The Best American Poetry 2013 Read online

  25. His name was Pete.

  26. Sheldon and Pete’s parents were not the kind to give their twins names that rhymed.

  27. In Iraq, an Improvised Explosive Device had pulverized Pete’s legs, genitals, rib cage, and spine.

  28. Sheldon could not serve in the military because he was blind in his right eye.

  29. In 1980, when they were eight, and sword fighting with tree branches, Pete had accidentally stabbed Sheldon in the eye.

  30. When they were children, Sheldon and Pete often played war.

  31. They never once pretended to be killed by an Improvised Explosive Device.

  32. Only now, in this new era, do children pretend to be killed by Improvised Explosive Devices.

  33. Pete was buried in a white coffin.

  34. It wasn’t made of ivory.

  35. At the gravesite, Sheldon scooped up a handful of dirt.

  36. He was supposed to toss the dirt onto his brother’s coffin, as the other mourners had done.

  37. But Sheldon kept the dirt in his hand.

  38. He made a fist around the dirt and would not let it go.

  39. He believed that his brother’s soul was contained within that dirt.

  40. And if he let go of that dirt, his brother’s soul would be lost forever.

  41. You cannot carry a handful of dirt for any significant amount of time.

  42. And dirt, being clever, will escape through your fingers.

  43. So Sheldon taped his right hand shut.

  44. For months, he did everything with his left hand.

  45. Then, one night, his right hand began to itch.

  46. It burned.

  47. Sheldon didn’t want to take off the tape.

  48. He didn’t want to lose the dirt.

  49. His brother’s soul.

  50. But the itch and burn were too powerful.

  51. Sheldon scissored the tape off his right hand.

  52. His fingers were locked in place from disuse.

  53. So he used the fingers of his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right hand.

  54. The dirt was gone.

  55. Except for a few grains that had embedded themselves into his palm.

  56. Using those grains of dirt, Sheldon wanted to build a time machine that would take him and his brother back into the egg cell they once shared.

  57. Until he became an elephant, Sheldon referred to his left hand as “my hand” and to his right hand as “my brother’s hand.”

  58. Sheldon’s father, Arnold, was paraplegic.

  59. His wheelchair was alive with eagle feathers and beads and otter pelts.

  60. In Vietnam, in 1971, Arnold’s lower spine was shattered by a sniper’s bullet.

  61. Above the wound, he was a fancy dancer.

  62. Below the wound, he was not.

  63. His wife became pregnant with Sheldon and Pete while Arnold was away at war.

  64. Biologically speaking, the twins were not Arnold’s.

  65. Biologically speaking, Arnold was a different Arnold than he’d been before.

  66. But, without ever acknowledging the truth, Arnold raised the boys as if they shared his biology.

  67. Above the wound, Arnold is a good man.

  68. Below the wound, he is also a good man.

  69. Sometimes, out of love for Sheldon and Sheldon’s grief, Arnold pretended that his wheelchair was an elephant.

  70. And that he was a clown riding the elephant.

  71. A circus can be an elephant, another elephant, and a clown.

  72. The question should be, “How many circuses can fit inside one clown?”

  73. There is no such thing as the Elephant Graveyard.

  74. That mythical place where all elephants go to die.

  75. That place doesn’t exist.

  76. But the ghosts of elephants do wear clown makeup.

  77. And they all gather in the same place.

  78. Inside Sheldon’s rib cage.

  79. Sheldon’s heart is a clown car filled with circus elephants.

  80. When elephants mourn, they will walk circles around a dead elephant’s body.

  81. Elephants weep.

  82. Jesus wept.

  83. Sheldon’s mother, Agnes, wonders if Jesus has something to do with her son’s elephant delusions.

  84. Maybe God is an elephant.

  85. Sheldon’s father, Arnold, believes that God is a blue whale.

  86. Some scientists believe that elephants used to be whales.

  87. Sheldon, in his elephant brain, believes that God is an Improvised Explosive Device.

  88. Pete, the dead twin, was not made of ivory.

  89. But he is coveted.

  90. If Jesus can come back to life then why can’t all of us come back to life?

  91. Aristotle believed that elephants surpassed all other animals in wit and mind.

  92. Nobody ever said that Jesus was funny.

  93. Then, one day, Sheldon remembered he was not an elephant.

  94. Instead he decided that Pete was an elephant who had gone to war.

  95. An elephant who died saving his clan and herd.

  96. An elephant killed by poachers.

  97. Sheldon decided that God was a poacher.

  98. Sheldon decided his prayers would become threats.

  99. Fuck you, God, fuck you.

  100. Sheldon wept.

  101. Then he picked up his trumpet and blew an endless, harrowing note.

  from The Awl

  NATHAN ANDERSON

  Stupid Sandwich

  So yeah, we all have these moments that suck

  because what they mean

  is like a mystery, like the Mariners last year

  good a team as any, traded

  what’s-his-name, the fat one, for that Puerto Rican dude

  with a wicked right arm

  and didn’t even make the playoffs.

  Anyway, I can see you’re a man of the world like me,

  standing here I don’t know how long and still

  no damn bus. But like I was saying

  we all have these moments and last week

  there I was after work, making a stupid sandwich,

  the kind of stupid-ass food people like me always make

  when I can’t figure out what I’m feeling

  and I feel like being true to myself

  is about the dumbest thing a man can do,

  knowing how easy it is for the truth to mess things up.

  So I lie in all the ways I can live with, and I go on

  wondering if this shithole I keep falling into

  is really my life, my own making, or what

  and I put it down there nice and orderly

  on the counter: turkey, white bread, mayonnaise—

  three things I’d like to think

  I’m in control of—and I said, like it was a revelation or something,

  just loud enough so I have to hear

  myself, feeling a little weird but a little good, too,

  because I’m home and hungry, and I said

  I’m gonna slice me some cheese

  for this bastard like it was the answer

  to just about everything and getting all happy

  on account of some goddamn cheese

  turns out I didn’t even have and was like, well, you know,

  fuck the cheese, don’t need it anyhow,

  I’m goddamn happy just to make a sandwich

  and have a job to hate

  and see my little girl once a week

  after those pricks down at County let me out

  and left me worse

  than I ever was and now, you know, I just walk around

  and want to smash things. And that’s what I did:

  Aimed all I had at that tiny

  ignorant white bread, slammed my fist down

  like a judge—felt so good,

  beating that bread like it was my own

  dumb face.
r />   from New Ohio Review

  NIN ANDREWS

  The Art of Drinking Tea

  A man has been lonely for so long, he fears he is becoming but an apparition, a ghost of who he once was. He takes up wearing a black suit and hat and studying Zen Buddhism with a black-haired woman who has mastered the art of drinking tea. She is one of the few on earth who only drinks tea when she drinks tea. She performs the drinking of tea when she is drinking tea before large audiences. When one is drinking tea, the woman explains, there is no woman, no tea, there is only the drinking of tea. Often while sipping tea and listening to the instructions on the drinking of tea, the man closes his eyes and tries to fully experience the drinking of tea. But he always fails. Instead he dreams of the black-haired woman as an unrobed woman who only makes love when she makes love. He pictures her first removing his hat, then slowly unbuttoning him from the dark coat of his life. She lifts him to her lips like a china cup and sips so slowly, a one night stand lasts 49 days and nights. In the end there is no woman, no tea, no man. Just thinking of it, he barely remembers his own name. In this way he attains enlightenment.

  from MiPOesias

  JOHN ASHBERY

  Resisting Arrest

  A year and a day later the wolf stopped

  by as planned. He made conversation

  about this and that but you could tell

  from the way he favored his gums that all was

  not well. Later the driving pool shifted.

  I had no idea that you were planning

  to stage an operation but it’s all right

  this time. Then I read your account and

  was dully impressed, right at the edge

  of the sea where the land asserts itself.

  He told a cheering crowd the infighting was over

  at least for that day. They had more affairs

  to remember than just that one time. Why,

  he went over it and that was that. Plethoras

  to be announced, etc. You’re telling me.

  Warming to his theme he brought us in

  as though we belonged. Ma and I

  decided to wait it out but here again

  he was unyielding, hoping to lure a big-name

  retailer on the strength of our fevered gain

  over the past months of quasi-activity,

  dark with relative distress. That proved uncertain

  and doesn’t smash it all. They liked what they heard.

  No one wanted to shoulder responsibility

  for the times and to slog off to uncertain

  destinies in fiberglass pilot houses.

  I had no idea that you meant it to be early.

  The fatal tarnish of the everyday

  groans and incites mobs to splendor

  and wrongdoing as though a tissue of sleeping cars

  were to upbraid dawn. They asked me to read

  off a result or temper a calamity like I was involved

  in the unfolding reaction with everything

  else, they wanted me to reside at 478 Pavilion Avenue

  and the story would resolve itself munificently.

  Not in my receding horsepital. I paid

  my dues to the city and look

  how out on a limb I am and you could guess

  this too, you could plan more strategically.

  That’s all for now kid. Drop me a line sometime,

  seriously.

  from The New Yorker

  WENDY BARKER

  Books, Bath Towels, and Beyond

  After Gary asked, “Will we ever read

  any normal people in this class?” and I quipped,

  “No, of course not,” and after the laughter had quieted,

  we ambled through “Song of Myself,” celebrating

  our “respiration and inspiration,” traveling along

  with the voices of sailors, prostitutes, presidents, and tree toads,

  in sync with the poet’s vision. No one

  this time—not even Gary—grumbled about

  Whitman’s disgusting ego, and yet when we came to the place

  where God is “a loving bedfellow”

  who leaves “baskets covered with white towels

  bulging the house with their plenty,” I was the one who

  wanted to stop. At that point, I’ve always

  been puzzled. I get it that a lover could

  be like a god. But towels? We’d just finished The House

  of the Seven Gables, and I wondered if

  Hepzibah or Phoebe ever sold linens in their shop. Yet

  we never hear Hawthorne talking about blankets or sheets or

  how anybody washes his face or her hands,

  let alone armpits or “soft-tickling genitals”—leave

  those to Uncle Walt. The store Hepzibah opened: a first step

  in leaving the shadows of her cursed

  ancestors, of joining the sunlit world. Last summer

  when my husband and I moved back into our old house after

  a massive redo, we gave away box after box

  of sweaters and tchotchkes. We even disposed of old

  books, including those with my neon markings in the margins

  blunt as Gary’s outbursts in class: “Ugh,”

  “NO,” and “Wow!” It was time to loosen the mind

  beyond the nub of the old self. My mother used to huff through

  the house every year like a great wind,

  and when she settled down, not a doll over

  twelve months old remained, not a dress, not a scarf, not even

  lint wisping in a drawer. One year during

  a flood, my husband’s letters from lifelong friends

  drowned in the garage, morphed back into pulp. I never hoped

  the past would vanish into a blank, and yet,

  when Holgrave in the novel cries, “Shall we never,

  never get rid of this Past!” I, too, want it washed clean, to wake

  in the morning released from echoes

  of my father’s muttered invectives, my mother’s

  searing tongue. I’ve now torn to rags the rust-stained

  towels from my former marriage and

  my husband’s bachelorhood linens, raveled

  threads drooping like fishnets. How Hawthorne’s Phoebe

  opened that heavy-lidded house

  to the light. I used to scorn her chirpy domesticity,

  praying along with Emily Dickinson—whose balance

  Gary had also questioned—“God keep me

  from what they call households.” And yet, after

  my husband and I returned to our remade, renewed house,

  what did I do but go shopping

  for towels. Back and forth to seven strip malls,

  bringing home only to return I don’t know how many colors,

  till, finally, I settled on white. And as I

  pulled out my MasterCard to pay for the contents of

  my brimming cart, a gaunt, wrinkled man entered the check-out

  line, hands pressing to his chest

  two white towels just like mine, eyes lifted

  to the fluorescent ceiling as if in prayer. I doubt that Gary

  would think it normal to greet the divine

  while clutching terry cloth. But now I see that Whitman

  knew what fresh towels could mean for a dazed and puffy

  face, white towels unspecked by blood

  or errant coils of hair, towels that spill from

  a laundry basket like sea-foam. Like cirrus clouds adrift while

  we’re loafing on tender, newly sprouted

  blades of grass growing from the loam under our boot soles,

  from graves of the old and decaying, all we’ve finally buried.

  from The Southern Review

  JAN BEATTY

  Youngest Known Savior

  They talk in that natural way shortcuts like: got it

  or second
shelf/left side and she thinks:

  oh my god, they talk alike her cousins

  all have long eyelashes [each one the same

  black lash, naturally curled] She feels like she’s falling

  deeper into alone She goes into the bedroom

  with the pink sleeping thing [baby]

  she hates it for how it lies there how it

  didn’t have to do anything to get those same eyelashes

  [white crib, ruffles] Only a 3 foot drop,

  she thinks Later she tells them [trying to approximate

  their truncated speech]: She fell out of the crib

  and I put her back [afterwards, in the bathroom,

  she uses her cousin’s eyelash curler] How could she

  learn their careful walk the way they move their heads

  slight/left She is 10 one of the youngest known

  saviors it’s better now Before today,

  it was so tedious: blood is blood and

  she was never one of them [that was

  before today] before she learned the language

  from Redivider

  BRUCE BOND

  The Unfinished Slave

  after Michelangelo

  The man we see writhing in the marble,

  what is he without the strength of all

  we do not see. A slave, we are told,

  though to what: the rock, the king, the world

  that, cut or uncut, we can’t remember.

  To be distinct, chiseled as a number

  across a grave, that was his dream once.

  If only he could shake the rough stone

  from his back, instead of being one.

  Or if he stood naked before the tomb

  he was meant to guard, perhaps then

  he would wear a god’s glass complexion.

  As is, he is abstract, and so closer

  to us, to the life that makes a future

  the anticipated past, our heads half

  buried, blind, disfigured by the stuff

  to which we owe our restlessness, our art.

  The hand that carves its figure in the slate

  abandons it, thinking it will lie

  beneath its work some day, beneath a sky

  that refuses to commit, to lift.

  It’s in there somewhere, whatever’s left

  of those who drive a hammer into us.

  With every blow, a little bloom of dust

  flies. Time keeps its promise to itself.