The Best American Poetry

Kit Robinson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Eric Breitbard

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This Poem

 

This poem is incredible
You should immediately memorize it and tell it to all your friends
If you read this poem over and over
You will be better able to read and understand other poems
Any poem!
Life goes on and off
Death goes off and on
Shit happens
Just like in this poem
Which is like an elixir or vaccine

Sometimes this poem is like overhearing a conversation in the next yard
A moment of relaxation
In your otherwise busy day
Other times it’s more like thinking about something
Then thinking about something else
It never stops
Even when interrupted by a passing train
In that sense, this poem is immortal
In so far as it is always on the move
To no particular end

When you dream a poem
The poem is often odd
Weird, asyntactic or wild
This poem is totally normal
It teaches one how to live normally
Under the most abnormal of conditions
Put one foot in front of the other
Is how the ancestors put it
They even put it into this poem
So that anyone would be able to see what this poem of our life on earth is made of

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Kit Robinson is a Bay Area poet, writer, and musician. He is the author of Quarantina (Lavender Ink, 2022), Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019), Leaves of Class (Chax, 2017), Marine Layer (BlazeVOX, 2015), and 20 other books of poetry. His essays on poetics, art, travel, and music appear online at Jacket2, Open Space and Nowhere. He plays Cuban tres guitar in the charanga band Calle Ocho.

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                                                                Autobiography, collage by Ray DiPalma ca. 2015

A poem from Tony Hoagland on his birthday [ed. Terence Winch]

 

My Father’s Vocabulary

 

In the history of American speech,

he was born between “Dirty Commies” and “Nice tits.”

 

He worked for Uncle Sam,

and married a dizzy gal from Pittsburgh with a mouth on her.

 

I was conceived in the decade

between “Far out” and “Whatever”;

 

at the precise moment when “going all the way”

turned into “getting it on.”

 

Sometimes, I swear, I can feel the idioms flying around inside my head

like moths left over from the Age of Aquarius.

 

Or I hear myself speak and it feels like I am wearing

a no-longer-groovy cologne from the seventies.

 

In those days I was always trying to get a rap session going,

and he was always telling me how to clean out the garage.

 

Our last visit took place in the twilight zone of a clinic,

between “feeling no pain” and “catching a buzz.”

 

For that occasion I had carefully prepared

a suitcase full of small talk

 

—But he was already packed and going backwards,

with the nice tits and the dirty commies,

 

to the small town of his vocabulary,

somewhere outside of Pittsburgh.

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For more on Tony Hoagland (19 Nov 1953--23 Oct 2018):

Wikipedia

Poetry Foundation

 

 

Maureen McLane: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Laura M. Slatkin, 2016 Paris

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Belfast

 

Your velvet hills came to me

last night in the pool

how they hugged the fraught city

the pubs filled and buzzing

the Europa unbombed now for years.

Your political murals are kitsch

and history’s a ditch

for lying if we let                                                                   

the gravediggers

name us. Let’s bury

our pseudonyms                     

all undisclosed.

Was Scarlett O’Hara’s father

a blustering Ulsterman

or was he a peasant                                       

like granddad from Wicklow

tender and fond amidst the riot                    

and kind to his slaves

but for the obvious?               

White people are weird

with their vitamin D

and sunravaged skin.

So far from an equator

it’s hard to walk the line        

in a cleaved world.                                        

Orange, green, navy blue

the colors are weapons

as were some horses                                     

in the 19^th century.                             

Freed by machines

see how they race

on fragile ankles—

beauty a late flower

of disuse. Your storefronts

were boarded, your university

Victorian, the linen quarter

defunct. The solid brick

that shelters us unmortared

smashed a window.

Your sky hung low your beer

rode high your visiting Masons

sober and punctual.

A Days Inn here

is a Days Inn anywhere

but for the marchers gathering

their ribbons’ gaud at odds                                        

with their drawn gaunt faces

shut like a purse

around an old watch

that still keeps time

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Maureen N. McLane is a poet, memoirist, critic, and educator. She has published seven books of poetry, including This Blue, Finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism (My Poets), two monographs on British romantic poetics, and numerous essays on romantic-era and contemporary literature and culture. Her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Czech. Her most recent book is More Anon: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021); her next book, What You Want: poems, will be out in spring 2023 from FSG. She is the Henry James Professor in English and American Letters at New York University.  [“Belfast” is from This Blue, FSG 2014]

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     Belfast mural

Richie Hofmann: Pick of the Week [ed.Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Male Beauty

 

I bought a bag of hard green pears today.

I came home and sat in our room

listening to music for hours,

solo piano, things from France, from the beginning

of the century.

When we were very young, your forgiveness

humiliated me. I knew

you would be asleep when I got back.

It is night outside

and raining. It is the same night

that fills the ruins.

You are naked, drowsy, lost. Stay like that.

In my favorite recordings,

you can hear the pianist breathing.

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Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems is A Hundred Lovers, published by Alfred A. Knopf. He is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. The recipient of Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships, he teaches at Stanford University.

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                                                Troy Caperton, Sleeping Endymion. 2016

KC Trommer: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Off the Roosie

    after O'Hara

I get off the 7 and head home, past the Chase and the Jackson Heights penguin

            that, last week, someone dressed as a bunny, and I’m thinking

of Frankie’s I-do-this-I-do-that poems, and my phone is dead again and

            I can’t afford to replace it. All I want to hear is Spoon

singing got no regard for the thing you don’t understand

            but maybe, as Lorna said, it’s a gift and there’s a poem across the street

waving Yoo hoo! Over here! and trying very hard to get

            my attention. I get onto 37th, near what’s left of the Brunson Building

after the fire on Easter Monday and I head past the Met (not that one)

            which they renamed Foodtown but which Honor and Joe and I will

always call the Met (not that one), and then a left onto 77th

            and past our coffee shop where Afsal stands outside, talking, but

for once does not say hello even though he looks

            straight at me, and it’s fine, I walk past the Berkeley and over 35th Ave., and

I guess I’m home, considering that my keys have opened

            the door even before I realized I had them in my hand, and everything is

where I left it, even in the bedroom where I keep waking alone quite

            suddenly to find—yes, I left you. You’ve never even been here.

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KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and The Hasp Tongue (dgp, 2014) and is founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein on a song cycle based on poems from her first collection. Since 2020, she has curated and run the Red Door Series, a reading and meditation series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens. She has been poet in residence on Governors Island since 2021, first through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program, then through Works on Water, and now through the NYU Gallatin WetLab. She is the Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights with her son.   [To hear KC Trommer reading this poem, click here.]

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                                        1941 photo showing 37 Av W. at 90th St Jackson Heights Queens New York City

Amaud Jamaul Johnson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Spirit of the Dead Watching

"Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”

                                                            —Jean Toomer

Like so many stones, a handful

of jasper or black opal scattered

along the banks of the Papenoo,

 

Gauguin has fixed his eye upon

a native girl working among the women.

She twists and beats the wash dry

 

for her mother, readying the bundles

to be carried back to their village,

and Gauguin is in love again.

 

Long from those indifferent hours,

long from the doors of the Maison du jouir

and the affected gaze of his mistresses.

 

In this paradise, all of his desires

collapse into color, become baskets

of guava, plantain, and avocado.

 

Tonight, he will offer her chocolate

and hold a red silk scarf before the fire.

Beneath banyan, palm, and sweet gum,

 

he will try to divine the body’s secret,

unburden himself of the thought of history

and paint his language into their silences.

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Born and raised in Compton, California, Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, Imperial Liquor (Pitt Poetry Series 2020), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;  Darktown Follies (Tupelo Press 2013), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Red Summer (Tupelo Press 2006), winner of the Dorset Prize.

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Paul Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892, oil on burlap mounted on canvas, 116.05 x 134.62 x 13.34 cm (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY).

Elisa Gabbert: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Adalena Kavanagh

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Bright & Distant Objects

 

I read a headline that said, “Human hair behind pigeons’ lost toes, study finds.”

I thought it meant that pigeons were growing human hair. . . behind their toes, their lost toes?

I felt sick with fear.

I read a headline that said, “Just thinking about bright objects changes the size of your pupils.”

So how do we know that we’re actually experiencing anything?

How do we know that we’re not just thinking about objects, bright and distant? Concepts? The future?

What do we know of “the actual”?

If you think about greyhounds, your pulse rate goes down.

I am thinking about 16 Psyche, a metallic asteroid so massive it exerts gravitational disturbances on other asteroids.

Some speculate it’s composed of gold and platinum, which would make it worth “quintillion dollars,” or billions of times all the money on Earth.

In these terms everything in the universe is money, a concept humans made up, like emotions.

In the future, objects in the universe will be so far apart that distant civilizations could never discover each other, even theoretically.

They could not even think about each other.

Sometimes, during a period of dread, I momentarily forget the thing I’m dreading, but continue to feel the dread.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m about to remember something, but the memory never arrives—just the all-consuming feeling of about to.

Or the memory has arrived, but it’s a memory of nothing, with nothing to be about.

The feeling of pure, empty remembering.

If things are just themselves, what do we know of things?

The moon? Clouds? Herons?

Are they decorative objects?

Details on the surface of the actual?

What is a human skull worth—really, what is the cost?

I want to purchase a human skull.

I want to know what happens to desire when you’re dead—should your desires be respected?

You can have your ashes embedded in a record, so your survivors can listen to your death.

You can turn all the carbon in your body into artificial diamonds—you can want that.

My friend the undertaker wanted to be turned into a diamond, then embedded in his own skull, a decorative object.

An undertaker takes the body under, a coincidence of language. (It’s just a euphemism: an undertaking.)

What you wanted, once you’re dead, is the real without feeling.

Desires with no one to want them.

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Elisa Gabbert is the author of six collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Normal Distance (out from Soft Skull in September 2022) and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020), a New York Times Editors' Pick and finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared recently in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Believer.

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                         Jacques-Laurent Agasse (1767- -1849), Nine Greyhounds in a Landscape, oil on canvas, ca. 1807

 

Grace Cavalieri's Milestone Birthday [Terence Winch]

Happy 90th birthday to the extraordinary & indefatigable Grace Cavalieri, an inspiration to all who know her. Poet, playwright, painter, and long-time host of “The Poet and the Poem” interview program from the Library of Congress, Grace deserves all the love she asks for.

 

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This Poem Is Asking for Your Love

This poem is not usually like this
I don’t know what came over it
It’s mostly violet under the sun
with a large yellow parasol and a pond
with a center that never freezes
I swear I had no idea
I’m so used to trees of hearts and
cherries within its branches
I can’t imagine
what woke this poem up
with a truth I never wanted
It called out the tower window and said
I was alone
That in itself is a morbid lie
I have long shadows in Autumn and clouds
anytime there is a sky
In fact everything was going so well until
this poem wanted to undress me
and bring back my love
and hold me close and rub
my forehead when I had fever
It had no idea what trouble could come
from this so I wrote it
then I ran from it
now I can erase it
to show I never needed it after all
because don’t you know, Poem,
if you have to ask for something
it’s no gift.

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                                                                                Autobiography, mixed media, by Grace Cavalieri

Jack Skelley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Skelley, photo by Gary Leonard

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Green Goddess

 

Who made the salad

Whose tangy vinegar made me wince

Who played pouty Venus to my impudent Caesar

Who taught me to renounce meat

Who flowed forth lubricants

Who performed dark sacraments

Whose tart shrub tangled my tongue

Who with unctuous poses oiled me

Who received my verdant sacrifice

Who, as I reclined panting, poured herself into her dressing

Who lured me to the garden and dragged me into deep greens

Who instructed me on the use of the proper fork

Who inserted an oblong cucumber

Who shredded slender carrot sticks

Whose burning bush consumed the sky god’s timbers, shaking his heavens to the rafters

Who roused me in damp chambers, dousing reasonable fires to consume knowledge raw

Who at the crack of the vernal equinox, broke seasoned bread into bite-sized croutons

Who parted beet-red vestments

Who swelled my painted cave-beast proud and pregnant

Who put me in the red-pepper pink

Whose celestial power I would enviously drink

Who succored me when I lay pallid

Who made the salad

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Jack’s Skelley’s “Green Goddess” appears in his latest collection, Interstellar Theme Park: New and  Selected Writing (BlazeVOX books). Other books include: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), and Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), spring 2023). He is also songwriter and guitarist for psychedelic surf band Lawndale which just released a new album, Twango.

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    “Product Placement”—one of nine collages by Erin Alexander for Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing by Jack Skelley.

Laura Orem: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bald

 

Remember, remember that boy

who could not love you

because you were not pretty,

whose terrible honesty you’ve carried

for thirty years, the truth you mined from him

like some strange gemstone made of your

own desperation that you still wear

around your neck.

 

And now this boy, your boy, who carefully wields

the electric razor until, stroke by stroke,

your head is shaven, austere as a nun’s,

beauty or lack of it as irrelevant as it is to God. This is

about power. This is about mess. This is what you do

to claim some purchase on this absurd slide

down a hill of talus looking for meaning

or Jesus or some way to make sense.

The boy reminds you as he shifts

to a disposable razor and, surgically careful,

scrapes away the tiniest stubble, black and gray

as a prophet’s beard. Your choice, he says. My choice,

like forcing truth from another boy thirty years ago.

See, says my son. Look. It’s not so bad.

You can stand it. You already have.

Stand it some more.

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Laura Orem is a writer, artist, and educator. Currently a board member of the Baltimore Wisdom Project, a multi-faceted education program for inner city youth, she taught writing for many years at Goucher College. She is the author of two books of poetry, Castrata and Resurrection Biology.  She lives in Palm Coast, Florida.

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This transformed image of the iconic Mona Lisa from a 2013 poster is the “perfect emblem of the upheaval that cancer brings with it, the enormity of its impact on the life of a person and of the inestimable stakes,” says the National Cancer Association Foundation of Italy, a nonprofit organization that provides free palliative care and pain management services to cancer patients throughout Italy.  

 

 

Diane Burns's "Sure You Can Ask Me a Personal Question" [ chosen by Terence Winch]

 

I can't remember when I first encountered this poem.  I know I stumbled on it accidently, I think while doing some on-line research during my days as an employee of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.  We had launched a poetry feature called "Pulling Down the Clouds"  for our membership magazine, and I was always on the lookout for interesting Native work to run as the focus of the feature.  

I knew immediately I wanted this poem in the magazine.  I loved its directness, its snarly, unapologetic, in-your-face attitude. Its completely sophisticated, contemporary use of language.  This was not work that catered to white assumptions and stereotypes: just the opposite, in fact.  Hers is a complex voice in which humor, bitterness, and hipness all coexist in service to the poem. This was a voice like that of many of my Indian friends and colleagues, but one rarely heard by the non-Native world (at least beyond the pages of a Sherman Alexie book).     

Further investigation revealed that the poem was written in 1989 and that Diane Burns, a Lac Courte Oreilles/Chemeheuvi, was born in 1957 and had passed away in 2006. She "first emerged," we told our readers, "as a powerful literary voice in the 1970s working as a poet and model in New York City. Burns’s first and only book of poetry, Riding the One-Eyed Ford (Contact II Publications, 1981), further established her reputation as a unique talent by challenging Native American stereotypes through sharp wit and honesty. In the 1980s, Burns joined a circle of poets and writers in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, reading her work at the renowned Bowery Poetry Club and Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery." 

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Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question

How do you do?
No, I am not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I am American Indian, Native American.

No, not from India.
No, not Apache
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
No, we are not extinct.
Yes, Indian.

Oh?
So that's where you got those high cheekbones.
Your great grandmother, huh?
An Indian Princess, huh?
Hair down to there?
Let me guess. Cherokee?

Oh, so you've had an Indian friend?
That close?

Oh, so you've had an Indian lover?
That tight?

Oh, so you've had an Indian servant?
That much?

Yeah, it was awful what you guys did to us.
It's real decent of you to apologize.
No, I don't know where you can get peyote.
No, I don't know where you can get Navajo rugs real cheap.
No, I didn't make this. I bought it at Bloomingdales.

Thank you. I like your hair too.
I don't know if anyone knows whether or not Cher
is really Indian.
No, I didn't make it rain tonight.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Spirituality.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Spirituality. Uh-huh. Mother
Earth. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Spirituality.

No, I didn't major in archery.
Yeah, a lot of us drink too much.
Some of us can't drink enough.

This ain't no stoic look.
This is my face.
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For more information on Burns, check out this obituary. I don't know if this is Burns herself reading the poem in this clip, but perhaps someone else out there would know.

Joe Wenderoth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My Life

after Henri Michaux

Somehow it got into my room.

I found it, and it was, naturally, trapped.

It was nothing more than a frightened animal.

Since then I raised it up.

I kept it for myself, kept it in my room,

kept it for its own good.

I named the animal, My Life.

I found food for it and fed it with my bare hands.

I let it into my bed, let it breathe in my sleep.

And the animal, in my love, my constant care,

grew up to be strong, and capable of many clever tricks.

One day, quite recently,

I was running my hand over the animal's side

and I came to understand

that it could very easily kill me.

I realized, further, that it would kill me.

This is why it exists, why I raised it.

Since then I have not known what to do.

I stopped feeding it,

only to find that its growth

has nothing to do with food.

I stopped cleaning it

and found that it cleans itself.

I stopped singing it to sleep

and found that it falls asleep faster without my song.

I don't know what to do.

I no longer make My Life do tricks.

I leave the animal alone

and, for now, it leaves me alone, too.

I have nothing to say, nothing to do.

Between My Life and me,

a silence is coming.

Together, we will not get through this.

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Joe Wenderoth has published a variety of books, all of which are available for sale. He is from Baltimore.

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                                                                                Lion Man, Photograph by Bilal Arslan

Sommer Browning: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Great Things from the Department of Transportation

 

My mother desires to track my location on her phone.

My mother announces that she’s “latex intolerant.”

My mother is horrified that the children’s cartoon character Caillou is bald.

My mother to the server at a terrible restaurant: I don’t want a box—I want a flamethrower.

One’s mother might be the most famous person one knows.

My mother says, There is no Denny’s, only Zuul.

My mother on penises and traffic cones: On occasion they’re both orange, aren’t they?

The young lungs of my mother fill with fine particulate matter on the streets of Clairton, PA.

My mother on the X-rated hypnotist: He was only concerned with having the hypnotized persons act sexually stupid.

One night in the 1970s, in the Mojave Desert, my mother ceases to feel apart from the world.

My mother pays my sister and me $40 each to not have birthday parties.

My mother’s soulmate is not my father but her dog, Six.

The only thing I don’t like about John Wick is that he never washes his hair.

My mother’s father, a bipolar beer distributor, laughs at least once that I know of because it echoes through me for 40 years.

On the whole my mother likes Miranda July’s novel, The First Bad Man, but could have done without the sex parts.

I listen to my mother tell my child a story as if I were my own daughter.

My mother tells me there were some skanks on America’s Next Top Model.

My mother asks, Didn’t someone famous say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”

My mother prays for her children every night.

My mother prays for children every night.

I bet you never thought you’d marry, have a baby, and get divorced before you’re 40, she tells me.

My mother expects great things from the Department of Transportation.

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Sommer Browning is a poet, writer, curator, and artist. Her latest book is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). She's the author of two other collections of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I'm Celebrating, as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book, You're On My Period (Counterpath), and others. In 2017, she founded GEORGIA, an art space in her garage in Denver. Her poetry, art writing, and visual art have appeared in Lit Hub, Bomb, jubilat, Chicago Review, Entropy, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a Librarian. ["Great Things from the Department of Transportation" first appeared in the American Poetry Review.]  _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                      René Magritte. The Double Secret, 1927. Oil on canvas. 114 x 162 cm (44.8 x 63.7 in). 

Richard Vargas: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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13 Angels Rising

 “Starting early in February investigators recovered 13 sets of skeletal remains from a once-remote section of mesa now being developed as a residential subdivision. Four have been identified… They are among a list of 16 women reported missing between 2001 and 2006.”  —Local Albuquerque TV news, krqe.com, 3/27/09

 

they say good is greater than evil
and if it is then the dead
shall rise and walk again
right out of their Westside graves
past the tracts of generic
cardboard neighborhoods
past the cars cruising Central Ave
driven by men with bloodshot eyes
and Budweiser breath who wave
dollar bills in the air
like honey coated flypaper

and if so inclined the dead
will reinvent their renewed lives
so that closed fists open up
become soft as pillows where
dreams of violence fade away
the way a bruise heals when
kissed by a seraph’s lips

families, babies, and friends rejoice
embrace their return from
the eternal night
the cruel night
especially now as
the sun’s light
shines down and
warms the sidewalk
beneath their feet

especially now as butterfly wings
with a gossamer sheen sprout
from the satin skin stretched
over once battered
shoulder blades
healed and whole

especially now as they
show us how to fly
and rise above the
nature of our sin

not a moment too soon
to come back and save
us from ourselves

inclined to walk unafraid
among the demons we
all have within
and show us

how like a pebble
dropped in water
calm and still
our inhumanity
ripples outward
touching one
and all

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Richard Vargas earned his BA at Cal State University, Long Beach, where he studied under Gerald Locklin and Richard Lee. He edited/published five issues of The Tequila Review, 1978–1980, and twelve issues of The Mas Tequila Review from 2010–15. Vargas received his MFA in creative writing from the University of New Mexico, 2010. He was recipient of the 2011 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference Hispanic Writer Award. He was on the faculties of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference and the 2015 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. Published collections: McLife, 2005; American Jesus, 2007; Guernica, revisited, 2014; How A Civilization Begins (MouthFeel Press, Summer 2022). He currently resides in Wisconsin, near the lake where Otis Redding’s plane crashed. [For more on Richard Vargas, click here.] 

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Seven Angels Pouring Vials of the Wrath of God upon the Earth. By a British School Painter influenced by William Blake. 19th century.

 

Abbie Bradfield Mulvihill: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Ciara Mulvihill

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We Can Move Forward Now

 

My nose is burning from the Urine Destroyer.

 

I’m speaking to the judge with my bare feet

Perched on the cedar chest in front of me.

I move the socks from my pocket

To the couch cushion next to me.

Why wear socks when

The aging dog

Has suddenly sprung a leak?

 

The judge thinks my husband called in.

We’re going to wait for him to call back.

I take a deep breath and explain,

“That was me.

I needed to be sure

I’d have audio on the Zoom call.”

 

We can move forward now.

 

It’s not emotional

Except for my disgust

For the attorney’s failure to tell me

I needed to have the Separation Agreement

On hand.

 

Of course I have it.

I’m always prepared.

 

I am getting divorced

In the same house

In which I was married.

Two rooms away.

 

What if I’d worn the same dress

Stood in the same spot

And placed the iPad judge

Where the officiant had stood?

Would I have erased time?

 

10 minutes.

 

It’s over.

I still feel nothing.

 

I move to the room

Between marriage and divorce

Where once we celebrated with

Coconut cake and a toast to our

Future.

 

Now, I sit alone at the table and play

(for the umpteenth time)

Mika singing, “Happy Ending” with

The Sinfonia Pop Orchestra.

 

The pets have concerns

About this behavior.

But I’m trying to add emotion after

The cold, masked Zoom call.

I need to cry

And I want céad míle slán.

 

Today is my childhood best friend’s

56^th birthday.

I don’t know where she is or

What she’s doing.

I haven’t seen her in decades

But I’m glad today is her birthday.

She is the only other person I know

To be divorced

Twice.

 

A “two-time loser.”

Evidence that “you’re the problem.”

This is what people say

Out of fear.

 

Ultimately,

No one remembered this day, but me.

I am relieved

Because it’s not the champagne day

Everyone wanted.

 

What now?

Return to telework?

Dairy Queen instead of champagne?

Drive around the Beltway

In my own personal Freedom Convoy

While blasting Life in Cartoon Motion?

 

It’s raining

Tears of joy

Or sorrow

Or Urine Destroyer.

 

Traffic will be a disaster.

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Abbie Mulvihill lives in the Washington, DC area where her federal government work focuses on webs, spiders, bugs, and taxonomies in the digital realm. "We Can Move Forward Now" is her first published poem.

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Jeffrey McDaniel: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Narcoleptic’s Marathon                                                              

 

The hetero married version of a 69 is: she does the dishes

while he folds the laundry. The sadomasochistic version

 

of a hand job involves sandpaper gloves. My body

is an old house; you fix one thing and something

 

else breaks. Today at the beach, a dolphin

sucked the wedding ring right off someone’s finger.

 

The decay is down to your gums, said the dentist.

This cabinet will have to come out. The narcoleptic’s

 

marathon involves twenty-six beds and strategically placed

alarm clock stations. In Sweden, there is a little jar

 

for you to spit your dreams into, in the bathroom

when you wake up. In France, married couples

 

must have sex in front of beginners once a year.

Encularnuit. I never liked that molar anyway.

 

The hole in my mouth where tooth number eighteen was

feels like a burnt-out bedroom. When I was twenty,

 

this girl literally set my futon on fire, and the firemen

chucked my stuff from the kicked-out dorm window.

 

When I was twenty-one, a different classmate

metaphorically set my bed on fire and left claw marks

 

on my vertebrae, and we role-played a couple firemen

squirting us with water pistols. She had great teeth

 

and now she has a couple kids and a wedding ring

the size of a strobe light. When I see her

 

at our fiftieth reunion, I’ll whisper in her flower petal ear:

honey is the only food that never goes bad.

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Jeffrey McDaniel’s seventh book, Thin Ice Olympics, is coming out in September 2022 from Write Bloody Books. He is the author of six previous books of poetry, most recently Holiday in the Islands of Grief (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Other books include Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (Pittsburgh, 2013), The Endarkenment (Pittsburgh, 2008), The Splinter Factory, The Forgiveness Parade, and Alibi School, all published by Manic D Press. McDaniel’s poems have appeared in numerous places, including The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New York Times, and Best American Poetry 1994, 2010, and 2019. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape, 1942, collage on paper, 255 x 305 mm.

           

Toi Derricotte: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Toi Derricotte. Photo by Ted Rosenberg

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Lauds

 

Good morning, fat chair.  Your frame is slight-

Ly askew, your wooden bones tilt, but padded

With foam & polka dotted, you seem sprite-

 

Ly, good-natured.  I’ve known a chair to rise

Out of a night’s darkness & provide a ride

For me, above the furry carpeting, defy-

 

Ing gravity.  Even one cock-eyed, cheap,

Can be a tilted ship climb-

Ing waves of mourning.  Whatever light

 

Shines through this morning’s slatted blinds—

Smoky with undelivered rain—I’ve turned aside

To praise my last-legged you, for (like Jessye

 

Norman’s lungs) your soul breathes blithe

Operatic air, & your polka dots climb

Atmospheric strophes like poems I memorized

 

In school.  Do not go gentle, fat chair.  What we write

About we are, so you are me, plumped with an extra

Twenty pounds, a bear, lumbering. But, in a poem, we

Dance with a relic of imagination &, by imagination, live.

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Toi Derricotte is the recipient of the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, for outstanding artistic achievement in the art of poetry over a poet’s career, and the 2020 Frost Medal from Poetry Society of America for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.  Her sixth collection of poetry, “I” New and Selected Poems, was published in 2019 and shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award.  Other books of poetry include The Undertaker’s Daughter, Tender, Captivity, Natural Birth, and The Empress of the Death House.  Her literary memoir,The Black Notebooks,won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. With Cornelius Eady, Derricotte co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation in 1996. She is Professor Emerita from University of Pittsburgh and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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                                                      Susan F. Campbell, Armchair, color pencil drawing, 1987 

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

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Princess of Thieves

 

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine,

And I have something else I want to say:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

I have not slumped into a terminal decline

And Celia, I welcome each new sunshiny day.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

It may be that you think I have no spine

But you’re wrong, and the truth is here to stay:

That “Best of Phil Collins” CD you have is mine.

 

Celia, I have never been the sort to whine,

And this is what I simply have to convey:

Since you left I’ve been absolutely fine.

 

As I crack open another bottle of wine

The absence of that record causes me dismay.

Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

 

It is not in my nature to weakly repine

And every day I go out with my friends to play.

Since you left I’ve been absolutely bloody fine,

And Celia, that “Best of Phil Collins” CD is mine.

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Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, in quiet retirement with his cat, Xiao Mei. He was the editor/publisher of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978–1993, where he championed New York poets including Paul Violi, Tony Towle, and Charles North. His poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s, his most recent titles being The Review (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2020) and Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters (Leafe Press, 2020). “Princess of Thieves” is one poem in a short sequence now called “To Celia” that was originally written as a (slightly humorous but at the same time very serious) series of blog posts called “How To Write Poetry,” with tutorials on the sonnet, villanelle, triolet, sestina, and pantoum. These very useful guides can be found here.  

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Alicia Jo Rabins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Alicia J. Rose

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Sunday School

 

Look around this cafe, everyone is reading the New York Times and talking,

which all adds up to a clamor of breakfast noises and a mosaic of Sunday papers.

Look at this messy cartoon I call my “life,” which does not know

whether it is living or being lived

It happened again on the way here:

a man looked at me on the subway, directly, meaningfully, brazenly.

This is a different way of being a woman,

which I always disdained, complained, refrained from and now

something must cry look at me, look at me!

And the thrill of being looked-at quivers me to attention.

Being noticed, like noticing, has a sharp blade.

I too cannot help but notice all the beautiful women who populate this restaurant,

it seems they are too beautiful to possibly be real;

and what is it all for anyway, all this ungraspable perfection, because

although right now their beauty is as full as a ripe boysenberry,

crushable, staining, straining their own edges, aching

to be popped in the mouth and tasted

(and they offer it as such)

soon it will be over, their beauty, and only the desire will remain.

All the fucking in the world never erases desire,

and moreover it creates a Next Generation with desire of their own.

So any cessation of desire becomes futile, impossible.

And so we keep putting on our strappy heels day after day,

just “not feeling right” if we wear sneakers or flip flops,

offering ourselves up for this one day:

offering our beauty on the altar of this particular Sunday

like a coffee and a newspaper, to be swallowed and read

and left behind on the cafe table,

leaving faint black smudges on our one-day-older fingertips.

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Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician, performer, and Torah teacher. She is the author of two poetry books, Divinity School (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (a finalist for the Jewish Book Award). As a musician, Rabins is the creator and performer of Girls in Trouble, an indie-folk song cycle about women in Torah currently being developed into a musical. Most recently she is the creator, star, and composer of A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, an indie feature film based on her one-woman chamber-rock opera, which The Atlantic calls “a blessing.” 

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   Francis Luis Mora (Uruguayan-born American, 1874-1940). Subway Riders in New York City (AKA Evening News), 1914.

Mark Wunderlich: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Proposition

 

That the smell of cows drifting through the open window is, indeed, that of a living beast.

That I too am a living beast.

That the body I possess is inhabited only by me.

That my body is neither at rest nor occupied by dramatic motion.

That I am, by my best account, fully alive.

That the room in which I am seated is in Germany, in a town called Worpswede.

That a poet I admire once lived here too, though he is long since dead.

Rilke wrote, “That I gently wipe away the look of suffered injustice sometimes hinders the pure motion of spirits a little.”

That there are such things as “spirits.”

That we were born suffering, but that we are not meant to suffer.

That the wind blows and the birches outside my window sing a little.

And that cooing and chucking of the dove I hear is also a kind of song.

That the difference between the living and the dead is mostly one of conjugation.

Er starb. Er istgestorben.  Ein gestorbenes Mensch.

That what we make when we speak is a kind of music, but disjointed and that music seeks

a unity that our speech does not possess.

Once I felt as though I was dead, but now the reasons for that feeling baffle me.

I marvel at what it is to feel the sun on my skin.

“Burnish,” is the word that comes into my head.

“Burnished by the sun,” as if my torso was a copper shield.

That my torso is a kind of shield protecting the inside from the outside.

Though we all know we are penetrable in many ways.

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Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness, published in 2021 by Graywolf Press.  His other titles include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award.  He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Amy Lowell Trust, and elsewhere and has published individual poems in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Magazine  He serves as the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program, and lives near the village of Catskill in New York's Hudson Valley.  

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   Jonathan Meese, DR. Z.U.K.U.N.F.T. FÜHRT, WIE SAU, COOL COOLISM… (ZEDADDY), 2017. Acrylic, Caparol-dispersion binder and mixed media on canvas; 2 panels.