The Best American Poetry 2021 Page 12
housewarming hand-me-down from my cousin, who
clearly, and incorrectly, thought this was a good idea
With the help of a little panic,
sparkling water and a washcloth,
I am stunned by how quickly the wine washes out,
how I was sure this mistake would find me
every day with its gaping mouth, reminding me
of my own propensity for failure
and yet, here I am
with this clean slate
The rug is made of fur,
which means it died
to be here
It reminds me of my own survival
and everyone who has taught me
to shake loose the shadow of death
I think of inheritance, how this rug
was passed on to me through blood,
how this animal gave its blood
so that I may receive the gift of its death
and be grateful for it
I think of our inability
to control stories of origin
how history does not wash away
with water and a good scrub
I think of evolution,
what it means to make it through
this world with your skin intact,
how flesh is fragile
but makes a needle and thread
of itself when necessary
I think of all that I have inherited,
all the bodies buried for me to be here
and stay here, how I was born with grief
and gratitude in my bones
And I think of legacy,
how I come from a long line of sorcerers
who make good work of building
joy from absolutely nothing
And what can I do with that
but pour another glass,
thank the stars
for this sorceress blood
and keep pressing forward
from Poem-a-Day
SHELLEY WONG How to Live in Southern California
Stay in the car and move from one air-conditioned location
to another chill location, perhaps in a tour of movie theaters.
After a long winter back east, 76 percent of California’s population
is facing abnormal dryness or drought. My family went
to Palos Verdes to look for gray whales, where the water was rough
and edged with mansions. As of June 19, 2018, 3 percent
is affected by extreme or exceptional drought. The Pacific Ocean
is a stage for an altar or a talk show. On the boat, my mother said,
“Don’t turn your back on the ocean.” Drive down Pacific Coast Highway
in a long, curving line—past sandal palaces, neon seafood shacks,
and offshore oil rigs—while listening to Fleetwood Mac, Katy Perry,
and Frank Ocean. Since the 1800s, my family has lived
along the West Coast, from Seattle to San Francisco to Long Beach,
where the sun so often set without our watching. Come to Disneyland,
the Hollywood sign, to paradise-by-the-highway. At 3 a.m., there’s always
another milkshake, another strike to roll in the bowling alley
of an Art Deco hotel. After discussing polygamy in Utah in 1875,
President Ulysses S. Grant said, “I invite the attention of Congress
to another, though perhaps no less an evil—the importation
of Chinese women, but few of whom are brought to our shores
to pursue honorable or useful occupations.” The spectrum of drought conditions
is color-coded from yellow to dark red. In Los Angeles, people drive
for the experience of driving, to be at the beach and in the hills
within the same hour. The drought website is maintained
by the National Drought Mitigation Center. Walk out
to the end of the pier. The good life is when you don’t feel
the weather. With sunglasses, you own a particular glamour.
from The Kenyon Review
JOHN YAU Overnight
In Memory of Paul Violi (1944–2011)
I did not realize that you were fading from sight
I don’t believe I could have helped with the transition
You most likely would have made a joke of it
Did you hear about the two donkeys stuck in an airshaft
I don’t believe I could have helped with the transition
The doorway leading to the valleys of dust is always open
Did you hear about the two donkeys stuck in an airshaft
You might call this the first of many red herrings
The doorway leading to the valleys of dust is always open
The window overlooking the sea is part of the dream
You might call this the first of many red herrings
The shield you were given as a child seldom worked
The window overlooking the sea is part of the dream
One by one the words leave you, even this one
The shield you were given as a child seldom worked
The sword is made of air before you knew it
One by one the words leave you, even this one
I did not realize that you were fading from sight
The sword is made of air before you knew it
You most likely would have made a joke of it
from Hambone
MONICA YOUN Caution (from “Deracinations: Seven Sonigrams”)
Frisky, her canine sidekick,
(she’d named him when she was 6),
had taken off again, seeing his chance
when she let him out to urinate,
tunneling under the cedar stakes
of the fence (as was his much-denounced
tendency) to make his social rounds
of the neighborhood. She sighed.
It was 10pm on Saturday night,
her parents were at the Korean church
for choir practice, and, conscientious,
she couldn’t let the dog run loose
all night (not since he, contrite,
had once returned with an unsigned
note duct-taped to his collar: I’ll shoot
this fucking dog if I see him in my yard!)
Honestly, Frisky, though cute,
was a pain in the ass. Untrained,
he had the bad habit of chasing
mail carriers, acquaintances (once
he knocked a pregnant stranger
off her bike). Only Asians, for some reason,
were exempt from these attacks.
He thinks we all look alike,
they tittered. She knew, that night,
where he was: the faux-Tudor estate
across the lake: the Coates’ residence.
She was in homeroom with their son, Trey.
The cool kids had handed around
fliers for a kegger at the Coates’
that Saturday, advertising a set
by his band White Minority (Trey
was both lead guitar and lead singer).
Frisky, though half her size (and,
moreover, spayed) nonetheless
liked to sniff around the Coates’
German shepherd, Bitch (that
was her name. Ha ha.) She didn’t
want to knock at the front door,
asking for her dog, endure the sneers,
awkward, avoiding eye contact,
while they searched the dog out.
She didn’t want to crouch
down in front of them to attach
the leash—the scenario nauseated her.
Luckily, another course of action
occurred to her: she could row across
the lake in her family’s canoe,
skulk across the yard unnoticed
till she located the truant,
return to her own home, unseen.
None
theless, she put on eyeshadow,
lipgloss, a cute (but not too cute)
top. Best to be inconspicuous,
she dissembled. (She cherished
a secret crush on Trey, unconfessed
even to herself.) Her trusty canoe cut
through the darkness—her destination
shining like a signal fire. She docked.
What the fucking fuck? A semi-nude
couple in an Adirondack chair
cussed her out, then carried on.
The amber floodlight scattered
citrines across a swathe of dark grass.
The yellow brick road, she thought,
skirting it. Friiiiiisky! she hissed.
By the poolhouse the dog, serene
for once, luxuriated—an odalisque.
His tail smacked the concrete
like a slow clap. You idiot,
she scolded, snapped on
the leash, retraced her route.
Another curse from the now entirely
unclothed interrupted inamorati,
but otherwise their surreptitious exit
passed undetected. Success!
Home by 10:30, well in advance
of her unsuspecting parents’ return. Not
till Monday did she learn the sequence
of events later… much later… that night:
a dirty-blond teenaged girl with “issues,”
with clear indicators of “ideation”
(a new term-of-art to her)—that is,
according to the Coates. A drunken
semi-conscious round of Russian roulette
(usually, even at the hardest-core
gatherings, understood to be charade.)
But this time, the game was both truth
and dare. “A tragic accident,”
the principal said, when she cut short
the morning’s announcements.
Oh god, y’all! The girl confided
to her nerdy but upstanding cohort,
(this wasn’t technically inaccurate)
I was there that night! I was there!
from Ploughshares
KEVIN YOUNG Dog Tags
Of us there is
always less.
The days hammer
past, artificial daisies
at the grave.
Words I didn’t choose
for my father’s headstone
& those that came instead
to live around my neck,
dog tags a tin
pendulum on my chest.
On my mother’s side,
my cousin, too young,
dirt a pile above her
but no stone, nothing
but the tinfoil name
from the funeral home—
the fresh plastic
flowers that still wilt
in this heat.
At blackjack
she lost
everything my great-
aunt & -uncle had saved,
even their low ranch
where I first
knew blue glass, plastic
covering the rug
& the good couch
in the sitting room
no one dared sit.
The prickly underside
of the clear runner a cactus
you couldn’t help
but touch. Uncle Wilmer’s
pickup long paid off
now stares empty
under somebody
else’s tree. The liars
& book-cookers
came with their knives
offering her
seconds, & she
sat & ate—
once you’ve tasted
the stone-filled fruit
of the underworld
you may never return.
They took everything
from her
my mother says, both
of us shaking
our heads, disbelieving
how exacting
death is, how deep
the shade—
except breath.
She was in debt
& dead within
a year, went through money
like water—
And that didn’t
last long either.
from Ploughshares
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS
ROSA ALCALÁ was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1969. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem, 2017). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, she is the editor and cotranslator of New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña (Kelsey Street Press, 2018). Her work was chosen for The Best American Poetry 2019. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, and teaches in its Bilingual MFA Program.
Of “The Pyramid Scheme,” Alcalá writes: “I can’t help but think of the devastating impact that COVID-19 has had on nursing homes, although this poem was written long before the pandemic began. I am haunted by the image of someone like my mother, confined to a room, unable to visit with loved ones except through a window. Someone like my mother, dying alone. I think, too, about the underpaid and overworked nurses and aides who took care of my mother, who spoke to her in Spanish, and therefore grounded her, who brought her the food she liked when they thought she was getting too thin. My mother died a few years ago, but do her caretakers continue on under these terrible circumstances? Do they fear for their own lives but have no choice but go to work? I think of my aunt, who died during the pandemic, two decades after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and who lived for many years in a nursing home. Whose funeral I watched on YouTube, because only her children were allowed at the service. What I mean to say is that the anger I express in this poem, directed mainly at a system that privileges some bodies above others, that does not care about the sick and the elderly, has not ‘mellowed.’ COVID-19 has simply exposed what was already broken.”
LAUREN K. ALLEYNE was born in 1979 and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish (New Issues & Peepal Tree, 2019), and coeditor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2020). She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she is an associate professor of English at James Madison University, and the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. More information is available at www.laurenkalleyne.com.
Of “Divination,” Alleyne writes: “In general, I am fascinated by the fact and idea of ‘remains’ and the way we can use them to read backward, gleaning information about a life. However, I encountered these remains in a workshop setting, as a prompt, and in that context, without any connection to the creature in its ‘before,’ I was surprised to find that I was less interested in what it had been than what it was becoming, and the strange journey this body was having. It struck me that remains are also the weird afterlife of the body itself, rather than just testimony of a prior life. The poem seeks, I think, to capture that train of thought.”
JABARI ASIM was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1962. He writes poetry (Stop and Frisk); fiction (A Taste of Honey, Only The Strong [all from Bloomsday] and the forthcoming Yonder); nonfiction (The N Word, We Can’t Breathe); and children’s books, including Preaching to the Chickens and A Child’s Introduction to African American History. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at Emerson College.
Of “Some Call It God,” Asim writes: “In working toward a constructive disruption of my idea of the Divine, I’m embracing the notion of God as Funk, an irresistible impulse to drop everything and move. I can think of few experiences holier than responding to rhythm, whether it’s coming from the beat of a drum or a church matron humming her favorite hymn.”
JOSHUA BENNETT is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth. His three books of poetry and criticism
are The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020); and Owed (Penguin, 2020). Bennett earned his PhD in English from Princeton University, and an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, MIT, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.
Bennett writes: “I wrote ‘Benediction’ back when I lived in New York City. Rereading the poem now, I’m reminded of everything I love about that place. Uptown in particular. Harlem and Washington Heights, all that those neighborhoods taught me from the time I was a small boy about what it meant to do one’s best to live and die with dignity. The poem is part of a sequence that is at the core of a new book I’m writing about black disposability, ecological catastrophe, and fatherhood. It recalls a world before the pandemic. It gestures toward the one we are building together, even now, in the midst of it. And the future world already on its way.”
Born in 1981 and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, DESTINY O. BIRDSONG is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee. Her debut poetry collection, Negotiations, was published by Tin House Books in October 2020, and her debut novel is forthcoming from Grand Central in 2022. Her work has received support from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Pink Door, MacDowell, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Tin House Summer Workshop.
Of “love poem that ends at popeyes,” Birdsong writes: “I believe I write best about the transformative power of love when I’m narrating from a hopeless place, and this poem is one such instance. It was Valentine’s Day 2018, and I was the sickest and the saddest I’d been in a long time. I was lying in bed trying to make myself comfortable, but I was also hungry and didn’t want to go out for food, so I decided to write about what I craved. I also really wanted to write a poem where I indulged my most pitiful, maudlin sentiments about loneliness, but it ultimately turned into an exploration of desire, failed/found tenderness, self-detachment from infatuation/objectification, and of course, hope. It’s one of those poems that read me as I wrote it. And although I knew how it would end before I began, I didn’t know that writing it would make me feel a little less pitiful, a little more loved, and a little more satisfied with being alone.