The Best American Poetry

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Bruce Covey

The Difference Between Toggle Bolts & Molly Screws

It's like the atlantic around here—jittery &
Full of waves, a desperate need for a horizontal
& vertical juxtaposition, a corner, a vantage point
A start. And if that weren't enough, this device

I found to fasten, without a clear understanding
Of what in the hell needs fastening. Except,
I do this: press gently through your center
Nestling, mixing into your microcosmic control,

Until its wings finally cross the cusp, detach,
Unfold again on the opposite side, drawing me
As close to you as relative density might allow,
Clinging from the rear of your ribcage

And imprinting according to this grid:
Every minus to crease a plus, every plus
To upend a many a minus. There's a message
Nestled in between us like a traffic signal

Composed of half a dozen buttons & a rook:
"Declining to hear the city's solving tools,
They, in a methodical approach to the construction
Of peculiar fields & frames, dusting full force, yield

Two outcomes, Phoenix on the left, trajectory
From concept to completion on the other,
Redirected to circles, one in my very backyard,
The other spread along every sort of continent."

The process of the phonologically sequenced paper,
Or your physical form, a thirdness, where order
The first, trace to follow up your spine & amidst
Your hair an intended & immediate kiss

Second & nonrepresentative because
The moment this is, it is, and then one more

* * *

Bruce Covey is the author of Glass Is Really a Liquid (No Tell Books, 2010) and Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell Books, 2006).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in September 2007.  Bruce wrote, "I believe these poems are reaching, attempting to celebrate the mysterious & magnificent something that's always beyond one's extended & stretching fingers. The space between what's "true" & what might have been. . . "The Different Between Toggle Bolts and Molly Screws" came from a challenge to write a poem centered around a piece of hardware."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Paige Taggart

from To People Who Sometimes Read

A female blue whale calf gains nine pounds an hour. Holy fuck! What a mammal. If only all females could see past their own insecurities, the fire would light a higher maternal flame. The deep sea is ridiculously blue. I’ve been caught in a wave twice and was pulled from its drowning. How high the feeling of being full of water can be, knocking the wind from your lungs, giving you no option but to swallow. That’s how to be in love, to swallow all your pride and let your body sink into its capsizing existence. The blue whale’s heart is the size of a small car.

* * * 

Paige Taggart is the author of Won't be a Girl (Scantily Clad Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in January 2010. Paige wrote, "To People Who Sometimes Read is a series in which I attempt to make language my bitch. I had exhausted my previous mode of writing, coinciding with a need to change my life. It was time to admit my “soulshame,” to allow myself to be vulnerable and more declarative, a befitting circumnavigation with my lifestyle transition. I was influenced immensely by two poet’s correspondence of email-poems that were both extremely personal and had mastered a certain building format that I wanted to build-off of myself. At one point I didn’t even believe in editing. I had said it’s like trying to train a mule to talk. But I now realize that part of my dream is to begin without perfection, in fact, the more chaotic, the more likely I am to hone-in. Oftentimes, I felt like I was trapped in a cave that only allows exit when the sea is at low tide, and frequently the sea was at high-tide but with my one-good-eye I was able to scratch lesions into the walls. I found a dog that wasn’t mine but fed it anyway for four days, then I responded to the posters that had been duct-taped to tree trunks. The number put me on the phone with a sheriff. He was out for blood but when I told him my story, he let me go. I think I care about writing poetry more than anyone else in the world."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Alice B. Fogel

Variation 1:  Yhwh

Explode from the cauldron dark,

that’s what I’d do for them:  That in mind into self

and other I divided.  In and in I overlapped in density

and where I was gravid I breathed their breaths. 

With my body like a brine spiraling I stirred

the silence till it echoed apart from me, and where I

was deafened I hummed their frequencies. 

From a floating ground I fired rounds of clouds

flaming and where they burned I brewed the rutilated

light till it refracted in the wells between comets rocketing.

In and in through the ancient rooms I fell and where

there were thresholds I left them canyons gorgeous

and aggrieved.  Flung wide, electrified, I striated skies

with ellipsis, color, collapse, shot suns past

eclipse, blew the air for sound to sound

from touch, touched them till they cried in ecstacy:


Out and out and through the skin my sweat

ran and poured into hollows so where I emptied

they filled and though I encompassed

they merely contained.  Into the molten cavity I

dropped a stone, I lit the furnace, stretched a hide. 

I wielded the ragged white-veined ice and birthed

spinning galaxies in atoms, vital alluvium, the eternal

quest for me.   I remembered and made them

forget.  I raged and sweetened them.  Formless then

I dimensioned space, delineated them.  I swallowed

my own throat to feed them hungers delicious.

Where I could not pass I corridored their heavens.

Where I felt nothing I caused them passion and urge.

I watch them and they are blind to me.

I sleep, and they dream. 

I cry out to them, and they die.

* * *

Alice B. Fogel is the author of  Be That Empty: Apologia for Air (Harbor Mountain Press), Elemental and I Love This Dark World (Zoland Books).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in May 2005.  Alice wrote, “Var. 1: Yhwh” is based on the Kabbalah’s notion of the Zim-Zum, which is pretty much like the big bang theory in physics. I also thought of Francis Ponge’s “Kings do not touch doors,” or how lonely the powerful are. The way the universe is spinning in and out replicates the way Bach’s variations often climb up and down scales, sometimes involving the crossing over of hands."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Craig Santos Perez

from the ghost of the harvest madonna

Tears of the Madonna, the Hunger and Other Stories. “Madonna Rescues Malawian Child – only 12 Million to Go.” A boy with an allergy to ghosts has trouble with too-logical teachers who say ghosts don’t exist. To celebrate the autumn harvest, the boy claims he had seen his real father’s ghost. The father tells his son “your vitriol towards Madonna seems out of control.”

* * *

Craig Santos Perez is the author of from Unincorporated Territory (Tinfish Press) and from Unincorporated Territory [saina] (Omnidawn). No Tell Motel first published this poem in March 2007. Craig wrote, "These poems are from a prose poem manuscript titled "the ghost of the harvest madonna," which explores the possibilities of disjunctive allegory."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Joanna Ruocco

When I Worked for Madonna

The bodyguards wear white 
The bullets fly towards them 
The bodyguards are clouds 
The bullets do not penetrate 
Kaddafi. The bullets are precipitation 
After we drink coffee, we check 
the bird feeders. Kaddafi has purple 
martins on his shoulders. The bodyguards 
are snowy egrets. Forget 
in both directions from this moment 
I am right in front of you 
I have a rifle 
I am sexually wonderful 
like a horse

* * *

Joanna Ruocco is the author of Man's Companions (Tarpaulin Sky). No Tell Motel first published this poem in January 2009. Joanna wrote, "One time, my friend, Brian Conn, was waiting to cross the street and he saw a big squirrel standing next to him on the sidewalk. The big squirrel was standing quite still, holding a smaller squirrel in its mouth. Brian Conn watched the big squirrel and the big squirrel watched the traffic. Suddenly, the big squirrel ran into the street and threw the smaller squirrel under the wheels of a car. 
I didn't write these poems thinking about that story. However, I am very interested in animals, sudden death, and misapprehensions of all kinds. 

My father used to smoke cigars with a squirrel. This was in New York City. My father would lean out the window and the squirrel would balance on a branch of the sycamore tree and they would share Garcia Y Vegas. 

I don't know how to reconcile these two encounters with squirrels. Maybe a gap in the universe opens between irreconcilable encounters with squirrels, and this gap has something to do with poetry? 

All animals should wear orange in the woods and sing loudly."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne

On the day of your favorite color:

Here is the day of pumpkins,

their hollow heads lit and leering. Here

is the stripped sweetness of candy corn

cupped in my hands. Here is fall

swirling the leaves into a storm of red-

gold fire. Here is the sunset,

shorter now. And here is memory,

spilling from its orange coat:

your mandarin sheets, your russet

couch, kisses the color of burning.

Here is the day of heartbreak

ripened to glow. Here is the day of ghosts.

* * *

Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne is the author of Dawn In The Kaatskills (Longshore Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in September 2009. Lauren wrote, [This poem is] "part of an ongoing obsession of mine with relationships of all kinds—between lovers and friends, between the past and the present, between the various aspects of our own selves. Because so much of who we are is tied up in the relationships we're in, we're always balancing how much we are willing to give or give up to establish, and maintain these bonds, and as they change, we have to reevaluate who we are. This is the experience that the poems and I keep coming back to..."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Cynthia Arrieu-King

Bird Studies Human Studies Bird

"Birds don't sing, they explain. Only people sing."
--Kenneth Koch

Mary Smith sings about how birds can punish us,
studies any in the context of diversion or patterns.
Birds that count are not really the ones inside humans'
heads. Mary Smith, however, is good at imagining
horribly uncommon woodpeckers, supposedly
extinct. If, in either case, dodo or ivory-billed
woodpecker, Mary Smith persists, what happens? At
first she may associate being in a city or in the yard
of a suburban house with being a common sparrow. She may,
in terms of the song in her mind sing to find nuthatch,
drawing sparrows out of the ginkgo, cardinals
aghast at her vibrato. Maybe she sees all birds
as basically the same type of bird, so the dodo
who never appears is as good as an absent robin.

You, on the other hand, have a set of elements
associated with Mary Smith in your head. Yet,
are you little and brown? Do you have a red breast?
Do worms dangle from your beak? Are you the
idea attractor of what is to be a robin? Or are you
a dodo trying to pass as normal? Do you gravitate
toward birds with social practices that push you away?
Do you chirp an explanation of why this branch,
why this final refusal to come back even as
idea, why you try to fit into patterns only
humans are part of? Even clouds in terms of song
are not songs but explanations formed long ago,
lines of thought that covered every path. Looped around,
cumulus bore down on grackle, squall line
mapping turkey before that animal was, before Start
of Our World. If you want to sing, don't be a robin. If you
want to explain the robins you have to admit

the patterns in your head about robins are wrong.
If you want to join the dodos you have to find one.

* * * 

Cynthia Arrieu-King is the author of The Small Anything City (Dream Horse Press) and People are Tiny in Paintings of China (forthcoming, Octopus Books). No Tell Motel first published this poem in February 2006.  Cynthia wrote, "I was reading James Paul Gee's, What Video Games Have to Teach us About Literacy and Learning. The book yields rich pedagogical lessons from a comparison between the landscapes of multi-player video games and composition classrooms. I was reading along merrily one night, when suddenly, Gee started analyzing the social matrix of birds, dodos, and the sentence "If, in either case, dodo or ivory-billed woodpecker, Mary Smith persists, what happens?" got stuck in my craw."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Steve Fellner

Ode To Matthew Shepard

Once I hit
someone I loved.

It wasn’t
very hard. But

I hit him. I
hit him

in the way you
hit someone

you need
to stop

loving you. I
can still

remember the way
the body looked

when I hit it.
It was ruined

with my knowing
you could hurt

a body and it
still needs

something
more than

your pain. 
Narrative is

as corrupt
as the thoughts


of the men who
murdered

you, Matthew.
Explanation never

satisfies. It 
always wants

something
like redemption.

* * *

Steve Fellner is the author of Blind Date with Cavafy (Marsh Hawk Press) and All Screwed Up (Benu Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in May 2008. Steve wrote, "I believe in ghosts, and I hope these poems do not anger Matthew Shepard’s ghost. I do not mean any harm. I want to get at something, and this is the only way I know how."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Karl Parker

A Museum of Making Do

When all was said and done, the human parts were my favorites. 
Sun glints through glass roofs under which some move, irregularly 
ambulant. I’m glad we never make it to the mall, in the dream that ends 
the instant before we kiss. We kiss and kiss, pretty kissing. Parts move  
smooth, through the meanings.

* * *

Karl Parker is the author of PERSONATIONSKIN (No Tell Books).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in September 2004.  Karl wrote, "I'm delighted, especially when I let language, in other words my other words, do whatever they slash I want to do, person-ify spontaneously and not, at and because of particular contexts; it's that simple, that material, that literally performed for and of course by a shifting aeriallyrooted "me"-place within and established by various frames real and imagined--say, social and haunted, the extrapersonal. All the "fun" in the house's marking and remarking the semiviolent, sad, somnolent, laughing torn and so on human image, not via verbal photographia--more by way of, as if, hand-gesture-prints in flickered series, no, speechprints, movement-echoes of a voice doing voices, all including its chosen own. I say Take any and all liberties and socalled ha licenses with language in the furtherance of the invention and accretion of your own thought, your own signs, your own actual useable meanings in your time and place always."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Daniela Olszewska

Creation Myth/Golden Age

A god from the East and/or above and/or far far away
took to the notion to plant a fetal-curled seed by the banks
of a body of water. Four hundred thousand years of deity-
induced rain and sunshine caused the stone to sprout
into a city’s worth of architecture, gold-leafed astronomies,
and smiling, single-headed cows. 
The women’s eyes housed nine-pointed ceruleans
and children were taught at an early age the value
of aneroidical breathing. 
Monsters lived the whole of their lives in glass coffins,
surrounded by orange safety cones.
Old men would spend days on their backs,
watching clouds take the shape of semi-sapien eyeballs. 
Peopled by swallowers of burning tea leaves,
the inhabitors of this land lacked the mouth
mechanisms to make hissing sounds. 
Whenever they felt angry or threatened,
they had to resort to humming.

* * *  

Daniela Olszewska is the author of three chapbooks: The Twelve Husbands of Citizen Jane (Beard of Bees), The Partial Autobiography of Jane Doe (Dancing Girl Press) and Resort to Humming (Scantily Clad Press).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in April 2008.  Daniella wrote, "The myth poems are very loosely based on a now-lost book of Polish folk tales. Writing poems based on pre-existing narratives was a wonderfully frustrating experience. At times I felt as if the story limited the language available to me. This, of course, made me work that much harder to find words/images that: (A) excited me (B) stayed (more or less) true to the story. I highly recommend putting a myth-retelling prompt in your NaPoWriMo arsenal."