The Best American Poetry 2015 Read online

  everything in praise.

  from The Volta

  CATHERINE BOWMAN

  * * *

  Makeshift

  From two pieces of string and oil-fattened feathers he made a father.

  She made a mother from loss buttons and ocean debris.

  Lacking a grave, they embottled themselves

  in a favorite liqueur, the pyx and plethora of clouds—

  with the heart striped and clear-cut, they rekindled the stars,

  created a glossary of seeds.

  Down the fire ladder, rung after fiery rung, they gather, salvage,

  fiddle about, curse and root, laugh themselves silly,

  en masse assemble a makeshift holy city. In the holy city,

  makeshift, they assemble en masse, silly themselves,

  laugh and root, curse the fiddle, gather salvage rung

  after fiery rung as they ladder their fire down.

  A glossary seeded creates stars, strips clear the diamond-cut heart.

  They sold clouds, the plethora and pyx of liqueur. Favored themselves

  embottled in grave lack, ocean debris, and loss buttons,

  where Mother made a father who made feathers

  from fattened oil and string pieces for two.

  from The New Yorker

  RACHAEL BRIGGS

  * * *

  in the hall of the ruby-throated warbler

  Jenny, sunny Jenny, beige-honey Jenny

  sings the parsley up from the topsoil, Jenny,

  cool tabouleh, hot apple crumble Jenny,

  alchemy Jenny

  please, I whispered, teach me the secret whistle

  help me coax the thistledown from the thistle

  perch me on the branch where the goldfinch rustles

  heedless of bristles

  so she bore my heart to the eagle’s aerie

  folded me like down in a twig-tight nestle

  kissed me til my sinews leapt up, cat’s cradle

  brain like a beehive

  Jenny, downy Jenny, my treetop lover

  from Able Muse

  JERICHO BROWN

  * * *

  Homeland

  I knew I had jet lag because no one would make love to me.

  All the men thought me a vampire. All the women were

  Women. In America that year, black people kept dreaming

  That the president got shot. Then the president got shot

  Breaking into the White House. He claimed to have lost

  His keys. What’s the proper name for a man caught stealing

  Into his own home? I asked a few passengers. They replied,

  Jigger. After that, I took the red-eye. I took to a sigh deep

  As the end of a day in the dark fields below us. Some slept,

  But nobody named Security ever believes me. Confiscated—

  My Atripla. My Celexa. My Cortisone. My Klonopin. My

  Flexeril. My Zyrtec. My Nasarel. My Percocet. My Ambien.

  Nobody in this nation feels safe, and I’m still a reason why.

  Every day, something gets thrown away on account of long

  History or hair or fingernails or, yes, of course, my fangs.

  from Fence

  RAFAEL CAMPO

  * * *

  “DOCTORS LIE, MAY HIDE MISTAKES”

  —Boston Globe headline

  That doctors lie, may hide mistakes

  should come as no surprise. Of course

  the body we must memorize

  in fact cannot be trusted, breasts

  embarrassing as cheese soufflés

  that didn’t rise, scuffed knees as dumb

  as grief. The very act of touch

  is like a lie, the latex gloves

  we wear in case of a mistake

  protecting us from pulsing blood’s

  blithe truths. We lie and hide from what

  the stethoscope will try to say,

  incapable of listening

  itself: the heart, mistaken for

  the place where the elusive soul

  resides, in fact does not repeat

  itself. Instead, it cries, “Of course

  we must tell lies, and to be human

  is this incalculable mistake.”

  from upstreet

  JULIE CARR

  * * *

  A fourteen-line poem on sex

  1. On film I’m a sky or a swimmer

  2. Red lightbulb

  3. All those cross-legged girls

  4. If I don’t write the word “rendered”

  5. I will forget it by morning

  6. Boys in black sing harmonies

  7. She’s running a fever dressed like a Belgian

  8. Can you smell her from here?

  9. A mutating ghost

  10. Once on a drive from Nashville to Asheville

  11. I ran out of gas. I’d been watching the temperature gauge

  12. Resolutely in the middle

  13. I’d never run out of gas before

  14. I didn’t know what was wrong with the car

  from The Kenyon Review

  CHEN CHEN

  * * *

  for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me

  i pledge allegiance to the already fallen snow

  & to the snow now falling. to the old snow & the new.

  to foot & paw & tire prints in the snow both young & aging,

  the deep & shallow marks left on cold streets, our long

  misbegotten manuscripts. i pledge allegiance to the weather

  report that promises more snow, plus freezing rain.

  though i would minus the pluvial & plus the multitude

  of messages pressed muddy into the perfectly

  mutable snow, i have faith in the report that goes on to read:

  by the end of the week, there will be an increased storm-related

  illegibility of the asphalt & concrete & brick. for i pledge

  betrayal to the fantasy of ever reading anything

  completely. for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me:

  to be brought into a patterned world of weathers

  & reports. & thus i pledge allegiance to the always

  partial, the always translated, the always never

  of knowing who’s walking around, what’s being left behind,

  the signs, the cries, the breadcrumbs & the blood. the toe-

  nails & armpit hair of our trying & failing to speak

  our specks of here to the everywhere. dirty snow of my weary

  city, i ask you to tell me a story about your life

  & you tell me you’ve left for another country,

  but forgot your suitcase. at the airport they told you

  not to worry, all your things have already been sent

  to your new place by your ninth grade french teacher,

  the only nice one. & the weather where your true love is

  is governed by principles or persons you can’t name,

  imagine. it is that good, or bad.

  from PANK

  SUSANNA CHILDRESS

  * * *

  Careful, I Just Won a Prize at the Fair

  Don’t remind me

  how insufficient

  love is. You

  threw quarters

  into a bowl. We are bones

  and need, all hair

  and want: this fish won’t swim

  in a plastic bag

  forever. My makeshift

  gown is a candle, my breasts

  full of milk for our young—

  whose flames

  are these anyway?

  from Columbia Poetry Review

  YI-FEN CHOU

  * * *

  The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve

  Huh! That bumblebee looks ridiculous staggering its way

  across those blue flowers, the ones I can never

  remember the name of. Do you know the old
engineer’s

  joke: that, theoretically, bees can’t fly? But they look so

  perfect together, like Absolute Purpose incarnate: one bee

  plus one blue flower equals about a billion

  years of symbiosis. Which leads me to wonder what it is

  I’m doing here, peering through a lens at the thigh-pouches

  stuffed with pollen and the baffling intricacies

  of stamen and pistil. Am I supposed to say something, add

  a soundtrack and voiceover? My life’s spent

  running an inept tour for my own sad swindle of a vacation

  until every goddamned thing’s reduced to botched captions

  and dabs of misinformation in fractured,

  not-quite-right English: Here sir, that’s the very place Jesus

  wept. The Colosseum sprouts and blooms with leftover seeds

  pooped by ancient tigers. Poseidon diddled

  Philomel in the warm slap of this ankle-deep surf to the dying

  stings of a thousand jellyfish. There, probably,

  atop yonder scraggly hillock, Adam should’ve said no to Eve.

  from Prairie Schooner

  ERICA DAWSON

  * * *

  Slow-Wave Sleep with a Fairy Tale

  I knocked out Sleeping Beauty, fucking cocked

  her on the jaw. She fell into the briar.

  Pussy. I found her prince. I up and socked

  him, too. I called each one of them a liar.

  I damned the spindle’s hundred years of sleep

  because I rarely sleep. I cursed the birds

  who took their heads from out beneath their heap

  of wings. When lovers look, they need no words.

  And when a hound came running after me,

  a Redbone with a smile bearing its teeth

  so white, I woke up with the majesty

  of a princess who’s lying underneath

  a spell of something better still to come.

  My eyes were blurry, my mouth dry and dumb.

  from Tupelo Quarterly

  DANIELLE DETIBERUS

  * * *

  In a Black Tank Top

  In a black tank top

  my man can say

  just about anything.

  Stuff like, let’s watch

  football, or this shrimp

  is overcooked or see how many pull-ups I

  can do. In a black tank top, he looks fifteen

  years younger, looks like all those silly boys

  I knew in school. When he gets home from

  playing ball, I want to crawl inside the bed

  of his parents’ beat-up red pick-up truck &

  make out until his almost beard scratches

  at me, leaves dappled marks on my cheeks

  & throat for friends to stare at for days. In a

  black tank top, I can watch him talk about

  beams, joists, & trusses for hours cause the

  shadows of his arm press against the ribbed

  cotton like a boy presses a girl up against a

  steely locker, hard before Mrs. Toner’s home

  room. I want to shout, Damn son! Looking

  like that should be illegal. And, Break me off

  some of that. Instead I try to be the shy little

  thing, smile & blush like the good girls do. In

  a black tank top, though, my man always gets

  me to offer a hand to pull it off. He trembles:

  a boy undoing his first real belt.

  from Rattle

  NATALIE DIAZ

  * * *

  It Was the Animals

  Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark

  wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag.

  He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it,

  peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood.

  He took a step back and gestured toward it

  with his arms and open palms—

  It’s the ark, he said.

  You mean Noah’s ark? I asked.

  What other ark is there? he answered.

  Read the inscription, he told me,

  it tells what’s going to happen at the end.

  What end? I wanted to know.

  He laughed, What do you mean, “what end”?

  The end end.

  Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled.

  His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters.

  He held the jagged piece of wood so gently.

  I had forgotten my brother could be gentle.

  He set it on the table the way people on television

  set things when they’re afraid those things might blow up

  or go off—he set it right next to my empty coffee cup.

  It was no ark—

  it was the broken end of a picture frame

  with a floral design carved into its surface.

  He put his head in his hands—

  I shouldn’t show you this—

  God, why did I show her this?

  It’s ancient—O, God,

  this is so old.

  Fine, I gave in, Where did you get it?

  The girl, he said. O, the girl.

  What girl? I asked.

  You’ll wish you never knew, he told me.

  I watched him drag his wrecked fingers

  over the chipped flower-work of the wood—

  You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it—

  no matter how many books you’ve read.

  He was wrong. I could take the ark.

  I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers.

  The way they almost glittered.

  It was the animals—the animals I could not take—

  they came up the walkway into my house,

  cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips,

  marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother,

  tails snaking across my feet before disappearing

  like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows

  of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls,

  reaching out for him—wildebeests, pigs,

  the oryxes with their black matching horns,

  javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots

  with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat.

  So many kinds of creature.

  I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it,

  but my brother stopped me—

  This is serious, he said.

  You have to understand.

  It can save you.

  So I sat down, with my brother wrecked open like that,

  and two-by-two the fantastical beasts

  parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles,

  built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup

  before floating it away from the table.

  My brother—teeming with shadows—

  a hull of bones, lit only by tooth and tusk,

  lifting his ark high in the air.

  from Poetry

  DENISE DUHAMEL

  * * *

  Fornicating

  such a beautiful

  day

  and I’m not

  fornicating

  —Adília Lopes

  I have goose bumps

  from the breeze

  coming into the window

  which is a kind of fornication

  but who am I kidding

  a breeze is not even a kiss

  especially a breeze

  strained through a screen

  I would have a better chance

  out on the street

  where I could perhaps meet

  someone who wanted

  to fornicate

  with me or someone like me

  and I could pretend

  I suppose

  even to be someone else

  give a fake name

  so the man would never
r />   find me again

  it is a little scary to say

  to a stranger, Hey, do you

  want to fornicate?

  especially if you are a woman

  and you want to fornicate

  with a man

  what kind of a man

  would say yes to such a request

  maybe a violent one

  maybe no decent man at all

  since the request is pretty bold

  and I suppose I would

  look crazy

  men are leery of crazy women

  and I can’t blame them

  I could promise a man

  that I wouldn’t

  stalk him or call him ever

  that I am just in it

  for the fornication

  but would he believe me

  even I don’t really believe me

  because what if the fornication

  was a success and I woke up

  the next morning

  another beautiful day

  and I wasn’t satisfied

  with just the memory

  of fornication

  and wanted another round

  or what if it was lousy

  outside

  and since I’d given a fake name

  insisting I didn’t want to know his

  I had to look for a new fornicator

  this time while lugging an umbrella

  this time I could look for a woman

  with the same sad look I have

  when I want to fornicate

  and if she agreed

  we could step out of the rain

  into her apartment

  it might not be as scary

  as approaching another man

  or as big a leap over a puddle