pearls aren’t really pearls—no pearl so large has ever come to light.
/> No oyster could be big enough.
So the famous pearl is probably just glass painted to look like a pearl.
Pearl of no price.
Yet as you look, the illusion of the pearl—the painted pearl, glistening, radiant, fragile, but made real by the light it radiates—becomes before your eyes a metaphor for the girl wearing it.
Or if not the girl, then Vermeer’s painting of her.
from Harvard Review
ALAN SHAPIRO
* * *
Encore
Cold, that’s how I was. I couldn’t shake it off, especially
those last days and nights doing all the right things
in the wrong spirit, in the antithesis of spirit, more
machine of son than son, mechanical, efficient, wiping
and cleaning and so having to see and touch what it would have
sickened me to touch and look at if I hadn’t left my body
to the automatic pilot of its own devices so I could do
what needed doing inside the deprivation chamber of this final
chapter, which the TV looked out on glumly through game
show, soap, old sappy black-and-white unmastered films.
I was cold all the time, I couldn’t shake it off till
I was free of her, however briefly, in the parking lot
or at home for a quick drink or toke, anything
to draw some vestige of fellow feeling out of hiding—
hiding deer-like in a clearing at the end of hunting season,
starved but fearful, warily sniffing the scentless air,
breathing in the fresh absence of her scent too new
too sudden not to be another trap—you’re dutiful,
she’d say when I’d come back, as always, I’ll give you that.
And I was cold: I couldn’t help feel there was something
scripted and too rehearsed even about her dying,
laid on too thickly, like a role that every book club
romance, soap, musical and greeting card had been
a training for, role of a lifetime, role “to die for”
and O how she would have played it to the hilt
if not for the cold I couldn’t shake—which must have so
enraged her—not my lack of feeling but my flat refusal