The Best American Poetry 2013 Read online

  from The Antioch Review

  TRACI BRIMHALL

  Dear Thanatos,

  I did what you told me to,

  wore antlers and the mask, danced

  in the untilled field, but the promised

  ladder never dropped from the sky.

  In the burned house strays ate bats

  on the attic floor, and trotted out

  into the dark with wings in their mouths.

  I found the wedding dress unharmed,

  my baby teeth sewn to the cuff.

  There’s a deer in the woman, a moth

  in the chimney, a mote in God’s one good eye.

  The fire is on the table now, the bear is in

  the cradle now, and the baby is gone.

  She’s the box of bones under the bed,

  the stitches in your lip, the moon and the hollow

  in the geode, in peaches heavy with June.

  If I enter the river I must learn how to swim.

  If a wolf’s ribs are bigger than a man’s,

  and if the dead float, then I am the witch’s

  second heart, and I am the sea in the boat.

  from FIELD

  JERICHO BROWN

  Hustle

  They lie like stones and dare not shift. Even asleep, everyone hears in prison.

  Dwayne Betts deserves more than this dry ink for his teenage years in prison.

  In the film we keep watching, Nina takes Darius to a steppers ball.

  Lovers hustle, slide, dip as if one of them has no brother in prison.

  I dine with humans who think any book full of black characters is about race.

  A book full of white characters examines insanity near—but never in—prison.

  His whole family made a barricade of their bodies at the door to room 403.

  He died without the man he wanted. What use is love at home or in prison?

  We saw police pull sharks out of the water just to watch them not breathe.

  A brother meets members of his family as he passes the mirrors in prison.

  Sundays, I washed and dried her clothes after he threw them into the yard.

  In the novel I love, Brownfield kills his wife, only gets seven years in prison.

  I don’t want to point my own sinful finger, so let’s use your clean one instead.

  Some bright citizen reading this never considered a son’s short hair in prison.

  In our house lived three men with one name, and all three fought or ran.

  I left Nelson Demery III for Jericho Brown, a name I earned in prison.

  from The Believer

  ANDREI CODRESCU

  Five One-Minute Eggs

  1. The Economy

  We used to make things we didn’t understand (Marx), consumed by

  people who didn’t understand us, and now we don’t even understand the

  people who are making them, that is us. Our misunderstandings progress.

  We consume things that are familiar, and the more familiar they get, the

  less we know or sympathize with ourselves, the people who make them.

  We are not familiar with the parts of these things that other people make,

  but we love to use them. Technology is familiar, people are not. The

  people who make TVs know us from TV better than we know them or

  ourselves. When we are not on TV, we are waiting to slit our (their)

  throats. The German economy thrives because Germans make “the thing

  that goes inside the thing that goes inside the thing.”

  Can you love people you don’t understand? With a blender and a mixer

  and an iPhone.

  The Jesuits would be pleased.

  Why would God need to choose a people when there are all these

  machines around.

  What else would He do with the Salvation Army warehouses?

  2. Pound in the Ozarks

  5 time grimace:

  pro patria

  pro domo

  pro usura

  pro forma

  pro pane

  3. Expansive Song

  Space is my Baby

  Time is my Bitch

  (with Vince Cellucci)

  4. I Broker

  “in this army you break down your body like a gun

  ascertain its needs and reassemble it for action when they’ve been met”

  The Manual

  splitting hairs for commodities

  the centrifugal force that dismembers matter into sellable minis

  the broker broke down his body and ordered its needs from a catalogue

  everything arrived by mail overnight and the broker reassembled

  hermself

  by the time the market opened

  herm hoped to make enough to post a profit

  on the increasing needs of herm body

  “every day you don’t sell you buy”

  herm ever-expanding ever-needy body

  was an expense that had to be covered by greater profit

  so when herm body incorporated the city the country and the globe

  it had to be broken down and fed

  by myriads of catalogues from outer space

  whence the profits had to also eventually come

  today herm franchised copper on mars and sold

  the green algae noon meal of the cloned venus from last night

  i went to sleep without a shower and woke up malcontent

  but my daughters brought me time for breakfast

  i was happy with the design

  some retro some yet to be duplicated

  what counts is attitude

  5. San Michele

  it’s got to be raining in Venice

  to write like Henry James

  was never your wish in even

  the most twisted version of yourself

  from House Organ

  BILLY COLLINS

  Foundling

  How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,

  jotting down little things,

  noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,

  then wondering what will become of me,

  and finally to work alone under a lamp

  as if everything depended on this,

  groping blindly down a page,

  like someone lost in a forest.

  And to think it all began one night

  on the steps of a nunnery

  where I lay gazing up from a sewing basket,

  which was doubling for a proper baby carrier,

  staring into the turbulent winter sky,

  too young to wonder about anything

  including my recent abandonment—

  but it was there that I committed

  my first act of self-expression,

  sticking out my infant tongue

  and receiving in return (I can see it now)

  a large, pristine snowflake much like any other.

  from The Southampton Review and Slate

  MARTHA COLLINS

  [white paper 24]

  The Irish were not, the Germans

  were not, the Jews Italians Slavs and others

  were not, or were not exactly or not quite

  at various times in American history.

  Before us the Greeks themselves

  were not (though the weaker enemy

  Persians were), the next-up Romans

  themselves were not either.

  And later the Europeans were not

  until Linnaeus named by color,

  red white yellow and black.

  Even the English settlers were only

  vaguely at first to contrast with natives,

  but then with Africans, more and more

  of them slaves to be irreversibly,

  totally different from, they were.

  Then others were not, then were,

  or were not, but gradually became,

  leaving only, for a time, blac
k

  and yellow to be not.

  Then there were other words

  for those who were still or newly

  (see immigrant, Arab) somehow not

  the same and therefore not.

  Thus history leaves us nothing

  but not: like children playing at being

  something, we made, we keep

  making our whiteness up.

  from Harvard Review

  KWAME DAWES

  Death

  First your dog dies and you pray

  for the Holy Spirit to raise the inept

  lump in the sack, but Jesus’ name

  is no magic charm; sunsets and the

  flies are gathering. That is how faith

  dies. By dawn you know death;

  the way it arrives and then grows

  silent. Death wins. So you walk

  out to the tangle of thorny weeds behind

  the barn; and you coax a black

  cat to your fingers. You let it lick

  milk and spit from your hand before

  you squeeze its neck until it messes

  itself, its claws tearing your skin,

  its eyes growing into saucers.

  A dead cat is light as a live

  one and not stiff, not yet. You

  grab its tail and fling it as

  far as you can. The crows find

  it first; by then the stench

  of the hog pens hides the canker

  of death. Now you know the power

  of death, that you have it,

  that you can take life in a second

  and wake the same the next day.

  This is why you can’t fear death.

  You have seen the broken neck

  of a man in a well, you know who

  pushed him over the lip of the well,

  tumbling down; you know all about

  blood on the ground. You know that

  a dead dog is a dead cat is a dead

  man. Now you look a white man

  in the face, talk to him about

  cotton prices and the cost of land,

  laugh your wide open mouthed laugh

  in his face, and he knows one thing

  about you: that you know the power

  of death, and you will die as easily

  as live. This is how a man seizes

  what he wants, how a man

  turns the world over in dreams,

  eats a solid meal and waits

  for death to come like nothing,

  like the open sky, like light

  at early morning; like a man

  in red pinstriped trousers, a black

  top hat, a yellow scarf

  and a kerchief dipped in eau

  de cologne to cut through

  the stench coming from his mouth.

  from The American Poetry Review

  CONNIE DEANOVICH

  Divestiture

  Here’s your mistake back

  you never made it

  here’s the cushion

  reshaping the couch

  your shadow slips under the threshold

  you never crossed it

  private paradise

  is just another storm splitting in space

  the sheets you never crumpled

  fold up again

  the words you spoke

  were never spoken

  when I walk into the library

  I’m not thinking of you

  when my heart drains like sand from a shoe

  I’m not thinking of you

  something was having trouble ending

  think of energy’s mutations not of you

  yesterday I devirginized

  my own story

  stuck my fingers in and out of my own future

  until I broke its promise

  today I’m not thinking of you

  but of a souvenir tossed on the compost

  a smelly time unpetalling

  blackening rain and garbage

  from New American Writing

  TIMOTHY DONNELLY

  Apologies from the Ground Up

  The staircase hasn’t changed much through the centuries

  I’d notice it, my own two eyes now breaking down the larger

  vertical distance into many smaller distances I’ll conquer

  almost absently; the riser, the tread, the measure of it long

  hammered into the body the way it’s always been, even back

  in the day when the builders of the tower Nimrod wanted

  rising up into the heavens laid the first of the sunbaked bricks

  down and rose. Here we are again, I say, but where exactly

  nobody knows, that nowhere in particular humming between

  one phoneme and a next, pulse jagged as airless Manhattan-

  bound expresses on which I’ve worried years that my cohort

  of passengers’ fat inner monologues might manage to lurch

  up into audibility at once, a general rupture from the keeping

  of thoughts to oneself—statistically improbable I know but

  why quarrel with the dread of it. I never counted my own voice

  among the chaos, admittedly. I just figured it would happen

  not with but against me. A custom punishment for thinking

  myself apart from all the others. But not apart from in the sense

  above but away from. Although to stand in either way will

  imply nobility, power, distinction. As for example if you step

  back to consider a sixteenth-century depiction of the tower

  under construction, you rapidly identify the isolated figure as

  that of the king, his convulsive garment the red of an insect

  smitten on a calf, the hint of laughter on his face, or humming

  just under the plane of his face, indicative of what you have

  come to recognize in others as the kind of pleasure, no more

  or less so than in yourself, that can only persist through forcing

  the world into its service as it dismantles whatever happens

  to oppose it, including its own short-lived impulse to adapt

  by absorbing what opposes into its fabric. It will refuse to do that.

  It will exhaust its fuel or logic or even combust before it lets

  itself evolve into some variation on what it used to be instead

  of remaining forever what it is until it dies, even when its death

  comes painfully and brings humiliation down upon its house.

  In the abstract, on and off—as when hurrying past the wrought-

  iron fence some pink flowering branches cantilever through

  or if pushed too relentlessly into oneself in public—it’s hard

  not to admire the resolve in that. But there are pictures in which

  there is no king. The tower staggers into the cloud cover as if

  inevitably, or naturally, as if the medium of earth were merely

  manifesting its promise. Often the manner in which it does so

  reflects the principles of advanced mathematics, but it’s unclear

  whether the relationship between the two might be more

  appropriately thought of as one of assistance or of guidance.

  This distinction is a matter of no small concern to me, actually,

  because as much as I don’t want anyone’s help, I don’t want anyone

  telling me what to do about ten times more, and if what it all

  comes down to is that, there’s a far better than average chance

  I’ll just end up devising some potentially disastrous third option

  on the fly as I wait in line. Elsewhere we find teams of builders

  at work among the tower’s open spaces with no one figure leaping

  forward as king or even foreman, a phenomenon whose effects

  include not only the gratification of our fondness for images

 
of protodemocracy but also the stimulation of our need to fill

  whatever we perceive to be an emptiness, which in this instance

  means electing ourselves into the very position of authority

  we had been happy to find vacant. I myself would be happy

  leaving every position vacant as an antique prairie across which

  bison once roamed democratically, each denizen of the herd

  voting for what direction it wanted to take off in with a nudge

  of its quarter-ton head, but someone around here has to start

  taking responsibility, and I don’t see any hands going up. So here goes.

  Sorry. It was me. I built the Tower of Babel. What can I say?

  It seemed like a good idea at the time. And a fairly obvious take-

  off on what we were already doing, architecture-wise. All I did

  was change the scale. I maintained the workers’ enthusiasm

  with rustic beer and talk of history. Plus the specter of the great

  flood still freaked the people out every heavy rainfall, so it felt

  like good civic planning, too—but apparently the whole project

  violated the so-called natural order of things. I’m still a little shaky

  with the language in the aftermath, but my gut says that’s just

  some dressed-up way of admitting I was really onto something.

  from A Public Space and Poetry London

  STEPHEN DUNN

  The Statue of Responsibility

  Imagine it’s given to us as a gift

  from a country wishing to overcome its own hypocrisy.

  I can see someone standing up at a meeting

  and saying, Give it to the Americans, they like

  big things for their people, they like to live

  in the glamour between exaltation and anxiety.

  Instead of an arm raised with a torch, let’s insist

  they cement its feet deep into the earth, burden it

  with gigantic shoes—an emblem of the inescapable.

  We place it on land, across from Liberty

  on the Brooklyn side. And I can see myself needing

  to visit it regularly, taking the elevator up

  to its chest area where I’d feel something

  was asked of me. Near its heart, I’d paint

  After the tyrants, there’s nothing as hateful

  as the martyrs. And I’d stare at those words,