The Best American Poetry 2021 Page 3
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