The Best American Poetry

Thomas Devaney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Devaney. Photo by Patrick Montero.

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Oregon Ave

 

You can’t find a place to smoke anymore

Ro says, smoking and rifling

through her handbag looking for a number.

She sits in the backseat with Meg.

They’re not singing.

The ballgame’s on inside and outside

the game is always on.

Actually, sometimes they do sing.

What year is the car, a ’98?

A Ford? A Focus?

They always tip too.

 

There is dust, always; and terrible dirt;

but if that’s what you see you’re hardly looking.

We believe in the front stoop.

We believe in banging pots and pans and honking horns.

We believe that in the heat of day shadows come back.

Trashcan on fire says Things are hotting up.

The street’s a mix, water, water ice, LIVE CRABS,

jumbo jets, firecrackers.

Summer days are huge and often overlap late into fall.

Seriously, when you have a good spot, why move the car?

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Thomas Devaney is the author of You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2020) and Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019). He wrote and co-directed the film Bicentennial City (2021) about the 1976 Bicentennial in Philadelphia. He teaches creative writing at Haverford College.

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    Philadelphia Muses by Meg Saligman. Photo by Steve Welnik.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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No Apology: A Poemifesto

Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes
in my head.” Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize
for the sight in my eyes. Susan Briante

I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at Kroger.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination.

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Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, Her forthcoming book. Nostalgia Has Such a Short Half-Life, will be published in 2023. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she is a Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She has served as the publisher of Noemi Press since 2002.

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                                      Roberta Levitow, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 2020.

 

Jerome Sala: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A History of White People

 

white people were paid well

not to witness

the fact that they were white

 

you know the theory

white isn't a color

but color's unlimited absence

 

white goes with anything

that's why it seemed fair that white people

conquered the world

 

they were the real invisible men

cause they could perch on top of a country

and say they weren't there

 

they could move through its neighborhoods

like mysterious aliens

with this difference:

 

in ufological lore

aliens often infiltrate a world

without its inhabitants knowing about it

 

but when white people invaded

everyone could see them

but themselves

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Jerome Sala’s books include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books),The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). His poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Boundary 2, Rolling Stone, The Best American Poetry series, and many others. His blog–on poetry, pop culture and everyday life, is espressobongo. [“A History of White People” originally appeared in Hanging Loose magazine (circa 2004) and Look Slimmer Instantly 2005.]

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                            Emma Amos, About Whitness, 1995. Oil and laser transfer on paper. Whitney Museum of American Art

Emily Fragos: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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The Sadness of Clothes

 

When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived

their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.

You talk to the clothes and explain that he is not coming back

 

as when he showed up immaculately dressed in slacks and plaid jacket

and had that beautiful smile on and you’d talk.

You’d go to get something and come back and he’d be gone.

 

You explain death to the clothes like that dream.

You tell them how much you miss the spouse

and how much you miss the pet with its little winter sweater.

 

You tell the worn raincoat that if you talk about it,

you will finally let grief out. The ancients forged the words

for battle and victory onto their shields and then they went out

 

and fought to the last breath. Words have that kind of power

you remind the clothes that remain in the drawer, arms stubbornly

folded across the chest, or slung across the backs of chairs,

 

or hanging inside the dark closet. Do with us what you will,

they faintly sigh, as you close the door on them.

He is gone and no one can tell us where.

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Emily Fragos is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize  from the Library of Congress, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She is the author of four acclaimed books of poetry, Unrest, Saint Torch, Hostage, and Little Savage, and the editor of seven poetry anthologies for The Everyman’s Pocket Library: Music’s Spell, Art & Artists, The Great Cat, The Dance, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Poems of Gratitude, and Poems of Paris. She has also written numerous articles on music and dance, and served as guest poetry editor for Guernica. Her work has been translated into Spanish by Natalia Carbajosa and into Japanese by Yuka Urushibata. Emily Fragos has taught at Columbia, Yale, and NYU. She lives in New York City.

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                                                      Király Nikoletta, 1978. Hungarian Painter.

Sean Thomas Dougherty: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sean Thomas Dougherty, 2021. Photo by Melanie Rae

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Snowglobe

 

It is late and I want to sleep

but the two girls who work at the gas-station-convenience store

next door have gotten out of work and it’s 2AM and they are laughing

and scraping their cars and I want to peek out the window to see

them push their little plastic scrapers over their early 90s models

Fords and toss snowballs and talk about “Jaime just called” and “God girl, you’re

graced” and I wonder how they will spend the minimum wage

they made tonight, a slow night, with everyone staying in

because of the storm, whether Jaime will take the tall one

out (I recognize her voice from when I buy milk every other

day for my child) and whether she will say My Treat!  Or

maybe they will go to a bar, since they seem like they may

almost be that age, though I doubt it, it is so hard

for me to tell now, and they will drink beers

and dance and tenderly wipe the sweat

off of each other’s faces, but then I wonder about the other

girl, where will she go, now that they have started their cars

and I hear their engines about to roar but they don’t, only idle

and idle and I figure they are warming them to get the ice that was too hard

for their little plastic scrapers but they just sit there

so finally I rise from my chair and peek out my curtain

and am startled to see them both in the front seat of the tall girl’s car

and the other one, the one who I think is prettier and who says to my son,

hey sport when he comes in and once tugged his hat over his eyes, she is crying,

crying and saying something I can’t hear over the engine’s

idle, some song is playing something hard on their radio and the snow

is falling and the tall girl is staring up through the windshield and I can’t make out

her expression through the fog whether she is upset or wondering come on

how can I get out of this and get home cause I’m tired when I see her bend

over and take the other girl’s head in her hands and now I can’t get to bed

because it has been almost an hour and their cars are still outside idling

and they are still holding onto each other and the whole world is snowing all at once

like a snowglobe and everything has become fragile and holy, amen.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author or editor of twenty books, including the The Dead Are Everywhere Telling Us Things, winner of the 2021 Jacar Press Poetry Prize. “Snowglobe” is taken from his collection, All You Ask for Is Longing: New and Selected Poems, published by BOA Editions in 2014. His book The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018) received both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Housatonic Book Award from Western Connecticut State University. Over the decades he has worked in factories, in a newspaper plant, as an untenured college lecturer, and in a pool hall. He now teaches writing part-time for the Master of Fine Arts Program of WCSU, and works as a Med Tech and caregiver for people recovering from traumatic brain injuries in Erie, Pennsylvania. More info on Sean can be found here.

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Two girls in a burnt-out car, 1980s. Photo by Peter Anderson

Sally Wen Mao: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Inviolacy

 

Tonight, we shrink for no one.

           Tonight, we are afraid of nothing.

                       Not torpedoes, not the long

 

bodies of submarines or tiger sharks

             that circle beneath us. Not wilt, not tornados,

                         not the dark camps moored to erasure.

 

We will reel them in, shear their teeth.

               Their husks stew the sea. Tonight, awaken me

                            from this dream of apple blossoms, we’ll follow

 

the kingfisher downstream, forget what we’re

            confronting. It’s better this way. To mythologize:

                        city of endless crayon, endless sod;

 

boy riding wild horse in Mongolia.

            Chimeras cannot hurt us

                        even if they were once matter, pestle

 

grinding mortar. Even the abattoir

            feels unreal— it’s unlikely that we’ll ever

                        witness: creature turning

 

into meat. The duck hangs whole

            in the restaurant window. We believe

                        it is whole. When we order it plump,

 

it is cut to pieces in the back room.

            Even invincible, we envy the luxury:

                        a room to bleed in, break apart accordingly.

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Sally Wen Mao is the author of Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). The recipient of an NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, she currently lives in New York. 

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                     Zhang Xiaogang, The Dark Trilogy Fear: Meditation, Sorrow, 1989-1990. Oil and collage on canvas, in three panels.

Greg Masters: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greg Masters. Photo by Kate Previte

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At 20 minutes, 37 seconds

 

At 20 minutes, 37 seconds

into track one of a box-set

reissue of the Miles Davis Quintet

recording “Freedom Jazz Dance,”

a previously unissued rehearsal take,

the raspy-voiced bandleader instructs

drummer Tony Williams to play triplets.

Up to this point in the ensemble’s

working out of the tune, he’d,

uncharacteristically, 

been lagging, playing as if he were

still with Jackie McLean,

accompanying with a ring-a-ding-ding

on the ride cymbal.

But after first working out a bass part for

Ron Carter and a few run-throughs—

Wayne Shorter certainly had the head down

and Herbie Hancock seemed assured

with splashes of chords—

Miles instructs his teenaged drummer

to lay down a triplet pattern and, after a

few attempts, he hits on the pulsating

underlying momentum that, still,

50-plus years after recording,

transforms the seven-minute

master track into a miracle.

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Greg Masters co-edited the poetry magazine Mag City from 1977–85. In 1977–78, along with a crew of poet comrades, he produced a cable TV show, Public Access Poetry. From 1980–83, he edited The Poetry Project Newsletter. Over the past decade, he has issued 10 books of his writing from his imprint Crony Books. “At 20 minutes, 37 seconds” is from It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This (Crony Books, 2020).

[To hear the track referred to in the poem, go here.]

[For more on Tony Williams, click here.]

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Mary Ruefle: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Ruefle, photo by Hannah Ensor, 2017

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Little Stream

 

My heart was bright and shining

like a lobster boiling in water.

And then I was just a child

eating the leftover snow.

I’d lost my mittens and my belly button

was as good as gone, meaning

I couldn’t be born again, ever,

so I sat by a little stream

with my eyes closed.

I saw a woman carrying a child’s coffin

on her head. I saw a rat so friendly

he shined my shoes with his tongue.

I saw my mother leave the room, saying

“Now I am going to go drink some vinegar.”

I saw a surfer drink a wuthering wave

and go down gently into that good night.

I saw the daffodils praying together.

I saw a hummingbird cry out

for a comma between decades.

I saw the quick trimming the hair on their necks

and the wicks of their packaged feet.

I saw something small and in constant danger

of being blown away, like pepper.

I saw a monk set an umbrella on fire, for fun.

I saw an old man dwelling in a tiny fishing village

with a tangible vibrancy that was truly inspiring.

I saw a Venus flytrap eat a cheeseburger.

I saw my struggles were coming to a close.

I saw I would grow so old I would stop wondering

what life on Napa Rui was like, and forget

the first apple tree was in Turkey.

I had the constant feeling something of vital importance

had been lost sight of, was perhaps even gone.

It’s hard to say hello to every atom.

I got to know protozoans, though.

It took three days for my umbilical cord

to swim past. At the end,

the tattered carnation of my navel

seemed most like me, so I threw it in

and at once my eyelids opened,

never to close again.

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Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate. [“Little Stream” from Dunce. ©2019. Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books.]

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                        Hieronymus Bosch, The Concert in the Egg, ca. 1475

Charles North: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Philosophy of New Jersey

            (for Jill)

 Actually the sky appears older than it is. It’s 63 or 64 at most, not 75. The part with the

cliff face and the yellow crane could be in its early 30s. It wasn’t Wallace Stevens who

said, “They have cut off my head, and picked out all the letters of the alphabet—all the

vowels and consonants—and brought them out through my ears; and then they want

me to write poetry! I can’t do it!” It was John Clare. Wallace Stevens said—something

like—the best poems are the ones you meant to write.  That has a nice sound to it, but

it’s hard to see how he or anyone would know that.  It would be hard, for example, to

accept the notion that there are ideas one meant to have. Poems underneath

every peeling sycamore and inside every file cabinet, along with ideas about poetry

and uncountable other ideas.

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Charles North's recent Everything and Other Poems was a N.Y. Times New and Noteworthy Book, What It Is Like headed NPR's Best Poetry Books of 2011, and The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight (2001) was a finalist for the inaugural Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award. Other books include the innovative Complete Lineups and the essay collection States of the Art. With artist Trevor Winkfield North published the collaborations Elevenses and En Face, and with James Schuyler co-edited the poet/painter anthologies Broadway and Broadway2. ["The Philosophy of New Jersey," from The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight (Adventures in Poetry), is used by permission; © 2001 Charles North.]

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                                                           William Hilton, Portrait of John Clare (1793–1864). Oil on canvas, 1820.

 

An Féar Gorta [Terence Winch]

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An Féar Gorta

 

If I ever go back home again, we will drive

through the countryside just as it is getting dark.

We will gather together in the town’s only hotel,

eating, and telling jokes at each other’s expense.

 

My heart beats steady there, my spirit alive

to every gesture, every glance, the fire and spark

we find in those we love. Those to whom we tell

our dark secrets along with our idiotic nonsense.

 

Whatever route I take, I always seem to get lost.

I have a tendency to choose the wrong road

to the wrong place. I wind up confused and stranded

wondering if I’ll ever make it home.

 

But I want that ticket back, no matter what the cost.

At An Féar Gorta I want that rhubarb tart a la mode.

I am even willing to stand in the rain, and be reprimanded

for the sorry, soggy state in which I’ve left this poem.

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                                  at An Féar Gorta with cousins Monica (Guthrie) Donovan and Mary Guthrie, Oct. 2013

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An Féar Gorta is one of my favorite eating establishments in the world. Located in Ballyvaughan, in County Clare, Ireland, where I have many beloved relations, it is a place, as the poem suggests, that I look forward to visiting again. 

I originally thought the term meant "the hungry man," as "fear" is “man” in Irish. But the fada (accent) confused me---instead of "fear," it's "féar," which means “grass.” So, the name translates to "The Hungry Grass," a term going back to the Famine. More information can be found here, here, and here.

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                                      the garden at An Féar Gorta. Photo by T. Winch

Catherine Barnett: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Epistemology

 

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.

Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.

Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord 

to keep it from fraying?

Not the man who called my life a debacle, 

a word whose sound I love.

In a debacle things are unleashed.

Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.

I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate, 

the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing. 

They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. 

They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.

And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing

stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect 

or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare, 

to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.

Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth

and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

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Catherine Barnett is the author of three books of poetry, Human Hours (2018 Believer Book Award); The Game of Boxes (2012 Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award for Best Second Book); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper's, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and The Washington Post. A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature, which honors exceptional accomplishment in any genre. She is a member of the core faculty in the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing and a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. She lives in New York City, where she also works as an independent editor. 

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                                                   Susan Campbell, Windy Night, 2021, Fine art archival print

 

Major Jackson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Grandfather’s Lecture

 

If punched, you punch twice as hard, and in the face,

a wop right in the nose. Use the flat counter of your fist

or the palm’s hard ridge. Lean into it but brace

your stroke with your back leg then lift

your whole blow into his mug. He’ll crumble.

If you’re lucky, blood will pour in rivulets

down his mouth and chin leaving him startled,

dazed like the newly awakened. Don’t relent.

Think what he’d do to you if given the chance.

Throw what we used to call a haymaker.

Nest fear inside but don’t tremble. Don’t parade & prance 

like you’re Ali. Don’t hesitate. Land a jawbreaker,

jab him in the gut. Did you know the Brown Bomber

never televised a hit, never reared back, just snuggled in,

leaned close shoulder to shoulder, calmer

than most then kapow to the ribs? Schmeling struggled

on the ropes. Life’s no boxing ring, but know your power,

what your shadow is made. Then always make up.

Show your adversary you’ve got class; don’t tower

over him. That’s for punks. Extend a hand. Help him up.

 

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Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Absurd Man. His collection of essays, A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose, is forthcoming in Fall 2022. A recipient of fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Whiting Writers Award, Major Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

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     Praying with Grandpa by Henry Ossawa Tanner (American painter, 1859-1937)

Minnie Bruce Pratt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minnie Bruce Pratt 2.20.12 photo by Leslie Feinberg

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Getting Through the Night

 

At twilight, in the fold of this day’s pall,

you lift the bed covers up, and I climb in.

 

The bed is a cave, the sheets cool as stone.

The bed is a nest we fold flesh into, belly

to back, knee to knee-fold, wrist-bone to hand.

 

Our ribs brace the bed, a boat to carry us into,

through, the little death that lives in every night.

 

I wake again at three a.m. Our cardboard boxes

sit unpacked in every room. Taxes, losses, old

dishes, death. But you still breathe beside me.

 

If I can put each thing into its place, there will be

a place for the boat to land where the clock

doesn’t tick, where the body is unlocked from pain, 

where the wood thrush sings again after the rain.

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Minnie Bruce Pratt’s poetry on being a lesbian mother, Crime Against Nature, was honored with the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book is Magnified, poems emerging from her life with trans activist and writer Leslie Feinberg. Her creative nonfiction essay, “The Queer South: Where the Past Is Not Past and the Future is Now,” was recently published in Scalawag. More information on her work can be found here.

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                                                                  Mary Pratt, The Bed, 1968

Anselm Hollo: Posthumous Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Parting

            after Hugo Ball

don’t go is what I want you to tell me

the rainless wind from the south

will make me long for you

 

tell me these are beautiful days

to have you here to look at your mouth

and to listen

                                    don’t go

tell me life pleases you

tell my voice to go on and on

tell me you will be happy and of good cheer

even when I am gone

 

tell me I’m stupid

a child or feathers and a small brain

held in your hand

then tell me I know my way back to you

even at night

                                    even in the rain

that hides the stars from my sight

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Anselm Hollo was born on 12 April 1934 in Helsinki, Finland. He died at age 78 on 29 January 2013 in Boulder, Colorado. For more information, click here.

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                                      Jani Hanninen (Finland), p. b. serie, acrylic on canvas, 2016.

Edward Hirsch: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edward Hirsch. Photo by Julie Dermansky

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A Partial History of My Stupidity

 

 Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge

 and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,

 and got stuck in the car for hours.

 

 Most nights I rushed out into the evening

 without paying attention to the trees,

 whose names I didn’t know,

 or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

 

 I couldn’t relinquish my desires

 or accept them, and so I strolled along

 like a tiger that wanted to spring,

 but was still afraid of the wildness within.

 

 The iron bars seemed invisible to others,

 but I carried a cage around inside me.

 

 I cared too much what other people thought

 and made remarks I shouldn’t have made.

 I was silent when I should have spoken.

 

 Forgive me, philosophers,

 I read the Stoics but never understood them.

 

 I felt that I was living the wrong life,

 spiritually speaking,

 while halfway around the world

 thousands of people were being slaughtered,

 some of them by my countrymen.

 

 So I walked on—distracted, lost in thought—

 and forgot to attend to those who suffered

 far away, nearby.

 

 Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

 

 I did not believe in God,

 who eluded me.

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Edward Hirsch’s books of poems include Special Orders, Gabriel: A Poem, and Stranger by Night. His prose books include A Poet’s Glossary, One Hundred Poems to Break Your Heart, and The Heart of American Poetry.

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                       Neo Rauch, Aprilnacht, 2011, oil on canvas.

Maya C. Popa: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Is This Your Bag Please Would You Open It

 

The moment you know they are about to find something

pushing aside the mini marmalades

withdrawing the curler           with latex fingers

folding a flap           folding back                       another flap

your underwear grinning              not getting the situation

placed inside a box            PROPERTY OF HEATHROW;

it isn’t personal                      though it sure feels

like it’s personal                      when a man asks you

how long you spent in Romania             when moments ago

you said you were in London              and packed your own

bag                             who else would pack your fucking bag

 

but he thinks it’s charming

to get things wrong                             or maybe professional

to run on a hunch                                  he swipes the straps

for a bomb test                                           banters while your bras

feel badly for you       they never wanted this               in spite

of their lace    finally he finds the toiletries case          delays

the pleasure of admonishing you          for Alice-sized lotions

stolen from hotels                    into another box they go

it’s a job            remember            you can’t take it personally

            if he hands you his number on a food court receipt

                                                prettiest terrorist I’ve seen all day

is this your privacy                                          and can he . . .

 

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Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (Norton, 2022) and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019). She is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, writing on the role of wonder in poetry. 

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    Francesca Woodman, Untitled, from the series Space2, Providence, Rhode Island,1976.

Dean Young: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Archaic Torso of Me Too

 

There was the guy in the next room

screaming he wanted some goddamn sugar.

There was the lady who my first night

conscious tried to get me to pray while

a falcon-headed shade carried off

my biowaste, hexes welting the walls—

she was also a hallucination.  How

I was strapped to the face of a sundial,

names of drugs like archangels,

the breathing machine pulling in

an Army-Navy game and tolling

like Big Ben. Hovering beside me,

another me entirely free of pain

like the idea of a rainbow beside

a fading rainbow.  Huff of alcohol,

fentanyl, urine, red beets.  The one

I made leave because he couldn’t stop

acting triumphant.  It wasn’t only death

in costume.  But always there was my darling

who’d kiss me even though the pulse-spike

would bring nurses running.

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Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, the very place that Coleridge and Southey were thinking of founding their commune.  Maybe.  He is also maybe currently living in Cincinnati where he is trying to fit a two-bedroom house into a loft apartment.  His, hopefully next book, completing his IT’S ALIVE!! Trilogy, Creature Feature is almost finished.  Then from there on in it’s all petal drop blast radius.

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Saint Elizabeth of Hungary bringing food for the inmates of a hospital. Oil painting by Adam Elsheimer, ca. 1598           

Evie Shockley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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quiet as it’s kept

 

no one tells you about these boys  :  their quiet feminism

grows like wildflowers  :  in their mothers’ gardens  :  you

should take a field

                                   trip  :  i’m telling you  :  they are

                                                                                             like

architechtural flourishes

                                             unseen

                                                            all about town  :  baroquing

libraries  :  finishing museums with clean modern lines  :  no

one tells you not to look past neat

                                                                 in search of

                                                                                          shine

or brawn  :  the masculinity that winks and whistles at you

like times

                    square or roars and kicks up dust like a pick-up

truck  :  the open

                                secret of such sexiness has its charms  : 

but the boys who open doors for men

                                                                      and

                                                                                women  :  who

catch you watching them adjust

                                                            their glasses and eye you

a smile  :  no one tells you what such subtle signs can mean 

:  i’m telling you that these boys

                                                            flowering

                                                                                 flourishing

and their quiet twinkling eyes can spark enough heat to warm

you through a massachusetts winter  :  pools of melt making

mud of your footprints  :  behind you

                                                                    the ice freezing silently

over your private spring

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Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar. Her most recent poetry collections, the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017), both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; the latter was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize.  Her poetry has appeared internationally in print and audio formats, in English and in translation. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Cave Canem, among others.  Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.

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      James Dunbar, Field of Wildflowers

Brandon D. Johnson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In Concert

 

Earl grins and flicks ash from his shoulder.

he scans the scene, ears tuned for sirens,

says less gunpowder might blow just

the door off next time.

from our safe distance, we stare at the yacht’s cabin;

it flips, hits water, disappears like a penny in used motor oil.

one narrow smoke column mixes with moist air.

this guy counts on next times the way a wet thumb

snaps hundreds off a roll, lives for

on-the-job practice like a rookie surgeon

who never says oops.

 

I clamp the top buckle on my McIntosh,

push pant legs deep into gum boots.  it’s cold,

the boat’s bowels are water-logged, sinking.

my jaw is tight thinking how Earl

slings explosives the way he slaps

an upright; all feeling, no control.

it’s the reason they have so few gigs,

why gaps are filled clutching

black bags and looking around corners.

it’s been difficult explaining how discipline

and popularity are related but that’s what got

them interested in my proposal in the first place.

 

four men and Cynthia follow

me down the pier dragging heels,

scraping meaning

from all this.  match heads

crackle, smoke blows through lips

like dead whistles.   

 

I knew the woman could use a gun

the first time I saw her lips part

to loose a somber note.  she was not to be messed

with. the only one allowed to pack heat.  if she had to,

she could even do bullheaded Cedric, the drummer,

holding that sledgehammer to knock away

what Earl’s excess hadn’t already. 

Charles, the gloved pianist, refused anyone’s hand,

distrustful of others and the manly art of handshaking.

his fingers spin combo dials.   Kevin, wheel man,

player of anything needing wind, thought being smart

made him next in command.  No one fought him on it,

knowing he never shut-up when he thought he was right. 

he was not.

 

when riffing, they meshed like gear-teeth

but out here, someone is always to blame

for one misstep or another.

I thought it’d be easy to teach

a bunch of musicians

how to play off each other like the call

and response of alternating solos, but

this is the fourth time.

they should have it down by now.

my last two gangs, formed from scratch

and good liquor, did better, sooner.

but they weren’t as well-traveled

and they weren’t as young.

 

perhaps I’ve aged beyond this avocation,

the thrill of rousing people past abilities.

these pieces can’t be played alone.

I suppose, in a moment’s clarity, I’ll cool.

my head will settle.  I’ll accept

for this quintet, doing scores

is harder than sight-reading Mingus.

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Brandon D. Johnson is author of Love’s Skin, Man Burns Ant, The Strangers Between, and co-author of The Black Rooster Social Inn: This Is The Place. He is published in several print and online journals and anthologies. Brandon is also a photographer. Born in Gary, Indiana, he received a BA from Wabash College and his JD from Antioch School of Law. He lives with his wife and children in Washington, DC.

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        Charles Mingus record cover. Design and painting by S. Neil Fujita, 1959.

Myra Sklarew: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Birdland

                        for Sterling Brown

So I take my seven bucks

to buy a railroad ticket.

 

And with a little luck

hitchhike to the station.

 

The money comes from playing

in a dance band with Vinny Gallo

 

braying on his tenor sax

and Charley Panzner—

 

I forget the others—

and me on the piano.

 

When no one is looking I play

solo piano in taverns after hours

 

up and down Long Island’s South Shore,

singing Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life.

 

I don’t tell my folks when I hop

on a train at age 14 and head

 

to Birdland where I sit

in the Peanut Gallery for nothing

 

and drink in Miles Davis,

John Coltrane, Count Basie

 

and Oscar Peterson. And not far away

you could go to the Embers

 

and hear Red Norvo on the vibraphone

play the Blues in E Flat.

 

And Stan Getz whose tunes I’d been trying

to play all year and ever since.

 

Sterling, this was before I met you.

Were you there too, singing your poems:

saying “Slim in Atlanta” and “After Winter”

and “Sister Lou.”  Or listening to “Ma Rainey”:

 

O Ma Rainey,

Sing yo’ song:

Now you’s back

Whah you belong,

Git way inside us,

Keep us strong…

O Ma Rainey,

Li’l and low…*

 

Sterling, you made us stand up

in your living room while you played jazz

 

on your phonograph and wouldn’t let us

sit down till we could name who was playing.

 

Sometimes we stood a long, long time.

It was Erroll Garner and Lester Young.

 

Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie.

And there was Satchmo who we loved.

 

I never told my folks where I’d been, pretended

to spend the night at a friend’s.

 

But I wouldn’t trade that smokey room

and that gorgeous music that filled us up

 

to the top until it was time to sneak out

of the house and head uptown to Birdland

 

once more. And years later, Sterling, to stand

in your living room, under the alms

 

of a great poet having us listen

to the music you loved and to the words

 

you wrote. Sterling, we could have stayed

there the rest of our lives.

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Myra Sklarew, professor emerita American University, founder of the MFA Program, former president of the Yaddo Artist’s Community, studied biology at Tufts, bacterial viruses at Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory, and did research at Yale Medical School in memory and the prefrontal cortex. She has an  M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. Her twelve poetry collections include Lithuania: New and Selected Poems; Prose: Like a Field Riddled by Ants, Over the Rooftops of Time, An Invitation to a Country called Aging (with Patricia Garfinkel), and A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust Memory in Lithuania.  A new collection of essays on science and medicine, Lie Perfectly Still, is near completion. In 2011, Sklarew helped launch "A Splendid Wake"—a project to document poets, poetry movements, and literary organizations in the Washington, D.C. area from 1900 to the present, sponsored by the Special Collections Research Center at the Gelman Library, GWU, organized by local poets.  [For more on Sterling Brown, click here.]

(*from Beyond the Blues by Rosey E. Pool, The Hand and Flower Press, 1962, England.)

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