The Best American Poetry 2021 Read online

  who dare to wake

  & walk in this

  skin & you

  best believe

  God blessed

  this skin

  The shimmer & slick

  of it, the wherewithal

  to bear the rage of sisters,

  brothers slain & still function

  each morning, still

  sit at a desk, send

  an email, take an order,

  dream a world, some heaven

  big enough for black life

  to flourish, to grow God

  bless the no, my story

  is not for sale

  the no, this body

  belongs to me & the earth

  alone the see, the thing

  about souls

  is they by definition

  cannot be owned God

  bless the beloved flesh

  our refusal calls

  home God bless the unkillable

  interior bless the uprising

  bless the rebellion bless

  the overflow God

  bless everything that survives

  the fire

  from Literary Hub

  DESTINY O. BIRDSONG love poem that ends at popeyes

  it’s valentine’s day & i hear tires on the slick streets

  it is raining a slow  steady rain

  the kind that makes me saddest because it seems

  endless   & even after     the sky   having forgotten

  its big-eyed blue  stands aloof      now    distant

  while the sun       mumbling from her side      of the bed

  settles herself   into     a light        doze

  i am thinking    of the meal     i won’t have to brave

  those streets  clamp-thighed   in a passenger seat   to eat

  or the flowers i will not have to accept   awkwardly

  because flowers are such   strange gifts    why undress

  the ground  just to prove       i am special?

  we could go to the botanical     gardens   hold hands

  smell the smells that come at me  all at once   in a sneeze

  or we could pull over on the highway   run through fields

  of bonnets     so buckled  with sky

  they look   bruised

  why has no one ever loved me that way a bonnet

  might engorge itself with blue   so much it is a new

  color    unnameable breathless  my loves  hold

  their breaths  calculating    they want me   to look

  at the food & the flowers & the tiny golden heart

  run through    with a golden thread & say thank you thank you

  yes  i am wearing silver but now i will wear

  only gold & then they expect me to lie down quickly

  as if we’re children & the fields are bloated with green & it is may

  somewhere     the man who doesn’t love me    though i wish

  i could say the same        is pacing a supermarket floor

  his body   a reflection     in the waxed tile

  really he is two men  one flesh man    one floor man

  & both are moving in a direction away from me

  they are picking out fistfuls of roses or maybe   tulips

  maybe assorted flowers with daffodils

  & he knows the woman he really loves will dip her nose

  into them like a doe & say     thank you  thank you

  & she will kiss him with her tacky lips & for the first time

  i am not angry that he might lay her down

  & ask if he can do  the things he will do

  of course she will say yes that is what    you say

  when you love someone         right?

  it’s what i would say    & this time  not

  because i’ve learned what happens

  when you say no or when you say  nothing   at all

  i am not sad about     whatever she will let him   do

  or what she will do to him to make him      smile

  make his mouth   form    & his breath catch the emptiness

  where a few of his teeth used to be     & make it ache

  it’s a good ache   when something is missing    & people still love you

  i want him to be satisfied     i want him to be happy

  also  i want to be happy  we can do that separately

  or we can do it    together   we can do it now

  or we can do it       later     i am a hopeless

  romantic   i still make wishes before i blow out candles

  last week i asked an oracle  when    not if

  i’d find true love  it said bad reception     try

  again girl      & i am trying    i am lying

  in bed with my arms around   myself    thinking of what

  i will eat when i get hungry    i am willing

  to wait for what i want      like when i pull up

  to the window & the cashier says it’ll take ten minutes

  for the spicy dark      & i say yeah yeah that’s ok

  i still want it     & i pull my car over & i play

  my music & i imagine the fried flecks of flour

  smothering in the saliva   of my mouth

  & oh the biscuits & oh the honey & oh the red beans

  in their salty velvet     & i think   this is my own gold

  it is not   daffodil gold    it is not supermarket-roses-

  gold  it is not a thin-      stringed gold attached to a locket

  of expectations      with my face clasped between

  two     composite            hearts

  but it is good    & it is filling     & it is enough

  from The Kenyon Review

  SUSAN BRIANTE Further Exercises

  Write a 12-line rhythmically charged poem in which you slant rhyme (at least twice) the name of the last official indicted from the Trump administration. Reference the most recent climate-change related disaster. Address by first name one of the 24 migrants who have died in ICE custody since 2017. End with the instructions given to you by a parent or guardian on what you should do when waking from a nightmare.

  *

  Write a poem as an acrostic of the name of a person you love who is most vulnerable to US government policies. Include a quote (unattributed) from a writer killed by an authoritarian regime

  or a line in which you complete the phrase: “I have birthed __________________ and buried _____________.”

  End with a line that snaps like a turnstile at your back, that closes like an iron gate behind you.

  *

  Typographically represent the 650 miles of border wall teetering on the 2000-mile US–Mexico boundary. Write a 3-word refrain that could be used as a chant to tear the shroud of normalcy. Answer the question: What brought your parents to the place they birthed you? End with a line so open it would allow both a child and an endangered Mexican gray wolf to step through.

  *

  Begin with the city from which you write. Use your five senses to describe the most recently gentrified neighborhood. Personify a “For Sale” sign or an underfunded public school. Do not include an image of a transient.

  *

  Write a 48-line poem in which each line ends with you claiming “executive privilege” or some variation of that phrase. Answer the question: What do
you call someone who cannot speak and comes without a name? Reference the last time you were terrified by a cop.

  End with a metaphor that gasps for air or water

  or end with a couplet that screeches like a line drawn in the dirt.

  *

  Write a poem that binds you and your reader as tightly as the zip ties encircling protestors’ wrists. Use empathy, compassion, complicity. Include all the reasons why you have not placed your body in the streets or the courts to protect the person you love who is most vulnerable to the state. Address that person. End with a line that moans like gas entering your tank or end with a line that divides nothing.

  *

  In couplets, describe the opening shot of a movie you would make to depict the events of the past year. Slant rhyme the name of at least one known Russian hacking virus. Describe a monument, then deface it.

  End by completing the phrase: I would ________ 2000 miles to end ____________.

  *

  Write a poem that records all the new developments that have occurred in our country’s continued assault on migrants and/or other nonwhite bodies while you were writing any one of the above poems.

  *

  Make a list of words that sound like shots being fired on a residential street or that sound like children being herded into cages. Create a poem around these words. It should not rhyme.

  from The Brooklyn Rail

  JERICHO BROWN Work

  —Romare Bearden

  The men come in every color of black

  From the fields of the South

  To the mills in the North

  And the women too

  Some on their feet ready to hoe

  Some flat on their backs

  One lying facedown

  With the train we can trust

  In earshot but too far to catch

  Very few of us seated

  Each so different

  You can’t tell us apart

  The way the skin on my hands

  Is not the skin on my face

  My face won’t get a callus

  My hands never had a whitehead

  But it’s all my body

  My body of work is proof

  Of color everywhere

  I can show you

  Just how black everything is

  If you let me

  If you pay me

  If you give me time

  To cut

  The way a life can be cut into

  It’s roosters and whistles and sundowns

  And other signals to get up

  And go to work

  Or to rest a little

  My family made a little money

  And I was so light

  A few of the women called me

  Shine

  I had an eye

  For where I wasn’t like the people

  I pulled and pasted together

  Where wasn’t I like the people I pasted

  Back when Jim Crow touched the black side

  Of all the light in the world

  First time I came to Atlanta

  I couldn’t walk through one door

  Of the High Museum

  Wasn’t allowed

  But baby I’m old

  Enough to know

  What New Negro means

  Let a Negro show you

  Let me do my thing

  I want to go to work

  I want to make me

  Out of us

  Turn on the sun

  Get me some scissors

  from The Art Section

  CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY After Tu Fu

  Soon now, in the winter dawn, I’ll face

  my 70th year. In the moment it takes

  another leaf to fall, I see how many more

  evenings I’m going to need sitting here—

  letting the wind pass through my hands,

  overlooking the star pines and jacarandas,

  the valley of home. I think of friends

  from my youth, the clear green hills and sea

  that traveled with me all this way, all,

  almost gone now, despite the longstanding

  optimism in stars. A haze drifts between here

  and the islands… I’m still not sure.…

  I take an early drink and praise whatever

  is left… from 10,000 miles away

  the wind comes, and the evening air lifts

  the atoms of light. One thin cloud, shaped

  perhaps like a soul, is back-lit, briefly,

  by a rising moon. I stare off wondering

  if something more than the resin of pines

  will rise on the invisible salt breeze?

  What more could I want now beyond

  everything I’ve ever had, all over again,

  and the strength to withstand the heavens?

  I fold my poems into small paper boats

  and send them down the night river…

  who knows, really, if life goes anywhere?

  from Five Points

  VICTORIA CHANG Marfa, Texas

  Today I tried to open the river. But when I pulled, the whole river disappeared. I used to think that language came from the body.

  Now I know it is in that group of mountains in the field beyond the fence. Yesterday, I saw a red-tailed hawk. When I went near it, it took

  the wind with it. I was left without air. But I could still breathe. I realized everything around me I could do without. I could hear the

  mountains but nothing else. I saw a car start up but I heard nothing. A gray-haired woman said hello to me but I heard nothing. I stood and

  watched the hawk. It never looked at me but knew I was there. Neither of us moved. Finally, it flew to the top of an electric pole.

  I realized the pole is all the years of my life, the mountains’ applause, the hawk, what I have been trying to tell myself.

  from New England Review

  CHEN CHEN The School of Eternities

  Do you remember the two types of eternity, how we learned

  about them in a Wegmans parking lot, when you turned

  on the radio, the classical channel? Why

  were they even talking about eternity, what

  did it have to do with the suddenly

  broody guitars? You had a peach

  Snapple, I remember the snappy kissy sound of the lid

  coming off in your hand. One type of eternity, they said, is inside

  of time, as endless time—life

  without death. We were inside our Toyota. I said, We need

  a new umbrella. Do you remember

  when we first rhymed? Do you remember the first time I asked

  you about the rain, the expression,

  “It’s raining cats & dogs,” whether it was equally cats & dogs,

  falling? Can you remember when you learned the word

  “immortality”? The hosts on the classical channel

  were okay, I thought you’d do a much better job. I remember saying

  so, while you drove us home. Our apartment, our

  third. Remember the day we moved

  into our first? The boxes of books & boxes of

  books? My books? Our sweating up three flights of the greenest

  stairs? & you said, Never again? & the again, & again,

  &? The other type of eternity is outside of time, beyond it,

  no beginning, no end. I remember. Your hand, the lid, your hands,

  the steering wheel, your lips, your lips. The way you took a sip,

  gave me a kiss, before starting

  to drive.

  Do you remember the first time you drove

  me home, before “home” meant where we both lived, the books

  on the shelves, the books in the closet

  when I ran out of shelves, the second apartment, West

  Texas, remember the dust, the flat, another type of eternity, that dusty

  sun? & driving

  to the supermark
et, what was it called

  there? & that hand soap we’d get, which scent

  was your favorite? I don’t remember what it was called, can’t

  remember exactly the smell,

  but your hands, after washing, I remember

  kissing them. Don’t you remember when we thought

  only some things were ephemera?

  Can you remember when you learned the word

  “ephemera,” the word “immortality”? Probably the latter

  first, & isn’t that something,

  immortality first, then menus

  & movie tickets. What was the first nickname, the fifth

  umbrella, the type of taco you ordered on our sixteenth

  trip, remember driving, remember when we thought the world

  of the world, remember how I signed the letter

  explodingly yours, do you remember you were

  driving, we were halfway home, only eight minutes

  from Wegmans, remember when we measured distance

  in terms of Wegmans, like it was a lighthouse

  or pyramid or sacred tree, remember when your name

  was Fluttersaurus Vex & mine

  wasn’t, remember when I lived like a letter, falling

  in cartoonish slow-mo down four flights of stairs, did you picture

  a letter of the alphabet or a letter I’d written

  to you, remember when I asked you about the rain, when

  the wizard jumped out, when I lied & you laughed, when I lied

  & I lied & I lied, can you remember

  last night, how I crossed my arms

  as though dead & arranged just so, how I pictured my face

  polished, as though alive, &

  no, you can’t remember

  that, since it happened while you were sleeping & I

  wasn’t, I was up, wondering why people always talk about death

  as sleep, & how much I love sleep, hate death,

  & have I told you about the student who said, I’m really,

  really afraid of death, just like that,

  in class, it was fitting, because it was poetry

  class, ha ha, & I loved it, her saying that, I wanted to say I loved it,

  but couldn’t, I was thinking about you sleeping

  & me not, about me sleeping

  & you not, & what even is outside of time, beyond