The Best American Poetry

Tom Sleigh: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Dictator Walks into a Bar

In the hotel lobby, leaning against a marble column
from when the Romans ruled, I sip my vodka as gunfire
night and day ricochets in celebration

 

punctuating someone's wedding or a moment in
someone's mood in which blowing
off a clip into the air fights off boredom:

 

in this cellphone video that's more slashes of light,
jiggle and jag than a stable point of view,
I watch them drag him from muck out

 

of a culvert, his kufi knocked askew,
heavy body thrown across a Toyota battle wagon
where an electrical engineer turned militia man,

 

who reminds me of my father, mild, unshowy, studiously
polite, doesn't smile, frown, as he
watches himself slapping, in the footage that he's

 

showing me, the Brother Leader, great Murshid,
the Guide—doesn't comment, doesn't shy away
from my oh so fine-tuned sensitivities

 

quivering on the brink, maybe a little drunk, my cloak of objectivity
already tattering into rags—his lumps, welts
not quite bleeding—unable to look away,

 

am I hoping to see blood? It isn't every day that a dictator writhes under
your heel—the one powerful enough to say
Those who do not love me do not deserve to live—

 

as if he himself were the soul in the body politic and we
were just an afterthought, accessory
to his glory, the merest janitors to his trash, or maybe

 

just the trash itself, all of us human trash
waiting to be burned. But now, it's our turn,
and we've got him where we want him—

 

his livid puffy face, its blankness unto death
like slopped over paint running down the can—
his nose by now smashed in so his mouth

 

hangs open to the blahness of desert hardpan cliffs shadowing
tank tracks back into the Nafusa Mountains
where just an hour ago we were driving and he was worrying

 

about load-shedding and high-voltage grids,
the tragedy of no infrastructure—while I was daydreaming
of vodka and peeling happy hour shrimp

 

glinting like armor plate—finally, I've seen enough; but as I
turn to give him back his phone he's moved down
the bar and seems, head bowed, to be

 

peering into his drink with that intimate anticipation
that could signal a joke or a prayer speeding
to its punchline, only it's the new kind

 

of humor, the new kind of prayer,
in which the jokes aren't funny and prayers don't deliver,
and whether you're praying or laughing, it's all on you.

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Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry including winner of the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press, 2022), House of Fact, House of Ruin (Graywolf Press, 2018), Station Zed (Graywolf Press, 2015), and Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011). His most recent book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees (Graywolf Press, 2018) recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, NEA grant recipient, and winner of numerous awards including the Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, John Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, The Common and many other magazines. He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.  [Author photo by Annette Hornischer.]

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                                                                                       Wall painting, Tripoli, Libya

Ama Codjoe: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Deer

 

Walking alone in a forest, I came upon

a deer—this was not a vision.

It faced me, on its four thin legs,

unmoved as a cave painting

brushed by light. I made myself still.

I spoke to it, softly. I can’t remember

what I said. The deer regarded me as a god would,

eased by my astonishment.

Then, slowly, I moved closer, and the deer

did not run. By now, you know it was love

I walked toward, not the deer, but

what hung in the space between us. I know

it was love because, as I held

my breath, the deer took

a few steps toward me before

bounding into the camouflage

of branches and leaves.

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Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has been awarded support from Bogliasco, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Her poems have twice appeared in the Best American Poetry series. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. Codjoe is the 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award.  [Author photo by Jamie Harmon. “The Deer” first appeared in the New York Review of Books.]

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                                                               Neolithic cave painting in Spain's Penáguila region.

Karla Cordero: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tiburón

once, as a child, my parents & a credit card bought a pool table

& i found myself in the backyard with clumsy hands & growing breasts— 

 

i claimed corner pocket until i could master sinking an eight ball 

& by fifteen the neighborhood kids knew of the mexican girl 

 

named Tiburón— the shark who’d bite at the sound of a pool stick 

chalked into strategy in exchange for walmart gift cards.

 

& i recall a time when a boy who thought himself a man 

challenged me to a game of strip pool.

 

i thanked the sky for the cold desert night, for cloaking my body 

with layers. i emptied the table of its striped billiards &

 

the boy who thought himself a man stripped down to a full moon,

cupped his manhood & i walked away 

 

with his shit-talk in my pocket. years later, in college, my roommate

asked me to accompany her to the local pub.

 

the bar sticky in old beer & jukebox, we took our seat on broken stools, 

rickety when our legs crossed themselves for good balance.

 

the room full of tall men hovered over the pool table, their hands 

choking the necks of IPA’s. i stacked a tower of quarters on the table.

stared down a white man covered in mermaid tattoos 

trapped in the ocean of his arm.

i’ll play for 5 bucks & a few smokes. i break the table & his jaw 

snaps back at the reckless dance. four beers later i sweep 

a twenty dollar bill & american spirits. i walked into the alley, 

smoked my winnings & exchanged my dollar bills for a california burrito. 

 

my mouth smothered in salsa verde. i laughed, laughed at the history 

of men who dare doubt the feral animal that blazes in this blood.

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Karla Cordero is a Chicana poet, educator, and a 2021 California Arts Council Established Artist Fellow. Her poetry collection, How To Pull Apart The Earth, is a San Diego Book Award winner and finalist for the International Latino Book Awards. Karla’s work has appeared on NPR, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock, The Oprah Magazine, PANK, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4 LatiNext Anthology, among other publications. She is the Executive Director for the non-profit art organization Glassless Minds and Professor at MiraCosta College and San Diego City College. Follow her @karlaflaka13 on Instagram or visit her website.

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                                                                   Charles Edouard Boutibonne, Ladies Playing Billiards, 1869

 

Ray Gonzalez: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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One El Paso, Two El Paso

 

Awake in the desert to the sound of calling.

Must be the mountain, I thought.

 

The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary

line between the living and the dead was erased years ago.

 

Awake in the sand, I feared, old shoes decorated with

razor wire, a heaven of light on the peaks.

 

Must be time to get up, I assumed. Parked outside,

Border Patrol vehicles, I had to choose.

 

Awake to follow immigration shadows vanishing inside

American walls, river drownings counted as they cross,

 

Maria Salinas' body dragged out, her mud costume

pasted with plastic bottles and crushed beer cans,

 

black water flowing to bless her in her sleep.

Must be the roar of illegal death, I decided,

 

a way out of the current, though satellite maps never

show the brown veins of the concrete channel.

 

Awake in the arroyo of a mushroom cloud, I choke,

1945 explosion in the sand, eternal radioactive wind,

 

the end of one war mutating the border into another

that also requires fatal skills of young men because few

 

dream the atomic bomb gave birth in the Jornado,

historic trail behind the mountain realigned, then cut

 

off from El Paso, the town surrounded with barbed

wire, the new century kissing car bombs, drug cartels,

 

massacres across the river, hundreds shot in ambushes

and neighborhood soccer games that always score.

 

Wake up, I thought, look south to the last cathedral

in Juarez before its exploding bricks hurtle this way.

 

Make the sign of the cross, open your eyes to one town,

two cities, five centuries of praying in the beautiful dust.

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Ray Gonzalez is the author of 16 books of poetry, including Suggest Paradise (University of New Mexico Press). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

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   Judithe Hernández (U.S., b. 1948), La Santa Desconocida de la serie Juárez / The Unknown Saint from the Juarez series, 2017. Pastel on paper 

Cindy Hochman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Inner Life (With Sabotage)

 

This poem will be intentionally vague.

Candlewicks flicker. Chemicals misfire. Crossed wires refuse to untangle.

Sometimes I slip into something less comfortable.

Carousel horses and streetlights make me weep deeply.

My handsome father’s death has turned into stilted breath.

My benevolent brother’s death is still caught in my throat.

Everyone gives me flowers to fill the fissure between limbs and loss.

And I bury them under layers of, what? Nothing but my own undoing.

A startled and startling voice tells me to go even deeper than this.

Onyx and obsidian wrestle it out with a chest full of white diamonds.

Frankly, my dear, I’ve had enough of dancing through the murk with my not-so-better angels.

Excuse me while I remove this battering ram from my solar plexus.

Let me open my palms to the hazy sunshine. I promise I will stop shaking soon.

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Cindy Hochman is the president of “100 Proof” Copyediting Services and the editor-in-chief of the online poetry journal First Literary Review-East. She has been on the book review staff of Pedestal Magazine, and has written reviews for American Book Review, Clockwise Cat, Home Planet News, great weather for MEDIA, and others. (And she reviewed the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry for Coldfront Magazine eons ago.) Her previous chapbooks are Wednesday’s Child (Bear House Press), The Carcinogenic Bride (Thin Air Media), Habeas Corpus (Glass Lyre Press), and The Number 5 Is Always Suspect (Presa Press), a collaborative chapbook with poet/collagist Bob Heman. Her latest chapbook is Telling You Everything (Unleash Press). Cindy lives, loves, reads, writes, edits, meditates, learns tai chi, studies Russian, and agonizes over politics in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

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   Reginald Marsh, George Tilyou's Steeplechase, 1932, oil and egg tempera on linen mounted on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Peter Bushyeager: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Citadel Luncheonette

 

I’m beached in the Citadel Luncheonette

with my pinned eyes blinking over minestrone.

Dr. Lester’s acid-yellow light

was one inch from my face then his

blue metal examining ring plumped my eyeball.

 

Gesture’s important.  The thumb and forefinger

lightly touched together: a little bit of jelly

for my toast.  The index to the nose: follow with

your eyes while my drops vaporize your

vision like deer in a volcano blast.

 

Besides Irish, English and Welsh are Celtic, too.

My father was 50 percent Welsh with a black cloud

Mother clicked shut venetian blinds on neighbors

in her measured English way and I love

the droney ancient modal keys:

 

Songs about dressing a dead wren in

a satin cape, gently laying it down in

a ribboned pasteboard box lined with

gathered crepe, twisting its neck

delicately to the side like

 

a martyred pope, piling gold rings on

its head, carrying it door to door

collecting coins and

proclaiming a capella that

the King of Winter is dead.

 

If I’m lucky I won’t wake up

bilious tonight from my carnal dreams.

I’ll make a wiry leap past Lester’s

taupe leather sofa and his wry knee-to-knee verdict

of naturally deteriorating sight

 

feel out the thickness of quarters in my pocket

lay out six on the counter

and walk dignified through the

snowiness of the Citadel

to even whiter light on Lexington Avenue.

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Peter Bushyeager’s poetry appears in journals that include New American Writing, Hurricane Review, Local Knowledge, Sensitive Skin, Global Poemic, Boog City, and in his book Citadel Luncheonette. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.      

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                                                    St Stephen's Day--- Three wren boys in road, Athea, County Limerick, 1947

 

Melissa Broder: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ahoy!

 

By the gates of the walled lung

we stand circled in the dark.

 

We’ve come through his throat

by ship.

 

I say What if he hiccups?

 

I am channeling my grandmom’s fears

of common colds and foreign air.

The women judge me silly.

 

They say Unsisterly!

Your angst is old, so old.

 

To prove myself fierce

I run down the danger corridor

of his guts to his intestines.

 

There are cabbages and acid.

There are meat screams

and a fancy market.

 

I am relieved to discover

my favorite gourmet yogurt

with full nutrition labeling.

 

Indulging in a blueberry variety

on the banks of his duodenum

I watch the villi sway.

 

It’s a scene nearing Monet’s La Rivière

but I am not a visual person.

 

My mind is full of letters.

 

I say Help me be a sister.

I mean to say Don’t make me die alone.

 

Back at the lung

roommates have been chosen.

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Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Death Valley (October 2023), Milkfed, and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom: Selected Poems and Last Sext. She lives in LA.  [Photo of the poet by Petra Collins.]

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                                                                          Claude Monet, La Rivière, 1881

 

Jose Padua: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Made in America

 

If I were a less sane person I would probably stalk

Zoey Deschanel. After stalking her from nine to five,

I would come back home to my wife and daughter

and tell them about my day. “I stalked Zoey, but I

 

never saw her,” I’d say. “You’re just not trying hard

enough,” my wife would reply, “don’t give up.” After

glaring at me for a moment my daughter would say,

“Why don’t you just find a real job? No one’s going

 

to pay you to stalk Zoey Deschanel.” So I’ll tell her

about fame, about the things in this world that aren’t

real and the rain and the empty river in a dream. “I’m

not doing this for money,” I’ll explain, and she’ll turn

 

away from me and back to her strawberries, pulling

a plump red cone from the blue bowl on the table.

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Jose Padua’s first book, A Short History of Monsters, was chosen by Billy Collins as the winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and is out from the University of Arkansas Press. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in many publications. He has read his work at Lollapalooza, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Public Theater, the Living Theater, the Nuyorican Poets' Café, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Split This Rock festival, and many other venues. After spending the last twelve years in Washington DC and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he and his family have moved slightly north to Lancaster, PA.    [Author photo by Maggie Padua, Oct. 2022; this poem originally appeared in Live Mag! #17]

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                                                 Zoe Deschanel mural on an abandoned brewery in East Berlin

Aza Pace: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Portrait of Nymphs Bathing

                After the painting A Mermaid by John William Waterhouse, 1900

 

I thought I might as well transform

into a great silver fish

 

as turn from girl to woman.

It was like this: everyone watches

 

you bloom open like a terrible rose

reeking of new beauty, thudding life.

 

One day you comb your hair,

still dripping from the shower, and you are not

 

simply combing your hair.

Always, your portrait is underway.

 

That first summer of our revelation,

my friend and I undress

 

in her cold bedroom and pull

one-piece swimsuits on over our shifting forms.

 

We turn our backs—

another new thing—create an interval of air

 

for each other, a brief privacy

we’ve only just discovered that we crave.

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Aza Pace’s poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Crazyhorse (now swamp pink), New Ohio Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of North Texas.

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                                                                  John William Waterhouse, A Mermaid. Oil on canvas, 1900

                                 

 

Thomas O’Grady: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Grappelli

 

Take It Don’t Mean a Thing

as one instance—the version

from ’35, with Django swinging

 

with such reckless insouciance

over brother Joseph’s pulsing banjo-

esque chords, the two of them free

 

as a pair of gypsies (which they were).

Hear what I mean about Stéphane’s

breathing rarefied air—as if

 

in some other life he had seen

fearless Egyptian engineers

scaling scaffolds on the first

 

of the World’s Seven Wonders

and thought how much like rappelling

to improvise lines on the violin?

 

Once he unraveled his art’s

dark secrets: “It is a mystery,

like the pyramids.”

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Thomas O’Grady is the author of two books of poems, What Really Matters and Delivering the News, both published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in the distinguished Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series.  Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was Director of Irish Studies from 1984 to 2019 and a member of the Creative Writing faculty, he is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.  He divides his time between and among the banks of the mighty St. Joe River in South Bend, a converted rumrunners bunkhouse in Adamsville, Rhode Island, and the south shore of his native Prince Edward Island (Canada).

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                                                                  Grappelli, drawing by Isabelle Derangere, 2020

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Phyllis Rosenzweig: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Heart (Da Vinci)

 

                        a                     

brilliant investigation of the heart

                               understood perfectly

 

Leonardo always intended to publish a treatise on anato-

my

                                       However, like so many of Leonar-

do’s projects, the book was never completed

 

This is the heart

The Heart (detail), about 1512

 

                   1512 Copernicus announced his theory that the

planets revolve around the sun

                    1513 Leonardo moved to Rome

 

Opening the body

Anatomy of a soul

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Phyllis Rosenzweig was a curator for many years at the Hirshhorn Museum. Her writing has appeared in several magazines and journals. Her publications include the chapbooks Seventeen Poems (O Press, 1975), Dogs (Edge Books, 1996), Reasonable Accommodation (Potes and Poets Press, 1997), and Girls (Primary Writing Books, 2011). From 1995 to 2008 she and Diane Ward co-published the poetry journal Primary Writing. She currently edits Primary Writing Books. She lives in Washington, D.C. [Author photo by Alan Wallach.]

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                                                                      Leonardo Da Vinci drawing of the heart

Jim Whiteside: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Eighth Grade

 

On Sundays we learn about the glorious mysteries.

I picture God as an impossibly large night-black bird, carrying the world in

His great beak like an iridescent bead.

A rooster showed up in our back yard one day, roosted in the trees.

Dad lets me help while he replaces the alternator on his ’77 Charger,

signs the permission slip from my Sunday school teacher before we start the unit about sex.

He plays Queen on the stereo in the garage.

They’re one of his favorites, even though Freddie was gay.

The rooster crows all day, not just mornings.

My teacher drones on: The Church considers homosexuality and masturbation sins of the flesh.

In gym class I change facing away from the other boys.

I try not to watch their athletic bodies.

At night, in my room, I try to remember what I could catch in my periphery.

I wear headphones to watch late-night HBO on the mini-TV on top of my dresser.

Through the screen, Father Tim prompts me: Any sins of the flesh?

After a year, a silent day. The rooster’s fox-eaten carcass splayed out in the grass.

I must confess, I still don’t know what good this body’s for.

Dad says we all have a story to write down, that life is like a story we tell by living it.

Dad loves Freddie because Freddie lived free.

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Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019), and is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as residencies from the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Boston Review. Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.  ["Eighth Grade" appears in The Southern Review, Winter 2023.]

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                                                          Yasemen Asad, Freddie Mercury, mixed-media painting, 2022

Julien Strong: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Height

 

Each year I lose a little more of it,

the spaces between the vertebrae

slowly sighing closed

like an accordion that after

a full day of playing dances

lets out a long atonal breath—

the exhalation

of every song it ever made

as the musician prepares

to lay the instrument

gently in its box.

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Julien Strong (they/them) is the author of two books of poems, The Mouth of Earth (University of Nevada Press) and Tour of the Breath Gallery (Texas Tech University Press). Julien’s poetry has appeared in many journals, including The Nation, The Southern Review, Poetry Daily, River Styx, Southwest Review, and The Sun. They are also the author of two novels. An Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Central Connecticut State University, they live in Hamden, CT.  [Author photo by Cecilia Cangiano; "Height" appeared first in The Southern Review, Spring 2023.]

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                                                    Accordionists, from the Washington Post Magazine. 

 

Danusha Laméris: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Bermuda Triangle 

   

It loomed large over my childhood, hungry mouth

in the center of the Atlantic, a vast expanse that ate boats—

dinghies, cargo ships––sucked them down below the waves.

Or maybe took them up, like the planes that vanished

in mid-air, nothing left, not even contrails icing the upper

atmosphere. Not even a slip of a pilot’s lapel, or piece

of fuselage, fallen from the clouds.

 

I’d lie on the couch and watch its red outline hover

over the undulating map, learn the names of vessels

that went down without a trace: Star Tiger, a fighter plane

bound for Bermuda, the USS Cyclops, its load of iron ore,

the crew of over 300 never found. Once they said a passenger

flight turned a somersault in midair, nose over tail, then

righted itself and moved on. Who or what was behind it?

And how could we ever be safe? Though now I know

 

something of the pull that can prove too great. Desire’s lure.

How murky the waters of the heart, its rough, uncharted seas

and taut geometry. Who among us hasn’t drifted into

that treacherous terrain, engines whirring, compass gone

suddenly amok, only clouds above, only clouds below.

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Danusha Laméris’s third book of poems, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. She is also the author of two other books: The Moons of August, winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, 2014, and Bonfire Opera (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award. She is on the faculty of Pacific University’s Low-Residency MFA program and lives in Santa Cruz, California. (Photo of author by Mark Stover. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Spring 2023.) 

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USS Cyclops. Its disappearance in March 1918 resulted in the single largest loss of life in the history of the United States Navy not related to combat.

Cliff Fyman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by David Haas

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from TAXI NIGHT

 

I’m so dumb!

Like, why the fuck

am I drinking?

So I woke up today and I’m, like,

I hope I don’t get a lot of texts

and he’s, like, ‘O would you like

to get dinner tonight?’

And I’m, like, I don’t know and stuff.

I’ll shoot you a draft 

after school

because I don’t know

what time I’ll be free

tomorrow.

And he’s, like, ‘Ok.  So.  Are you free

tonight?’

I didn’t answer.

He’s, like, ‘Are you having dinner tonight?’

Question mark.

I didn’t answer.

Texts me again

an hour later.

I didn’t answer.

So yeah, like,

it was just crazy.

Um, so, like, yeah.

He, like, texts me,

‘If this is too much

just let me know I’ll stop.’

Dude, I haven’t even answered

your first question yet.

And then— 

I’m so sorry.

I’m just not looking for anything

new right now.

(I was really

hooking up

hard core

with someone

two months

this summer

but I can’t

tell him this.)

He’s, like, ‘O really?

Because it seems I heard

from other people

last night

you are looking

for something serious.’

I was, like, fuck I was so drunk

I told him I was looking for something

serious

but not with him!

Today I say I’m not looking

for anything serious.

So like OOOPS!

He was, like, ‘What happened?’

He came all the way

from Maryland.

He just kept on

texting me, like, non-stop.

And I was, like,

you are fucking annoying.

And I was, like,

what the fuck.

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Cliff Fyman was born 3 March 1954 in old St. Vincent’s hospital.  He was actually very nearly born in a taxi cab.  He drove cab at night in New York City from 2012 to 2017.  His first book of poems, Taxi Night, was published in 2021 by Long News Books.  

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                                                                                 Taxi by Laura Barbosa, 2010

Jennifer Givhan: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Apocalypse Déjà Vu

 

At the end of the world the dishes pile in the sink;

my children, who placed bets on which dogs

would survive longest without us, the scrapyard chihuahua

or the blue heeler who stopped bringing us dead

creatures when she saw how it made me cry,

stayed with me when the last caravan left.

When they asked if I believe in life on other globular

things spinning toward emptiness, I promised

the real joy has always been imagining endlessness

with them. We almost thought to scrub the kitchen

before the end. Almost thought to find matches

for all the unmatched socks in the basket.

Instead, we fashioned capes from old winter coats.

Set the dogs loose. Ran with them toward the treeline

till the great dark widened its maw & we kept running.

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Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. Jenn is the author of five full-length poetry collections, most recently Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press), and the novels Trinity Sight, Jubilee, and River Woman, River Demon (Blackstone Press). Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, and Salon and has won many national awards, including The Southwest Book Award, New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. 

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                                                              Running Away. Oil on canvas. [artist unknown]

 

Gregory Pardlo: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Raisin

 

I dragged my twelve-year-old cousin

to see the Broadway production of A Raisin

in the Sun because the hip-hop mogul

and rapping bachelor, Diddy, played

the starring role. An aspiring rapper gave

my cousin his last name and the occasional child

support so I thought the boy would geek to see a pop

hero in the flesh as Walter Lee. My wife was newly

pregnant, and I was rehearsing, like Diddy

swapping fictions, surrendering his manicured

thug persona for a more domestic performance.

My cousin mostly yawned throughout the play.

Except the moment Walter Lee's tween son stiffened

on stage, as if rapt by the sound of a roulette ball.

Scene: No one breathes as Walter Lee vacillates,

uncertain of obsequity or indignation after Lindner offers

to buy the family out of the house they've purchased

in the all-white suburb, Walter might kneel to accept,

but he senses the tension in his son's gaze. I was thinking,

for real though, what would Diddy do? "Get rich

or die trying," 50 Cent would tell us. But my father would

sing like Ricky Scaggs, "Don't get above your raisin',"

when as a kid I vowed to be a bigger man than him.

That oppressive fruit dropped heavy as a medicine

ball in my lap meant to check my ego, and I imagined

generations wimpling in succession like the conga

marching raisins that sang Marvin's hit song. Silly,

I know. Outside the theater, my cousin told me

when Diddy was two, they found his hustler dad

draping a steering wheel in Central Park,

a bullet in his head. I shared what I knew of dreams

deferred and Marvin Gaye. (When asked if he loved

his son, Marvin Sr. answered, "Let's just say I didn't

dislike him.") Beneath the bling of many billion

diodes I walked beside the boy through Times Square

as if anticipating a magic curtain that would rise,

but only one of us would get to take a bow.

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Gregory Pardlo is the author of Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem, winner of the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden, and a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi. His third poetry collection, Spectral Evidence, is forthcoming in 2024.

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Tara Borin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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List of Duties in a Subarctic Dive Bar

 

If the temperature outside is twenty-five below

            or colder

leave all faucets running and flush the toilets

            hourly.

 

R. has a two-drink limit. A. likes a coaster. Remember,

            Mrs. O. takes a chilled pilsner glass

with her bottle of Blue. Never

            keep her waiting.

 

If someone reveals residential school horrors,

            listen with your whole body.

 

If a customer becomes unresponsive,

            and overdose is suspected,

 

call the nursing station, then administer the naloxone

            kept behind the bar.

Be sure to write everything down in the incident book.

            This is your therapy.

 

At the end of each shift, pour a kettle of boiling water

            into the ice well drain. It keeps down the bioslime.

 

Wrap your cash in the blue vinyl bag and feed it

            to the Snake.

 

You are entitled to one staff drink. Choose wisely.

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Tara Borin is a poet and writer living in the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Dawson City, Yukon. Their debut full-length poetry collection, The Pit, was published by Nightwood Editions in March 2021; their poetry has been anthologized in the League of Canadian Poets Feminist Caucus in Conversation chapbook (LCP Press, 2022), Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021) and Best New Poets in Canada 2018 (Quattro Books), as well as published in various literary journals both online and in print. Tara is the 2022 winner of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Borealis Prize: Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution.

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      Emily Rapport, Wednesday Night, 30x40, aqua-oil on canvas, ca. 2004. Used by permission of the artist.   

J. Tarwood: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Pause in Our Divorce

 

Tomorrow, we start again,

those leaflets on the blood of the lamb

swirling about my blockade of shot glasses.

Like a coffin with its lid kicked open,

our trailer will shake

when I blast out the door,

stuffed tigers tumbling from crooked shelves

to claw the carpet bought at Goodwill.

Apple tea in hand,

you will watch me tramp that gravel path

smeared with snow, my breath

a fist trembling open

once my back’s to you. But tonight

is a butterfly on our bayonet,

you in the rocker, wet black hair hanging

like a nun’s habit; and me wedged

in the easy chair, a whiskey-stained Othello

in my lap. We wonder how we’ll end,

like those enemy soldiers in World War I

who played football in no man’s land before Verdun.

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J. Tarwood has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. After a life spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, he currently lives in China, and has published six books: The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And for the Mouth a Flower, What the Waking See, The Sublime Way, and The World at Hand. 

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                                                                  A re-enactment of the 1914 Christmas Truce

Nicky Beer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Marlene Dietrich Plays Her Musical Saw for the Troops, 1944

 

See how the silver snaps in a lone spot,

the sound flirting with coyotes,

castrated foghorns, distant siren.

Observe how that polished body curves

in the strategy of lights, how its voice

is like a parody of mourning,

and so even more mournful

immersed in its high-pitched joke.

Admit that some other instrument

would fail—wood-honeyed curve,

funneled brass—when what’s needed

now is a tongue with the chill of steel.

Watch how the thighs hold that music

steady, how the dust and moths draw

closer to the song, a song that’s dying

even as it hovers in the dark,

a lost mouth moaning vowels

that are too close to your name.

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Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022). Her first two books, The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) and The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015), were both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.

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                                              Marlene Dietrich, by Luana-Beatrice Lazar, 2014.

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Phillip B. Williams: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Epithalamium

 

A kiss. Train ride home from a late dinner,

City Hall and document signing. Wasn’t cold

but we cuddled in an empty car, legal.

Last month a couple of guys left a gay bar

and were beaten with poles on the way

to their car. No one called them faggot

so no hate crime’s documented. A beat down

is what some pray for, a pulse left to count.

We knew we weren’t protected. We knew

our rings were party favors, gold to steal

the shine from. We couldn’t protect us,

knew the law wouldn’t know how. Still, his

beard across my brow, the burn of his cologne.

When the train stopped, the people came on.

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Phillip B Williams is a Chicago native and author of Mutiny (Penguin, 2021), winner of the American Book Award, and Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He received a 2017 Whiting Award and was a Helen Putman fellow for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is founding faculty of Randolph College low res MFA.

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                     Vintage photo of two Black men at the beach, from the Flickr exhibition Hidden in the Open, curated by Trent Kelley