The Best American Poetry

A poem from The Awl by Matthew Zapruder [posted by Mark Bibbins]

I love the way this poem captures the sad, sweet, isolated longing of adolescence. The tension created by the interplay of short lines and sneakily unruly syntax seems to mirror the experience of tentatively feeling one's way toward, eventually, hope. —MB

When I Was Fifteen

When I was fifteen
I suddenly knew
I would never
understand geometry.
Who was my teacher?
That name is gone.
I only remember
the gray feeling
in a classroom
filled with vast
theoretical distances.
I can still see
odd shapes
drawn on the board,
and those inscrutable
formulas everyone
was busily into
their notebooks scribbling.
I looked down
at the Velcro
straps of my entirely
white shoes and knew
inside me things
had long ago gone
terribly wrong
and would continue
to be. When
the field hockey star
broke her knee,
I wrote a story
for the school paper
then brought her
the history notes
in the snow.
She stood
in the threshold,
a whole firelit life
of mysterious
familial warmth
glowing behind her,
and took them
from my hands
like the blameless
queen of elegant
violence she was.
Walking home
encased in immense
amounts of down
I listened to
the analog ghost
in the machine
pour from the cassette
I had drawn
flowers on.
Into my ears
it sang everything
they told you
makes you believe
you are trapped
in a snow globe
forgotten in a dark
closet where exhausted
shadows argue
what is sorrow
cannot become joy,
but I am here
from the future
to tell you
you are not,
all you must do
is stay asleep
a few more years
great traveler waiting to go.

Matthew Zapruder’s most recent book is Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017). His fifth collection of poetry, Father’s Day, came out from Copper Canyon in fall 2019. He is associate professor in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California and editor-at-large at Wave Books.

from the archive; first posted March 1, 2019

a poem from The Awl by Brandon Amico [posted by Mark Bibbins]

This poem is at least as relevant today as it was when Brandon wrote it three years ago, alas. [—M.B.]

 

“A New Gun Folds Up to Look Just Like a Smartphone”

                                                        —Huffington Post, March 30, 2016 

 

Gun that folds up into a teddy bear.

Gun that folds into a bottle.

Gun that folds into a dozen roses.

Gun that folds into a condolence card.

Gun that folds into a conference pass, a baseball ticket, a ticket to anywhere.

Gun that folds into your golden retriever, the usual tail wag. The jolt of electricity

     through the tail when you say its name.

Gun that folds into another gun.

Gun that folds into a prerogative, into an absentee ballot.

Gun that folds into a bulletproof necktie.

Gun that folds into rope.

Gun that folds into a grin without a face.

Gun that folds into legislation, and folds and folds again until so thick it can’t

      physically be folded again.

Gun that guns into a fold.

Gun that folds into an opening.

Gun that folds quietly.

Gun that folds into a weather forecast, a travel agent.

Gun that folds into a car key.

Gun that folds into a door key.

Gun that folds into a body.

Gun that folds into a mirror,

that shatters.

Gun that folds into a crane, into another crane, into a history lesson.

Gun that folds into an anti-NRA sign.

Gun that folds into a picture frame.

Gun that swaggers into an argument.

Gun that folds into a pen. Gun that unfolds an ink cartridge.

Gun that folds white as paper, that writes its wishes.

Gun that folds its fingers into a steeple.

Gun that folds into a pantry.

Gun that folds into a knife fight.

Gun that folds into a sitcom episode without an ending.

Gun that folds into itself, that becomes more gun.

Gun that folds in err, in human.

Gun that folds into a cell phone; gun that calls your children home.

 

Brandon Amico is the author of Disappearing, Inc. (Gold Wake Press, 2019). He is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Grant, and the winner of Southern Humanities Review’s Hoepfner Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, and New Ohio Review, among other publications.

A poem from The Awl by Patricia Lockwood [posted by Mark Bibbins]

I have always loved the propulsive rhythm of this poem, its strange and desperate tenderness. Reading it feels like a dream you might have after falling asleep while watching a nature documentary. —[M.B.]

He Marries the Stuffed Owl Exhibit at the Indiana Welcome Center

 

He marries her mites and the wires in her wings,
he marries her yellow glass eyes and black centers,
he marries her near-total head turn, he marries
           the curve of each of her claws, he marries
the information plaque, he marries the extinction
           of this kind of owl, he marries the owl
that she loved in life and the last thought of him
in the thick of her mind
            just one inch away from the bullet, there,
                                                he marries the moths
who make holes in the owl, who have eaten the owl
almost all away, he marries the branch of the tree
that she grips, he marries the real-looking moss
and dead leaves, he marries the smell of must
that surrounds her, he marries the strong blue
            stares of children, he marries nasty smudges
of their noses on the glass, he marries the camera
that points at the owl to make sure no one steals her,
so the camera won’t object when he breaks the glass
while reciting some vows that he wrote himself,
he screams OWL instead of I’LL and then ALWAYS
LOVE HER, he screams HAVE AND TO HOLD
and takes hold of the owl and wrenches the owl
away from her branch
                        and he covers her in kisses and the owl
thinks, “More moths,” and at the final hungry kiss,
“That must have been the last big bite, there is no more
of me left to eat and thank God,” when he marries
the stuffing out of the owl and hoots as the owl flies out
under his arm, they elope into the darkness of Indiana,
Indiana he screams is their new life and WELCOME.
They live in a tree together now, and the children of
Welcome to Indiana say who even more than usual,
and the children of Welcome to Indiana they wonder
where they belong. Not in Indiana, they say to themselves,
the state of all-consuming love, we cannot belong in Indiana,
            as night falls and the moths appear one by one, hungry.

a poem from The Awl by Josh Bell [posted by Mark Bibbins]

As many readers will be aware, the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference is currently in full swing. We are ever on the lookout for Josh's "free-range / angels slumped out / on conveyor belts" here. —[M.B.]

Vince Neil’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, As Transcribed by Josh, in a Crowded Hotel Bar One Afternoon, Being a Poem Spoken in the Future, During the Upcoming AWP Conference of 2014, in Seattle, Washington

1.

Of the latter heroes I was most

supine, handed out

warnings to women who were pregnant

or were likely to become pregnant,

hope tucked bloodless

into saddlebag, neither hunter

nor borrower, sometimes

referred to myself as It—

as in charity is

its bird machine—a strap-on fashioned

out of bits of the foregone cross

coming at me from the future

in the tiniest and the most

lineal of dreams, my preferred

haruspex pondering

her retirement and my new

address as quickly

dirty as the last, in times of war

immune to alarum,

at least fifteen minutes away

from sword and armor, the valves of my heart

opening and closing slowly

like the wings of a new butterfly

at rest upon the battlements

of overweening Troy, and all

the maidens and immortals

2.

and the handful of princes who,

in those days, took time away

from their own troubled narratives

to stop and save me from myself or from

the ancient boy-scout Death

are now themselves long dead

by natural and/or

mythological causes. Don’t mention it

they seemed to say with their great

careful bodies

as they turned them from me in departure.

Don’t mention it and drifted leonine

and smooth toward the assault

on their promised

constellations and perhaps

the foreign-funded rebellions

of their homicidal children,

got upon or beneath majestic animals

and graduate students, ears crisp

but not always white

as snow. And where was I—year

of the jellyfish, cossacked,

bowing feastless

before capital—when they

in their turn required me

                                                [continued]

A poem from The Awl by Matthew Zapruder [posted by Mark Bibbins]

I love the way this poem captures the sad, sweet, isolated longing of adolescence. The tension created by the interplay of short lines and sneakily unruly syntax seems to mirror the experience of tentatively feeling one's way toward, eventually, hope. —MB

When I Was Fifteen

When I was fifteen
I suddenly knew
I would never
understand geometry.
Who was my teacher?
That name is gone.
I only remember
the gray feeling
in a classroom
filled with vast
theoretical distances.
I can still see
odd shapes
drawn on the board,
and those inscrutable
formulas everyone
was busily into
their notebooks scribbling.
I looked down
at the Velcro
straps of my entirely
white shoes and knew
inside me things
had long ago gone
terribly wrong
and would continue
to be. When
the field hockey star
broke her knee,
I wrote a story
for the school paper
then brought her
the history notes
in the snow.
She stood
in the threshold,
a whole firelit life
of mysterious
familial warmth
glowing behind her,
and took them
from my hands
like the blameless
queen of elegant
violence she was.
Walking home
encased in immense
amounts of down
I listened to
the analog ghost
in the machine
pour from the cassette
I had drawn
flowers on.
Into my ears
it sang everything
they told you
makes you believe
you are trapped
in a snow globe
forgotten in a dark
closet where exhausted
shadows argue
what is sorrow
cannot become joy,
but I am here
from the future
to tell you
you are not,
all you must do
is stay asleep
a few more years
great traveler waiting to go.

Matthew Zapruder’s most recent book is Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017). His fifth collection of poetry, Father’s Day, 
is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in fall 2019. He is Associate Professor in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College 
of California, and editor-at-large at Wave Books.

A poem from "The Awl" [by Nuar Alsadir; posted by Mark Bibbins]

I'm very grateful to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for the opportunity to feature poems from The Awl (RIP) here on the BAP blog. The Awl's poetry section had a great run—nine years!—and I'm delighted that we can share some of the poets' work with more readers. 

 

Up first is a poem by Nuar Alsadir. I love how it walks the line between imagery and abstraction, or rather, how it seems to declare that there is no line. And the exclamation point in the tenth couplet is one of the more complicated I've encountered. What does it want us to do? -- MB

 

Morning

when dark, is not that,
morning, but more like rain:

a sky of smog-stuck potatoes;
frustration without eyes.

The way I did nothing exhausted me:
I fed the wall,

ran water over my body
until it swirled down the drain.

On a determinable plane
I am undetermined,

on a moving train,
unable to find a seat.

The edge is what knows me,
the face half-carved off,

the gutter that gathers its objects
like knives, without connection,

here what is not there and vice versa.
I lie. I have seven jars of lies:

one for each day and the joy!
of repetition. Weeks redouble

and hold me still, anchors sprout
from my feet, stand in for will.

Desire is the lie I tell on Tuesday.
I tell it with my socks off

to be understood. The color
of intent is the crispness of bread;

whoever wants the heel
comes last to the table.

Nuar Alsadir is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular (2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize for Best Collection; and More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012). She works as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.