The Best American Poetry 2021 Read online

then, now, no

  thanks, I’d prefer the type of eternity where we

  are inside, are

  us, & last night’s movie good,

  not great, a stray piece of popcorn still under

  our coffee table.

  Do you remember when the world

  signed the letter yours ephemerally?

  Remember when I asked you about the rain,

  the cats & dogs of it,

  if it was 50% cats, 50% dogs, 100%

  falling, & you said, Of course?

  & you said, She’s gotten, the flight’s not till, I’m going

  to drive. I remember you

  driving to your mother, West Texas

  to Upstate New York, you didn’t make it in time, she had little time,

  then none. I remember your face pressed

  into my shoulder. I remember your mother was an endless,

  a question your face asked into my shoulder. How I wanted it

  to answer because I couldn’t. I didn’t go

  with you, when I could’ve, I chose a poetry reading

  instead, thought, she’ll be there, you’ll be, is memory the best

  eternity we can make?

  The only?

  & you said it’s equal, the cats & dogs raining

  down, though in terms of overall

  volume. The rain, it’s all the different breeds of cat, of dog, & see,

  there are more individual cats, since there are more

  very large breeds of dog,

  the cats have to balance things out

  with their number, but the dogs, don’t you worry, they’re raining

  down, too, & they’re rain,

  absolutely, they’re still rain, the cats & dogs,

  lots of water for the plants, for the flowers, for the whole street

  & our dusty car windows, for the cats & dogs

  on the ground, the cats & dogs

  that aren’t rain, at least

  not yet, & maybe that’s another

  eternity, the rainy type.

  I remember you drove us home.

  The radio was on. We made a sound like a lid coming off.

  from Ploughshares

  SU CHO Abecedarian for ESL in West Lafayette, Indiana

  A is for apples shipped fresh off the

  Boat. At 2 PM we left math to go where

  Children are taught

  Differences between

  English and English at home.

  For example, Sun-Ah who named herself Sunny

  Grabbed blue pills from a plastic bag,

  Held the medicine in her palm. Teachers called me in—

  Ibuprofen, I say. I am seven,

  Just learned the word because Sunny sputtered

  Korean that they’re painkillers.

  Look, English was my second language but

  My tongue was new.

  Never had to teach me to curl my Rs

  Or how to say girl, blueberries, raspberries. In second grade, I

  Played Peter Rabbit’s mother rabbit, still don’t

  Quite know how that happened or

  Remember what my lines were.

  Still, when the Chicago Field Museum unveiled Sue

  The T-Rex, I was Sue the dinosaur, before that, Sue who lived in an old shoe.

  Usually I said “Yes, like the T-Rex without the useless e at the end.”

  Versions of my selves in ESL exist but I was kept there, after proficiency.

  Who else could translate for the teachers, my parents, and Sunny’s parents?

  X was for xylophones, x-rays, and now xenophobia.

  Yes, that’s too on the nose, but things on your nose are hardest to see.

  Z is for a zero, zigzagging between classrooms to say she has a fever, she misses home.

  from New England Review

  AMA CODJOE After the Apocalypse

  1.

  After the apocalypse, I yearned to be reckless. To smash

  a glass brought first to my lips. To privilege lust over

  tomorrow. To walk naked down the middle of a two-lane

  road. But, too late, without my bidding, life cracked open,

  rushed, openmouthed, like a panting dog whose name

  I did not call—my lips shut like a purse. The last man

  I kissed was different than the last man I fucked.

  We were so desperate then, the two of us, undone

  by longing, drawing night from the cracks

  inside us, drawing the night out, as long as we could,

  until dawn broke like a beat egg and our heartbeats

  quieted in private fatigue. I’d be lying if I said I don’t recall

  his name. The end of the world has ended, and desire is still

  all I crave. Oh, to be a stone, sexless and impenetrable.

  Over half of me is water, a river spilling into restless limbs,

  the rest of me is a scalding heat like the asphalt under my feet.

  2.

  After the apocalypse, I mothered my mother, became

  grandmother to myself, distant and tender, temples turning

  gray. The whole world cascaded past my shoulders, like the hair

  self-hatred taught me to crave—though all my Barbie dolls

  were black. And the Cabbage Patch Kid my grandmother

  placed under the artificial Christmas tree, sprinkled with tinsel,

  in Memphis, Tennessee, the city where my mother waited

  for her first pair of glasses in the Colored Only waiting room.

  She said the world changed from black-and-white to Technicolor

  that day. My mother watches TV as I roll her hair. She sits

  between my legs. I’ve never birthed a child. I have fondled the crown

  of a lover’s head, my thighs framing his dark brown eyes.

  I entered the world excised from my mother’s womb. Her scar

  is a mark the color of time. I am my mother’s weeping

  wound. On my last birthday, I cried into bathwater.

  I hid my tears from my mother because that’s what mothers do.

  3.

  After the apocalypse, I had the urge to dance on the president’s

  grave. The dispossessed threw me a belated quinceañera. My godmother

  wore a necklace of the dictator’s teeth. She sliced an upside-down cake,

  licked her forefinger, and said, “You have mastered sadness, querida,

  may your rage be sticky and sweet.” My father offered his hand—this time

  I took it. We glided like ballroom dancers across the red dirt floor.

  He wore a grave expression. I embraced him tightly

  so as to cloak my face. Instead of a toast, he handed me a handkerchief,

  wet with tears. My father circled the guests silently, dabbing gently

  each of their cheeks. This too was a dance unfolding.

  I folded the handkerchief into a fist and raised my fist like

  a glass of champagne. The pain in my father’s eyes sparkled

  like the sequins on my tattered gown. If it hadn’t been so ugly

  it would’ve been beautiful. The party ended just as the world had:

  with the sound of rain beating against the earth and each of us

  on our hands and knees peering into pools of mud and thirst.

  4.

  After the apocalypse, time turned like a mood ring. My mood

  changed like a thunderstruck sky. The sky changed

  like a breast, engorged, staining the front of a white silk blouse.

  I got laid off. I went thirteen days without wearing a bra. I changed

  my mind about the fiction of money. Money changed hands.

  I washed my hands religiously. Religion changed into sunlight—

  something allowed to touch my face. My face changed into

  my mother’s. No, into a mask of my mother’s face. Traces

  of heartache changed into a pain in
my right hip. The stock market

  dipped. The S&P fell freely. I did not fall to my knees

  promising to change my life. The price of paper towels changed

  and the price of toilet paper and the price of white bread and milk.

  Whiteness did not change. Some things stayed the same. We named

  the moon for its changes, but it remained the same. Gravity

  pulled at my organs like the moon’s tug makes a king tide.

  America’s king would inevitably change and inevitably stay the same.

  5.

  After the laughter subsided the crying kept after we held hands

  and screamed and screamed and squeezed and screamed after

  regret and shame and a single bush filled with speckled thrushes

  singing redwing bluebird wood thrush on the wood of a branch

  and forest thrush in the branches of a forest open pine

  and after your mother refused to haunt your dreams after

  you placed her in a wooden coffin and you sang like a blue bird

  breast trembling beak open like a mother’s beak foraging feeding

  offspring after lying on a clutch of blue eggs and after spring

  after pining for spring ignorant of your grief and unraveling

  with or without your blessing cool days and rain after icicles

  crying and after you kept from crying and after you cried

  there was no one left to protect after you blessed the demon

  possessing you and after it left you were even more alone

  a grandala calling and calling and after calling after your mother

  a hole closed and a hole opened after that after all of that.

  6.

  There is a scar near my right eye no lover ever noticed

  or kissed, a faint mark: split skin sewn.

  And so, and now, there was never a before. Never

  a time when the wind did not smell of dust

  or storm or brine or blood. Never an hour when I entered

  a field of bluebells without trampling at least one flower.

  And so, and then, on the day I was born, a stampede

  of horses filled my chest. Astronomers can only guess

  how the universe formed. The planet is dying:

  the horses, the mothers, the farmers, the bees. I am

  the ground, its many grasses and wild clover.

  My teeth grow yellow, ache, decay. I wash a plate,

  polishing the moon’s face—both will outlast my brutal

  hands. And so, in the minutes of after, the moon drips

  on a silver rack and the plate floats, cracked with age,

  in outer space… a stray soapsud sparkles then bursts.

  from The Yale Review

  HENRI COLE Gross National Unhappiness

  No, I am not afraid of you

  descending the long white marble steps

  from a White Hawk helicopter

  to a state-sponsored spectacle

  of mansplaining and lies.

  If you divide the sea,

  you will wind up in a ditch.

  The she-goat will mount the he-goat.

  Good deeds will cut out our tongues.

  No tree will penetrate a radiant sky.

  Can’t you see our tents cannot be separated?

  Can’t you see your one thousand dogs

  are not greater than our

  one thousand gazelles?

  from The American Scholar

  BILLY COLLINS On the Deaths of Friends

  Either they just die

  or they get sick and die of the sickness

  or they get sick, recover, then die of something else,

  or they get sick, appear to recover

  then die of the same thing,

  the sickness coming back

  to take another bite out of you

  in the forest of your final hours.

  And there are other ways,

  which will not be considered here.

  In the evening, I closed my eyes

  by the shore of a lake and I pretended

  this is what it will look like

  or will not look like,

  this is where my friends keep going,

  a “place” only in quotations marks,

  where instead of oxygen, there is silence

  unbroken by the bark of a fox in winter

  or the whistle of an unattended kettle.

  With eyes still closed,

  I ran in the dark toward that silence,

  like a man running along a train platform,

  and when I opened my eyes to see

  who was running in the other direction

  with outspread arms,

  there was the lake again with its ripples,

  a breeze coming off the water,

  and a low train whistle,

  and there was I trembling

  under the trees, passing clouds,

  and everything else that was pouring

  over the mighty floodgates of the senses.

  from The Paris Review

  ADAM O. DAVIS Interstate Highway System

  In the beginning, I was

  incorporate, plain as skull,

  in cahoots though inchoate:

  a suit suited to combust—

  my body a blunderbuss

  brandished in traffic bright

  as dogbite. I drifted like sand

  under the wind’s hand, saw

  supercells & speed traps,

  saw God in the face of a forest

  fire. The sky was froth,

  the land foment: ichor & ozone,

  bee swarm & wildflower—

  every living thing shivering

  under the long-range bellow

  of the transnational semi-trailer truck.

  Thrush melodies tumbled forth

  from trees still full of the didactic

  temper of birds, but I could only

  froth & foment—my tongue

  diabetic with word, deeded

  as property in the gun safe

  of my mouth. Thereafter,

  I heeded hints & omens, held

  hearsay dear as a family Bible

  so listened smartly when gossip

  hopscotched households

  like housefire. In later years

  I leaned prophetic, suffered

  visions—saw myself sullen

  on a windswept prairie, saw

  myself salved in a station flush

  with tropical disease, snakes

  shaking in my fists like bad mail.

  Still, when I slept I slept sound

  under the promise of diesel.

  When I dreamt I dreamt darkly

  under the auspices of convenience.

  When I woke I ate in the assurance

  of eating all I could. And when

  finally I corrected my iconography

  I wept to find my eyes ever-blue,

  the sun fled—clouds militant,

  the moon an ambulance of rock.

  Under its urgency I succumbed

  to the hobby of my body, held

  my health like a cigarette from

  the world I watched through

  drawn curtains, listening all night

  to the opera of wolves behind

  the motels of America. Wolves

  I ran with, wolves I ran from.

  I lived on stick. I lived on stone.

  I hunted myself any way I could.

  from The Believer

  KWAME DAWES Before the Riot

  But someone will ’ave to pay

  For all the innocent blood…

  —Bob Marley, “We and Dem”

  On the dreary trudge—the frontier begins. A hundred years later,

  almost two, a woman says in the way of appeasement,

  “Perhaps it is true, that for us to live so well,

  some of them had to die…?” The question suggest
ed

  by the nervous lift in inflection at the end of phrase—

  and who is this “us” who have lived so well, who are living

  so well; and how well—so that there is a peculiar

  justification, a terrible logic, and it is a haunting

  confession buried deep inside the book, though, in truth,

  there is no question there. This is its own duplicity, this questioning,

  this effortless way of speaking the tragic: there has been blood,

  so much blood, and the rituals of bludgeoning,

  of rust-tanned white men, clichéd westerners, hunters,

  the stereotypes, the killers of vermin rabbits

  under-wheel of trucks, the people she knows intimately,

  like a daughter knows her father, knows her brothers,

  knows the scent of Scotch on her grandfather’s breath;

  the comfort of their manliness, stoic as stone, they will kill,

  as easily as threaten even the softer bodies of their women—

  it is a logical equation, a management of ethics,

  and who are the dead, the slaughtered and the erased?

  Tribes and tribes, whose faces I do not know,

  though I know that the logic of this pragmatism—

  this expiation of guilt, but the embrace of guilt,

  as a kind of penance—is familiar, and the faces of those

  bloodshot eyes, skins chalky with deprivation, the weary look

  of slaves, those faces are as familiar as the panting bodies

  of the football team strewn on the wide grass, undressed

  in the heat, sweating, bodies broken after pleasure—the familiar look

  of black bodies coffered by desire and violence, familiar as this.

  And that saying—that Darwinian logic: “Perhaps it is true,

  that for us to live so well, some of them had to die…?”

  offered in the soft voice of a Midwestern woman,

  who never rushes her words, who carries in her throat

  the secret to receiving mercy, a kind of forgiveness,

  an expiation of guilt, who we count among those

  in whose mouths ice couldn’t melt; mouths of tender

  duplicity—perhaps, perhaps for us to live

  as we do, and by this, I mean we who contemplate

  anger and bombs, and chants, today—perhaps,

  it’s true: that someone will have to pay, as we say.