The Best American Poetry

John Koethe: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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The Divinity Within

Sometimes I write to try to figure something out

I hadn't understood before, that somebody else has said.

I've no idea what "the divinity within" might mean,

And yet I've heard it said so often that it must mean something

Everyone recognizes, whether they know what it really means or not.

It could mean we're created in God's image, if there were one,

Though I think it makes more sense the other way around,

Which is what I hope that Emerson and my mother had in mind.

It's not just that the supernatural makes no sense, and that the world

Is real enough without it. It's that each ordinary life seems at the same time

So miraculous it has to be divine, whatever that divinity might be.

 

Why do we think we're something other than we are? Look at the stars,

Or else don't bother, since there's nothing there to see. You realize

They're there, and yet you can't imagine what the worlds that they sustain

Could be like, or if those worlds exist, though there must be billions of them.

How could those lives be anything like ours, with its private sense of time

And memories that speak to me alone, like Sally's hair? Of course the inability

To feel them doesn't mean they can't be real, but what does real even mean 

When it's applied to things we can't begin to understand? I understand this life,

At least I think I do. But how can a life that doesn't have this sense of self

Or the past or poetry, even if it's written in the stars, be one that speaks to me?

 

Perhaps instead of being part of something too immense to understand

Or inhabiting an expanding multiverse in which every possibility is realized

And equally real, each person's life might be in some sense all there is,

Whatever that might mean. I know it sounds absurd, but it isn't any more

Ridiculous than all those narratives of God I grew up trying to believe.

What makes a life divine isn't its perfection or its power, but its estrangement

From the world and the reflection of itself in all it sees. I wish I understood

What people mean by an eternal life. I only know that mine is singular,

Complete and coextensive with the transitory universe that it contains---

As though it were like God's and comprehended everything, but small.

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John Koethe's most recent books are Beyond Belief and Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016, both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth (Bloomsbury).  “The Divinity Within” will be included in a new book, Cemeteries and Galaxies, to be published by FSG in April, 2025. [Author photo by Tom Bamberger.]

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                                                                              William Blake, Albion Rose, ca 1794

 

Natasha Rao: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Abecedarian on Shame

 

A mushroom quietly throbs with poison. I

bloat full of lies. Spurred by my

capacity for ruin, I insulted my brother

during the brief visit home, got too drunk in the

expensive restaurant while my mother’s worry

fermented. When confronted with my lack of

gentleness, I blame birth control or the moon, but

haunted by the palpitations of a mouse stuck

in glue, I knew atonement was beyond my trapping.

Just months ago I shaved all my fur then

knelt naked in front of not-you, have

laid in unfamiliar beds, squeak becoming purr,

metamorphosing into whatever kind of

nocturnal creature strangers desire. I keep

offering the soft meat of myself to

people I meet on the internet, save the stinging

quills for those who love me. I don’t know how to

reassemble myself into the kind of animal who

sniffs her way home every time. Somewhere,

there is a version of me whose instinct is to

tell the truth. She has no reason to

unravel in the doctor’s office, no sudden fits of

viciousness and rage. She does the right thing even

when no one is looking. I envy her timeline, the

x-axis aligned. Somehow I grow more twisted, each

year eluding guilt with skill. It’s easiest to pluck

zinnias if you don’t look them in the face.

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Natasha Rao is the author of Latitude, which was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she has also received fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Community of Writers. Her work appears in The Nation, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is currently Co-Editor of American Chordata. 

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                                           Henri Rousseau, La Bohémienne endormie (The Sleeping Gypsy). 1897, oil on canvas. 
                                                      

George Bilgere: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tar Pits

The last time I saw my father
was at the La Brea Tar Pits
a year after the divorce.

He was still living in St. Louis,
running the business
to the bottom
of a fifth of Jim Beam.

In my mind’s eye
he is a specimen, a foetus
of a father, floating in a jar
in some roadside museum.

I was nine. We had nothing
to say, so he took me
to the La Brea Tar Pits, as
divorced fathers do.

He was a membrane
at that point.
An effigy trembling
in another man’s suit.

We stared
at the three-toed sloth,
the dire wolf with its
marble eyes.

My father, I wish
you could rise from that
black pit and emerge

into light, like the tiger
we saw that day,
sheathed again in muscle,
its great teeth like sabers.

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George Bilgere’s ninth collection of poetry is Cheap Motels of My Youth, which won the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize.  In 2021 he won the New Ohio Review Editor’s Choice award. He has received grants and awards from the NEA, the Pushcart Foundation, the May Swenson Poetry Award, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two exceptionally fine little boys.

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                                                                Saber Toothed Tiger lithograph, ca. 1902

 

Maria Martin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Year of the Rat

 

The evenings came and went, but I did not.

I didn’t have what I needed. I needed air

in my tires. I needed to go to the store.

I didn’t have enough money. I ate sleeves

of saltines dripped with hot sauce.

I ate a potato microwaved with cheese.

The dishes all piled up like a sidewalk

memorial. I didn’t like to walk past them.

It was another warm winter. Squirrels gathered.

The mailbox received. Ivy lurched 

into the sidewalk toilfully, but I did not. 

And every day was another day I didn’t do it. 

Daylight receded like a bad dream.

The one where your teeth fall out

like twisted kernels of corn

and you wake up ashamed

and glad you are alone.

I couldn’t open my mail. 

Stacks of envelopes with cellophane panes. 

Who told them my name?

I was a rat and I lived like a rat. 

I slept on old laundry. I ate what I found. 

My torso covered over with dry, red scales.

I was afraid I’d be discovered. 

I avoided bright open spaces. 

I avoided ammonia. I was afraid

someone was coming for me,

but then they didn’t.

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Maria Martin is a poet living in North Charleston, SC where she works for the city coordinating arts enrichment programs for public schools. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Diagram, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

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                                                                             Girl with dirty dishes, A.I. image

Kurt Olsson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Devolution

 

The summer I turned eighteen I worked underground,

eight non-union hours spent scuffing a shopping cart of tools

through the long damp linking one laboratory to the next.

Damnedest thing I ever saw: a mutt bleary from sleep

wracked in the rictus of an eighty-year-old smoker’s cough.

I apprenticed for Rick, who weekends burned himself

electric red and drank a case of beer and who talked for hours

about devolution, learned from a rock band, and how

mankind was sliding back to slime. Sometimes he made sense

in those tunnels lined with hollow lockers, lab coats squishing by

in cheap Keds. They never told us what happened to the animals,

a lecture hall-sized room lined with cages, pink eyes rolling.

After Rick, there was Ned, who lasted a week, then Bob,

a Vietnam vet who drove a VW Bug and had been beautiful once

before his hair fell out and who looped his ball-peen under his belt

and strode about stoned, looking for a room. One morning

he went AWOL, then returned a week later and cried when Lou,

the boss, canned him. After my first day, Lou never came to site.

He was home dying of emphysema, or maybe it was a bum liver,

maybe he wasn’t dying at all, but by summer’s end all he was

was the static on a speaker phone doling out assignments and pleading,

Please, do whatever Mr. Liberaci tells you to. Which wasn’t much.

Liberaci’d already hired the next contractor, guys in buzz cuts

and the bullhorn tones of those who can afford the new houseboat.

By my last week everybody had quit but me. Lou didn’t call anymore.

A coat told me a subject had escaped, to keep an eye out,

the whole complex a maze of vents. It might show up anywhere:

frightened, hungry, drugged, who knew what it was capable of.

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Kurt Olsson’s work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, and the Southern Review. He’s published two award-winning collections of poetry, Burning Down Disneyland (Gunpowder Press) and What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press). A third collection, The Unnumbered Anniversaries, is due out later this year from Fernwood Press. He lives a stone's throw from Lake Michigan where he's pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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                                                                         VW bug, photograph by Rebecca Korpita

Nancy Miller Gomez: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Why I Tie My Hair to Trees

 

Thick, black handfuls gathered

from the comb. I carry the nest of it

outside to drape on a low-hanging branch

of the oak. Later when I look, it’s gone,

carried off by wind or birds.

I like to imagine it as home

for song sparrows, the strands

woven into the twigs and leaves.

Or collected by wood rats

along with cobwebs and cloth

and buried in the woodpile,

a piece of me nestled into the lives

of these creatures. Or maybe,

blown into the trees, tangled

in the lacy crown of the hemlock.

At night, when the outlines

of familiar objects run into the dark,

I like to think there is a part of me

that isn’t afraid, one slender curl

shining in the moonlight.

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Nancy Miller Gomez is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books, 2024) and the chapbook, Punishment (Rattle, 2018), a collection of poems and essays about her experience teaching in prisons and jails. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry and Best New Poets. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa  Cruz County Jails, and the Juvenile Hall. She has a B.A. from The University of California, San Diego, a J.D. from the University of San Diego, and an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. She has worked as a waitress, a stable hand, an attorney, and a tv producer. She lives with her family in Santa Cruz, California. 

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                                                   Édouard Vuillard, Beneath the Trees, 1897--99. Oil on cardboard.

Alan Bernheimer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Breakfast

 

Forgetting words

The moment you

Hear or read them

 

Is one way to avoid

Plagiarizing but just

Keep their flavor

 

And then try

Expressing that

In your own words

 

As if you could

Own words

You can't even

 

Keep thoughts

From slipping away

They’re the slipperiest

 

Of all the slippery

Things in life

The hotel elevator

 

That rises way

Past the roof

And slips across

 

A higher landscape

A different neighborhood

Why not ask

 

If any of these

Places will be

Open for breakfast

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Alan Bernheimer is a poet and translator living in Berkeley, Calif. His latest collection is From Nature (Cuneiform Press, 2019). His translation of Philippe Soupault’s memoir, Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, was published by City Lights in 2016. He recently edited “Retroscope,” a selection of literary travel writing from the past at Nowhere magazine.

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                                                 Irish breakfast, 19 March 2024. Photo by Don Berger

Cleo Qian: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Animal, Look

 

The miracle is not that this
is a lover’s poem, but that I
am the one writing it.

In the bathroom, I perch
at the edge of the tub
while she brushes her teeth
under the light.

Firm line of muscle behind the round shoulder,
stencil sketch of the sharp backbone.

It isn’t that I believed I would never love again,

only,

sometimes, these several years,
I believed I would never love again.

I wrote about deserts, copper,
shorelines and springs.
How the hourglass of life never
is turned.

Now, this woman’s back against my blue
brushed-cotton sheets.

The miracle was not her:
tender, vain, playful,
certain to leave.

Cold edge of the bathtub.
Harsh light of midnight.

It was my own heart I marveled at,
its skip and unease,

How it shifted, a small animal in its nest
raising its head, finally, to look.

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Cleo Qian (she/her) is a queer fiction writer and poet born in California. She is the author of the short story collection Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go (Tin House, 2023) which was one of Time’s 100 Best Books of the Year as well as being longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, among other accolades. Her writing has been published in outlets including ZYZZYVA, Pleiades, The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, and others.

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French, School of Fontainebleau (last quarter of 16th century), Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d'Estrées et de sa sur la duchesse de Villars (Gabrielle d'Estrées and One of Her Sisters).

Mosab Abu Toha: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

       for Alicia M. Quesnel, MD

I.

When you open my ear, touch it

gently.

My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.

Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium

when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

 

You may encounter songs in Arabic,

poems in English I recite to myself,

or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

 

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.

Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.

 

II.

The drone’s buzzing sound,

the roar of an F-16,

the screams of bombs falling on houses,

on fields, and on bodies,

of rockets flying away—

rid my small ear canal of them all.

 

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.

Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.

Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,

my doctor, day and night.

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Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.  His writings from Gaza have appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Review, among others. His second poetry book, Forest of Noise, is forthcoming from Knopf in October 2024. [Author photo credit: Mohamed Mahdy]

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                                                               Sliman Mansour, Mother and Her Child (أم وطفلها), oil on canvas, 2016.

Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Your Nights

 

if we are going to be together

we are going

 

to need a system

of rules a treaty

 

an understanding you won’t

colonize my body but you’ll

 

come when you’re invited

bring gifts to the borders of me

 

we’ll learn to say thank you

in each other’s languages

 

we’ll learn the important phrases

don’t stop and I love you

 

we’re going to need to reach

some kind of agreement

 

your nights versus my nights

 

my nights are all leather and fatherless dark

all chasing pain and holding it there

 

your nights are for words and holding

things that are fragile

 

my nights are a cat of nine tails

against skin are all the things that come

 

bubbling and beading to the surface

your nights are remember when we were young

 

my nights are Japanese rope bondage

your nights are watercolors and cherry blossoms

 

I asked you to cover my mouth with your hand I

was feeling adventurous and after all

 

it was my night darling you refused

you couldn’t stand to see me silenced

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Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribes. Native to the Pacific Northwest she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She writes with a focus on trauma and resilience, ranging topics from PTSD, sexual violence, the work her great grandmother did for Lushootseed language revitalization, to loud basement punk shows and what it means to grow up mixed heritage. Sasha received a double MFA from The Institute of American Indian Arts with a focus on creative nonfiction and poetry. She teaches creative writing at the Native Pathways Program at Evergreen and has been a mentor for Seattle’s youth poet laureate program.  Her memoir Red Paint has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Shelf Awareness and is available through Counterpoint Press. Her collection of poetry Rose Quartz is available through Milkweed Press. Thundersong, a collection of essays is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in spring of 2024.

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   Jeffrey Gibson. She Never Dances Alone, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, archival pigment on cotton, archival pigment on rice paper, inset in custom wood frame, glass beads, and artificial sinew;  87 3/8 x 79 5/16 x 2 9/16 in. Gochman Family Collection. Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio. Photo: Max Yawney.

Bob Holman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Another Day Elizabeth

 

Talking about coffee over coffee

     after coffee

This is morning, you forgot

How memories can steam

     in a hot quiet cloud

A blue line falls across love's

     face, as if the diagonal were

          a new direction

The only direction we'll ever need

Is up, as in get up

Out, as in get up out of bed

For now, it's a cup

     with two handles

Horizontally yours

Wish you were here and you are

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In 2023, Bob Holman read at Sundance and in Tbilisi, Tokyo, Oslo, Vienna, and the Parkside Lounge. 

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                                                                 Elizabeth Murray, Just in Time. © The Murray-Holman Family Trust

 

Kiki Petrosino: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Instructions for Time Travel

 

You must go through Mr. Jefferson

along his row of chinaberry trees

 

behind the ruined smokehouse

in unmarked tracts, under fieldstones

 

with no carvings, no monuments

with a few leaves shadowing the mulch

 

near scattered weeds, in sunken lines

while the sun walks in the day

 

at the end of the day

in an oval of brushed earth

 

just as the soft path finishes

under branches

 

where the dead are always saying

what they always say:

 

Write about me.

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Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she is a Professor of Poetry. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors.

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                                                    Isaac Jefferson (1775-1853). See this link for more.

 

Quincy Scott Jones: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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She Said in Bed

 

When I die let my body fly.

Book me a trip on a rocket ship

and launch me at dawn.  Play some

Hendrix and a Nina Simone song.  Give me

a eulogy through a static headset.  Let the

booster jets be my pallbearers and give

me a smoke plume in lieu of a tomb.  And

everyone awake who tries to fake

some caffeinated joy can take their eyes

out of their latte chai and turn their face

to space instead.

 

What would you like for breakfast? I said.

 

She said in bed Let me sail on solar winds over

all of the lunar seas

past crises and clouds and tranquility

nectar and moisture and fertility

even past the pyramids NASA never lets us see

until my body passes right over the moon.

Let me float like a balloon until I’m over Venus—

the namesake of flytraps

the reason for jimmy hats

both deity and devil and a woman

at that.  Let my ship land on a mountain cap

and let my body burn in a snowfall of lead. she said.

 

What do you want for breakfast? I said.

 

Let me bathe in 700 degrees

under storms of pure CO₂.

Let me walk without shoes

on volcanic plains and wash my hair

in sulfuric rains just don’t leave me

down here.  On Earth I watch

fathers get shot sitting in patrol cars

while cops shoot sons with empty hands.

 

                                                Bury me

on a land where I can never stand

in air I can never breathe

on a planet I can never know

around a star I cannot see.

Let me leave this world when I am dead.

 

And chocolate chip pancakes please she said.

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Quincy Scott Jones is an associate professor at Barnard College, the poetry advisor for Columbia University Undergraduate Creative Writing, and the author of The T-Bone Series and  How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children.  His work has appeared in the African American Review, The North American Review, the Bellingham Review, Love Jawns: A Mixtape, and The Feminist Wire.  With Nina Sharma he co-curates Blackshop, a column highlighting BIPOC artists.  His graphic narrative, BlackNerd, is in the works. [Author photo by Dominique Sindayiganza]

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   Harmonia Rosales, Birth of Oshun, detail, 2017, oil on canvas. Rosales uses Greek and Roman mythologies to draw viewers in, as in this work— modeled on Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”—which depicts the Yòrúba goddess Oshun.

Ina Cariño: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

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When I Say Hello to the Oldest Apples

 

                                                            they tell me

a mountain is good for me. disowned by my papa,

I don’t reply—afraid of fathers, decades of dirt.

 

my cousins would sneer & slop me wet rice—

no mercy for a curse of daughters instead of sons.

a family tree scattered. spit in my tea.

 

maybe I am unloved because I want to deal

in the currency of ghosts—to traffic in such

precious things as broken rosaries, jars of ash.

 

when I ask for pardon as I trample knotted roots,

I nod to the spirit inside the wood: dwende, old

man of the mound who snatches bad children.

 

dirty one, you can’t walk here. I confess, I am

a dirty one. in dreams my claws rake the soil

of my mama’s garden as I search for fallen figs.

 

my brow ignores its lineage, tries to forget

centuries of grey-eyed Spaniards lurking

my veins, knocking the lumber of my heart.

 

when I say goodbye to manzanitas, boughs withering,

they tell me I’ll never forget them, that I’ll never

find fruit as familiar as their berries at their ripest.

 

I climb these trees, but in dark churches, hot wax

drips my knob-knees, sweat skimming the velvet

back of my neck. I can’t let go of what I think

 

is still mine—bloodlines flooding the slopes

of the Cordillera, silver in the hills—pine sap

casing my teeth as I say hello to the oldest apples.

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Originally from Baguio City in the Philippines, Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner for poetry. Their work appears in the American Poetry Review, the Margins, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, Waxwing, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman fellow and winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for Feast, published by Alice James Books in March 2023.   In 2019, Ina founded a poetry reading series called Indigena Collective, a platform that aims to center marginalized creatives in the NC community and beyond. 

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                                    Francisco de Goya, Duendecitos (Little Goblins), 1797--1799. Aquatint etching. Phoenix Art Museum.

Brian Swann: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rags and Bones

 

Sorting through his things like a rag-picker

    or the rags and bones man who’d give you a goldfish

       in a jam-jar for the stuff you brought him,

I came across a card in his collection of sayings

    and aphorisms, “Follow Your Heart,” which

        I thought ironic since he died of a heart attack

after a diet including cold beef fat spread on bread

          like butter, which still makes me worry

since I had to clean the plate and eat any fat I

      cut off, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

                                                                    He

          never gave up trying to get the most

out of things, even on his death bed begging

     the nurse for a hand job.

                                                  And as he lay with

         light from stained glass falling over him

sailing through silky white billows as if

      there was still something more, the coffin,

          I thought, could just as well have been

a cradle. He’ll never die.

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Brian Swann’s most recent poetry collection is Imago (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), and his most recent prose is Ya-honk! Goes the Wild Gander (Mad Hat Press, 2023). 

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                                      Irving Penn. Rag and Bone Man, London,1950. Platinum palladium print, printed 1967

Stephanie Burt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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At the Parkway Deli

 

You can know what you need before you know why.

For example, ten-year-old me, who leans

on the empty cold salad-bar cart along the cold wall

of the crowded dining room at the best Jewish deli

(supposedly, though they’re not kosher) south of Manhattan:

I’m waiting for noon, when the cart

becomes the world-famous pick-your-own-pickle bar.

“World-famous,” meaning

I wouldn’t stop telling my dad how much I liked it:

green sour tomatoes that pop

whenever you cut or bite into them,

intricate as a satellite inside;

sauerkraut in three colors, like some nation’s flag

left outdoors in a storm and shredded, maroon,

not quite white and pale-emerald green;

half-sours and dills, sliced lengthwise like canoes,

curled up at their tips like canoes;

banana peppers the shape

of your tongue if you stick out your tongue,

that also burn your tongue;

jade disks with peppercorns, sugary like tart candy,

yet not dessert, and good for you. How many years

till I found out why trans girls and women crave salt.

Coming out makes your blood pressure go down.

So do spironolactone, and other

similar shots and pills with jawbreaker names

I wanted to change me.  I would tell no one.

I would stand outside until I was 41,

waiting to be let in.  You can know what you need

before you know why: shredded cabbage and mini-cukes

and sodium ions in water, and vine-ripe tomatoes

preserved in mustard seeds, coriander, allspice

and vinegar for no one knows how long.            

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Stephanie Burt is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. Her latest books include We Are Mermaids (Graywolf), After Callimachus (Princeton UP), and Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic). Ask her about Taylor Swift!

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                                              Dessert display, Parkway Deli, Silver Spring, Maryland, 14 March 2024. Photo by T. Winch

David Beaudouin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Annunciation

 

For my sins I live in the city of Baltimore

Immutable as it staggers into the sea   its crooked shore

Uncertain of any harbor, impure and beautiful

Like a cigarette butt in last night’s drink.

So must I also think like Poe with an aching head

Of dark and transcendent things that drift from those alleys

Follow us back to our little blue home.  Let these poems

Be our fiery word in these haunted streets, turning all shades

But our own to things as real as stone where we can read

Our death has not been written yet.  Even with monsters

At the edges, it is a map where we can live, this city they

Keep building as it falls, the water’s current carries everything

Away but what we feel, who we loved, where we went that

Night for crabs and beer.  It will never be more real than here.

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David Beaudouin, native to Baltimore, is a widely published poet and performer.  He was the founder of Tropos Press, Inc. (1976–2001), one of the region’s earliest and most respected alternative literary presses, as well as The Pearl (1980–2001), a Baltimore journal of the literary and "spontaneous" arts.  He served for more than a decade as a literary panelist for the Mayor's Committee on Arts and Culture and was instrumental in the creation of the Artscape Literary Arts Award, and additionally has created and hosted a number of public reading series in the area, most recently “Blabbermouth.” David also has collaborated with visual artists Thea Osato and Julia Kim Smith on multimedia projects, and has co-produced two documentary shorts, Fluid Movement and One Nice Thing. Published works include Ten Poems (1973), Gig (1976), Catenae (1989), Ode to Stella (1990), American Night (1992), and Human Nature (1995). Two new collections, After All (Bowerbox Press) and Some Odes and Others (UnCollected Press) will be published in 2024. [Author photo by Steve Parke.]

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                                                Mural art by Stefan Ways and Baltimore-based artist and activist Nether

Elizabeth A. I. Powell: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Too Late to Stop Now

 

This week I dragged the Xmas tree out like a corpse

I was homesick for mutual assured destruction and 1985

Love was a meeting of solitudes, the thin tissue around ornaments,

Anne in the neonatal unit saving junk-sick babies

I drank oolong tea in bed, read DeLillo, had a neck ache

Let the Words of my Mouth and the Meditations of My Heart

I rocked some preemie babies, made new cells, a couple of poems

Suddenly, Anne in hospital, lymph nodes, margins, ten inches of snow

I didn’t take anything personally except when I did

My neighbors telemark skiing, bonfiring their vanities

Anne lost numbers, words, minutes, space, knitting needles, life

There was still a God, and the maple apple Bundt cake went stale

I realized everyone was my dead mother acting in a Beckett play

I accepted this week all previous weeks prepared me for

with its nervous dirges and the Tibetan Book of the Dead

I was still this Elizabeth and the soul who claimed this Elizabeth

This week love in my pantry, on my doorstep, on my tongue,

the ice caps kept melting, a terrible sun.

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Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, most recently Atomizer (LSU Press). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was chosen for “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker.  Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues was published in 2019 in the U.K.  Recent poems appear in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Women’s Review of Books, among others. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University. 

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                                                                         Samuel Beckett by Nahidh Salman

Timothy Donnelly: Pick of the Week [d. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lunch in a Town Named After a Company Slowly Poisoning Its Residents

 

I saw a cow once on a hilltop casually stretch her neck

to face behind herself so that her hind leg might scratch

 

between her eyes with her hoof. I can’t emphasize enough

how casually she pulled this off, while obviously I was

 

gobsmacked, having never seen a cow do that before

and having never given thought to whether it was possible.

 

Well, it’s possible. Things slid back to normal after that

despite life’s electric charge, which I don’t let get the better of me.

 

Sometimes I feel like something might be underway,

but I just wait it out: hands on the table, eyes on the wall.

 

Meanwhile, it’s safe to say the cow is long since gone.

Not on account of what I saw, but because I saw it long ago.

 

A cow’s life expectancy is only fifteen years or so.

Me, I’m right here: red beans on yellow rice, a slightly

 

brown avocado. The day started off in clouds and the clouds

don’t always part. To ask too much of life would spoil it.

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Timothy Donnelly’s most recent book, Chariot, was published in 2023 by Wave Books. His previous books include The Problem of the Many, winner of the inaugural Big Other Poetry Prize, and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his family. 

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                                              Jack B. Yeats, The Road to Galway, oil on panel, 1924

 

Alise Alousi: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Detroit 1998, a Reminiscence

after Eliot Weinberger

 

In Detroit there is no fresh fruit.

 

We eat with our eyes. Our children are strong as weeds. They learn the alphabet backwards and

grow up never wanting to leave.

 

Our streets are named for cigarettes, highways—winning lotto numbers. In Detroit we don’t

stop at stop signs and traffic lights never turn red. We crave the smell of gasoline.

 

There exists only one map of the city. The mayor keeps it facing the wall in his home and you

must pay a fee to look at it.

 

The casino coughs blood into the night sky and the incinerator wears a surgical mask.

 

In Detroit our smiles are crooked, our canine teeth sharp as diamonds or hard candy sucked

to a fine point.

 

When it rains the streets smell like tortillas and wine and we play games where you must gather

with only those who look exactly like you.

 

In Detroit vines grow out the doors and windows of the oldest churches and you must cross the

street or travel with a machete to pass them.

 

There are seven kinds of birds that gather by railroad tracks at noon and dusk. All the gardeners

in the city take turns watching over them.

 

In Detroit our factories sleep with one eye open, their histories written in code on internal

walls.

 

All our cats are feral. They live on the roofs of our public buildings. Packs of dogs have been

sent to unseat them.

 

For in Detroit there is a secret freeway with only one car, its headlights dimmed, and the sound

of its bass makes roadside flowers grow.

 

The river is full of socks, hijabs, bicycle tires. Old men fish for hours off the sinking pier.

 

There is one library in the city and it is open every other day for fifteen minutes. Once an entire

family was killed in a stampede.

 

In Detroit we cover our houses with fine mesh and ivy. Wild roses grow everywhere.

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Alise Alousi is the author of the poetry collection, What to Count. She has worked for over two decades at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit and is a recipient of a 2019 Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship.     [For Eliot Weinberger, see this link.]

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One of the Detroit Industry Murals (1932–1933), a series of frescoes by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, consisting of twenty-seven panels depicting industry at the Ford Motor Company and in Detroit. Together they surround the interior Rivera Court in the Detroit Institute of Arts. 

Garret Keizer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Neighbors

 

When a man and woman built their house

on the hill behind mine, thus ruining

forever the satisfaction I took

in seeing no house but mine

in any direction,

I felt cheated and bitter.

I live at the foot of the hill,

I thought, and any time they wish,

they can peer into my yard.

 

But they were peerless people,

most times quiet as the trees

they had not cut, their voices murmurs

in the wind, their jackets flashing

colored wings among the branches.

The woman gave birth to a son,

who calls my name cycling down the road

as though I were his long-lost friend.

 

So I live at the foot of the hill,

and any bitter man who would climb it,

meaning my neighbors harm,

must first get past me.

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Garret Keizer is the author of The World Pushes Back (Texas Review Press), winner of the 2018 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and of eight prose books including Getting Schooled, Privacy, and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want. His poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, Raritan, and The New Yorker. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and Virginia Quarterly Review.

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