The Best American Poetry 2019 Read online

  they sing as they lope over bridges,

  bums to the wind, ripping out throats

  on footpaths, pissing off brokers.

  Tomorrow they’ll be back

  in their middle-management black

  and Jimmy Choos

  with hours they can’t account for

  and first dates’ blood on the stairs.

  They’ll make some calls: Good-bye.

  It isn’t you, it’s me. I can’t say why.

  They’ll dream of sprouting tails

  at sales meetings,

  right in the audiovisuals.

  They’ll have addictive hangovers

  and ruined nails.

  from Freeman’s

  CATHERINE BARNETT

  * * *

  Central Park

  I’d like to buy one when I die,

  one of the benches not yet spoken for,

  not yet tagged with a small stainless plaque

  and someone else’s name.

  If they’re all gone, please

  help me carry a replica

  to the boat pond so I can sit

  and watch the model boats get nowhere

  beautifully, rented by the fixed hours

  I’m grateful not to be out of yet.

  Another flicker of love,

  an updated Triple-A membership,

  and a handful of Pilot G-Tec-C4 blue-black pens,

  what else do I need?

  Universe,

  watch over us.

  Boat, my poor faraway father says,

  as if my mother has never seen one.

  Boat, he says, and we say, Yes,

  aren’t they beautiful.

  Come winter,

  the boathouse here is locked up,

  the pond drained,

  except one year it wasn’t

  and my son and I convinced ourselves

  his new Golden Bright

  could sail across.

  Merry Christmas, no one said

  as I pulled the black plastic liner bags

  from the empty trash cans

  and stepped into them,

  one for each leg,

  and waded into the addled water

  to salvage the present.

  I think that moment is something to remember,

  or something to remember me by,

  brief, vivid, foolhardy—

  even the revenants watching from the line of benches

  said so:

  thus have been our travels.

  Oblivion, they said,

  there’s no unenduring it.

  from The American Poetry Review

  JOSHUA BENNETT

  * * *

  America Will Be

  after Langston Hughes

  I am now at the age where my father calls me brother

  when we say goodbye. Take care of yourself, brother,

  he whispers a half beat before we hang up the phone,

  and it is as if some great bridge has unfolded over the air

  between us. He is 68 years old. He was born in the throat

  of Jim Crow Alabama, one of ten children, their bodies side

  by side in the kitchen each morning like a pair of hands

  exalting. Over breakfast, I ask him to tell me the hardest thing

  about going to school back then, expecting some history

  I have already memorized. Boycotts & attack dogs, fire

  hoses, Bull Connor in his personal tank, candy paint

  shining white as a slaver’s ghost. He says: Having to read

  The Canterbury Tales. He says: eating lunch alone. Now, I hear

  the word America & think first of my father’s loneliness,

  the hands holding the pens that stabbed him as he walked

  through the hallway, unclenched palms settling

  onto a wooden desk, taking notes, trying to pretend

  the shame didn’t feel like an inheritance. You say democracy

  & I see the men holding documents that sent him off

  to war a year later, Motown blaring from a country

  boy’s bunker as napalm scarred the sky into jigsaw

  patterns, his eyes open wide as the blooming blue

  heart of the lightbulb in a Crown Heights basement where he

  & my mother will dance for the first time, their bodies

  swaying like rockets in the impossible dark & yes I know

  that this is more than likely not what you mean

  when you sing liberty but it is the only kind

  I know or can readily claim, the times where those hunted

  by history are underground & somehow daring to love

  what they cannot hold or fully fathom when the stranger

  is not a threat but the promise of a different ending

  I woke up this morning and there were men on television

  lauding a wall big enough to box out an entire world,

  families torn with the stroke of a pen, citizenship

  little more than some garment that can be stolen or reduced

  to cinder at a tyrant’s whim my father knows this grew up

  knowing this witnessed firsthand the firebombs

  the Klan multiple messiahs love soaked & shot through

  somehow still believes in this grand bloodstained

  experiment still votes still prays that his children might

  make a life unlike any he has ever seen. He looks

  at me like the promise of another cosmos and I never

  know what to tell him. All of the books in my head

  have made me cynical and distant, but there’s a choir

  in him that calls me forward my disbelief built as it is

  from the bricks of his belief not in any America

  you might see on network news or hear heralded

  before a football game but in the quiet

  power of Sam Cooke singing that he was born

  by a river that remains unnamed that he runs

  alongside to this day, some vast and future country

  some nation within a nation, black as candor,

  loud as the sound of my father’s

  unfettered laughter over cheese eggs & coffee

  his eyes shut tight as armories his fists

  unclenched as if he were invincible

  from The Nation

  FLEDA BROWN

  * * *

  Afternoons at the Lake

  I would rather be trapped in an attic with rats than play Monopoly

  all the afternoons it takes to lose the last of my money to the already

  super-rich one-percent grandchild, to line up cheap green houses

  on my low-rent Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues in a futile attempt

  to collect enough to survive the next round of rent on Boardwalk

  or Park Place, to feel pitiful gratitude when I Receive for Services

  twenty-five dollars. Everything will be gone, save the smallest

  denominations, the Asian crayfish will overrun the native,

  the Autumn Olive will proliferate, the tallest thing will grow taller,

  will be layered with gold, will turn to gold, will harden its gold heart.

  It will squander, jet, pocket, dole, win past wanting to win, dig

  the mineshaft, the ore, eat up the hillside the birds the whales,

  crack the foundations of houses, force the defaulters into the street.

  Dice will land as they will, will cause the tiny car to bounce

  happily from St. James Place to Indiana Avenue, a galaxy of gobble,

  will enable the placement of flamboyant hotels on the coast

  where waters wash with exquisite music shoreward, all of it owned

  by the God who dwells inside the winning, who has not said

  otherwise yet, who owns Free Parking and Jail, who owns the treeless

  board the classy neighborhoods as well as the ones with the rats

  and smas
hed-out windows, the murderous scrawl of languages

  on walls, the smiling God holding the center with top hat and cane,

  as I at last step out on the dock with my coffee and say to myself

  the lines where Keats rhymes “think” with “nothingness do sink.”

  from The Southern Review

  SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

  * * *

  Essay on Joy

  When as a child my father deemed my weight excessive, the measure of which shifted according to whim, he would take his underwear off of his body and place it on top of my head. I was to run in circles around the house, wearing it, for a prescribed number of times. This was called “exercise.”

  I am undertaking a new labor: I will imagine myself into deep, focused, and strange hatreds. Spinoza writes, He who imagines that what he hates is destroyed will rejoice. Some years ago, dozens of grackles fell dead from the sky in Boston, the cause unknown. And so I think: I detest grackles. I rejoice.

  If asked, I would have explained the cause: somewhere in a level of atmosphere for which humans hold no keys lived a green-shining carrion crow. As her name indicates, she ate dead bodies. But nothing had died there, ever; and so, she was hungry. She was kept company by this lack.

  Sometimes, I tell myself that I cannot think of a lover with terribly much feeling at all. But this is a lie. The absence of feeling is an assertion of a feeling, and it is a memory, or an exercise, of a kind of a joy I sometimes fear I have forgotten, because, as a lover, I have been slighted, and, as a child, often betrayed.

  For some length of time that a crow considers painful and I cannot measure, she caressed her lack like a lover. But then she came to fear her lover, for it caused her pain, and she could not convince herself that she had no feeling for her lover. So she undertook an exercise of destruction and began to kill.

  When as a child I turned to violence, my mother, who also feared my father and even more feared the thought that I might become him, tried to warn, A fist is always made with four fingers that point back toward you. This is the kind of thing a grackle would say, because on their feet is one toe that always points backward.

  Then the crow’s fallow field of carrion was her new creation, and she had grown accustomed to hating the products of her own making. She ate some, and so she finally grew in size, and hated that, too. She who imagines what she hates is destroyed will rejoice. She opened a hole in the bottom of the atmosphere. Her kills fell.

  from The Rumpus

  VICTORIA CHANG

  * * *

  Six Obits

  Friendships—died June 24,

  2009, once beloved but not

  consistently beloved. The mirror

  won the battle. I am now

  imprisoned in the mirror. All my

  selves spread out like a deck of

  cards. It’s true, the grieving

  speak a different language. I am

  separated from my friends by

  gauze. I will drive myself to my

  own house for the party. I will

  make small talk with myself,

  spill a drink on myself. When

  it’s over, I will drive myself back

  to my own house. My

  conversations with other parents

  about children pass me on the

  staircase on the way up and

  repeat on the way down. Before

  my mother’s death, I sat

  anywhere. Now I look for the

  image of the empty chair near the

  image of the empty table. An

  image is a kind of distance. An

  image of me sits down.

  Depression is a glove over the

  heart. Depression is an image of

  a glove over the image of a heart.

  Optimism—died on August 3,

  2015, a slow death into a

  pavement. At what point does a

  raindrop accept its falling? The

  moment the cloud begins to

  buckle under it or the moment the

  ground pierces it and breaks its

  shape? In December, my mother

  had her helper prepare a Chinese

  hot pot feast. My mother said it

  would probably be her last

  Christmas. I laughed at her. She

  yelled at my father all night. I put

  a fish ball in my mouth. My

  optimism covered the whole ball

  as if the fish had never died, had

  never been gutted and rolled into

  a humiliating shape. To

  acknowledge death is to

  acknowledge that we must take

  another shape.

  Affection—died on November

  12, 1978, the last picture I see of

  my mother’s arms around me. At

  the funeral, I never touched my

  sister. When the room was

  finally empty, she sat in the front

  row with her spouse. I watched

  his arm lift and fall onto her

  shoulder. When my spouse’s

  parents died, both times, he burst

  into tears, inextinguishable tears

  that quickly extinguished. The

  first time, he hugged me and not

  his family. The second time, he

  hugged no one. When the nurse

  called, she said, I’m sorry, but

  your mother passed away this

  morning. When I told my

  children, the three of us hugged

  in a circle, burst into tears. As if

  the tears were already there

  crying on their own and we, the

  newly bereaved, exploded into

  them. In the returning out of the

  tears, the first person I dissolves

  a little more each time.

  Clothes—died on August 10,

  2015. We stuffed them into lawn

  bags to donate. Shirt after shirt,

  button-down after button-down,

  dress after dress, limb after limb.

  A few leapt out to me like the

  flame from a nightmare, the kind

  of flame that almost seems

  human in its gestures. I kept

  those. I kept the hundreds of

  pencils. I am writing with a

  pencil from my mother’s drawer.

  It says Detroit Public Schools,

  where she taught. Each sentence

  fights me. Once we rolled her

  downstairs, played croquet and

  putt putt golf. She sat and

  watched, her vacant eyes not

  seeing anything we saw. As if

  she were looking beyond us,

  beyond the sun. The days of

  August already made a certain

  way that she could see and we

  couldn’t. I left her in the sun too

  long. One child doing cartwheels

  on the grass as my mother looked

  on, wearing the white blouse

  with the small pink flowers

  swirling in a pattern. I kept the

  stare. I kept the flowers. And I

  donated the vacant shirt.

  The Ocean—died on August 21,

  2017, when I didn’t jump from

  the ship. Instead, I dragged the

  door shut and pulled up the safety

  latch. The water in my body

  wanted to pour into the ocean and

  I imagined myself being washed

  by the water, my body separating

  into the droplets it always was. I

  could feel the salt on my neck for

  days. A woman I once knew

  leapt out of a window to her

  death. The difference was she

  was being chased. Some

  scientists say the ocean is

  warming. Some say the ocean

  has hypoxic areas with
no

  oxygen. Even water has

  hierarchy. A child’s death is

  worse than a woman’s death

  unless the woman who died was

  the mother of the child and the

  only parent. If the woman who

  died was the mother of an adult,

  it is merely a part of life. If both

  mother and daughter die

  together, it is a shame. If a whole

  family dies, it is a catastrophe.

  What will we call a whole

  ocean’s death? Peace.

  The Clock—died on June 24,

  2009, and it was untimely. How

  many times my father has failed

  the clock test. Once I heard a

  scientist with Alzheimer’s on the

  radio, trying to figure out why he

  could no longer draw a clock. It

  had to do with the superposition

  of three types. The hours

  represented by 1–12, the minutes

  where a 1 no longer represents 1

  but a 5, and a 2 now represents

  10, then the second hand that

  measures 1 to 60. I sat at the

  stoplight and thought of the

  clock, its perfect circle and its

  superpositions, all the layers of

  complication on a plane of

  thought, yet the healthy read the

  clock in one single instant

  without a second thought. I think

  about my father and his lack of

  first thoughts, how every thought

  is a second or third or fourth

  thought, unable to locate the first

  most important thought. I

  wonder about the man on the

  radio and how far his brain has

  degenerated since. Marvel at

  how far our brains allow

  language to wander without

  looking back but knowing where

  the pier is. If you unfold an

  origami swan, and flatten the

  paper, is the paper sad because it

  has seen the shape of the swan or

  does it aspire towards flatness, a

  life without creases? My father is

  the paper. He remembers the

  swan but can’t name it. He no

  longer knows the paper swan