Best American Poetry 2017 Read online

  your head a majestic black seed

  I fetch my magnifying glass

  to view your life form

  so difficult to glimpse

  except fleetingly while in motion

  for twelve days I have selfishly kept you

  for private study on a corner of my desk

  you seem a saint

  remaining uncorrupt obligingly intact

  perhaps your oranges yellows and blacks

  are imperceptibly dimming

  but I can’t see it yet  you look fresh

  I long to pet you but know

  you would crumble to dust

  like pollen on my fingertips

  dead monarch will you ferry

  my dead father a missive in which I admit

  he was right about everything:

  my cousin’s sham marriage

  and 9/11 about how one should never eat

  a loveless meal about craving more time

  alive  about the eternity of our ends?

  from Fifth Wednesday

  REGINALD GIBBONS

  * * *

  Canasta

  Houston, 1953

  Masses of one un-housed

  household added to another, all abandoned and made

  to abandon their names. A non-colonnade

  of gray clods. An un-quadrangle

  of neo-rational obliteration. An arcade

  of ashes. Ditch-buried

  hordes of kin left akimbo, a strangled

  necropolis on the verge of the farthest acres of the settled

  precincts of our planet—or maybe at the corner angle

  of the poisoned field

  of remembrance, only one little creaking shed.

  And in the low gray corner inside, a weak tangle

  of the last echoes of a last word

  that ever was uttered to a beloved child,

  or of that child’s reply. “I know how to play,” I said

  to my grandmother, I lied—

  so wanting to be included, and interrupting her card

  game in America—the card table, the discard,

  the talk in their languages, the tea—no more than a decade

  after all that hate-whipped

  grief without a shroud.

  Her three card-playing women friends, as displaced

  as she, did not (I remember this) like to be interrupted.

  It might be too much for me to say I understand

  that what they did,

  their canasta and bridge, their mahjong, they did

  so as, even then, not to be destroyed.

  And they went out together, too—converged

  with fellow Theosophists and singers and even tramped

  off in pants to a mossy, snakey wood

  to see a migrating bird.

  If, as I stood near the card game, my grandmother reached

  and touched my head—

  I’m saying: if she did, I don’t remember that she did.

  Her own youngest son had gone all the way back there to be killed

  in that war. If touch me she did,

  it might have been because I, her blood-

  descendant but knowing nothing—could

  not have restored

  to her for one second—

  even if unwittingly I could have touched

  her with the grace of a small child—

  I could not have restored

  “one iota,” as she used to say, of the world

  that had been obliterated, world

  she never once mentioned.

  from Ploughshares

  MARGARET GIBSON

  * * *

  Passage

  Once in sunlight I pinned to the clothesline a cotton sheet, a plane of light

  sheer as the mind of God,

  before we imagined that mind creased by a single word.

  With my hand I smoothed any rivel, any shirr, any suggestion of pleat or furrow.

  Whatever it was I wanted from that moment, I can’t say. It failed to edify.

  Nor did I bow.

  And yet the memory holds, and there is a joy that recurs in me much as the scent

  of summer abides in air dried sheets I unfold long after,

  lying down in them as one might in a meadow,

  as one might with a lover, as one might court the Infinite, however long it takes.

  from The Southern Review

  ARACELIS GIRMAY

  * * *

  from The Black Maria

  after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to study stars.

  “I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium. . . . So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. And all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance. . . . Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna . . . I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. . . . And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is [the thing] on the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.”

  —NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007

  Body of space. Body of dark.

  Body of light.

  The Skyview apartments

     circa 1973, a boy is

  kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who

     (it is important

  to mention here his skin

     is brown) prepares his telescope,

  the weights & rods,

     to better see the moon. His neighbor

  (it is important to mention here

     that she is white) calls the police

  because she suspects the brown boy

     of something, she does not know

  what at first, then turns,

     with her white looking,

  his telescope into a gun,

     his duffel into a bag of objects

  thieved from the neighbors’ houses

     (maybe even hers) & the police

  (it is important to mention

     that statistically they

  are also white) arrive to find

     the boy who has been turned, by now,

  into “the suspect,” on the roof

     with a long, black lens, which is,

  in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon &

     depending on who you are, reading this,

  you know that the boy is in grave danger,

     & you might have known

  somewhere quiet in your gut,

     you might have worried for him

  in the white space between lines 5 & 6,

     or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding

  your breath for him right now

     because you know this story,

  it’s a true story, though,

     miraculously, in this version

  of the story anyway,

     the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives

  to tell the police that he is studying

     the night & moon & lives

  long enough to offer them (the cops) a view

     through his telescope’s long, black eye, which,

  if I am spelling it out anyway,

     is the instrument he borrowed

  & the beautiful “trouble” he went through

     lugging it up to the roof

  to better see the leopard body of

&n
bsp;    space speckled with stars & the moon far off,

  much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing

     out) the distance between

  the white neighbor who cannot see the boy

     who is her neighbor, who,

  in fact, is much nearer

     to her than to the moon, the boy who

  wants to understand the large

     & gloriously un-human mysteries of

  the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,”

     has not been killed by the murderous jury of

  his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem

     wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof.

  This boy on the roof of this poem

     with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body

  as I write this poem my body

     is making a boy even as the radio

  calls out the Missouri coroner’s news,

     the Ohio coroner’s news.

  2015. My boy will nod

     for his milk & close his mouth around

  the black eye of my nipple.

     We will survive. How did it happen?

  The boy. The cops. My body in this poem.

     My milk pulling down into droplets of light

  as the baby drinks & drinks them down

     into the body that is his own, see it,

  splayed & sighing as a star in my arms.

     Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars.

  Maybe he will be (say it)

     the boy on the coroner’s table

  splayed & spangled

     by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made

  of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last.

  Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning,

  splendored with breaths, turned,

  by time, into, at least, this song.

  This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul”

  caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net,

  then, whoosh, back into the sea of space.

  The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing

  only things ordinary

  as water & light.

  from Harvard Review

  JEFFREY HARRISON

  * * *

  Higher Education

  Antioch, Berkeley, and Columbia

  were the ABC’s of colleges

  my father said he wouldn’t pay for—

  breeding grounds for radicalism

  he called them, as if their campuses

  were giant Petri dishes spawning

  toxic cultures. Our own pathology

  was pretty toxic at the time, both of us

  stubbornly refusing to learn

  anything about each other, or

  about ourselves for that matter, stuck

  in a rudimentary pattern of

  defining ourselves as opposites.

  I wouldn’t even look at Kenyon,

  his beloved alma mater, despite

  its long tradition as a school for

  future poets. I hadn’t read a word

  of Robert Lowell or James Wright yet,

  but I’d read Ginsberg, and the first stop

  on my college tour was Columbia,

  and that’s where I ended up going.

  And my father, to his credit, must

  have seen it was the right place for me

  or at least was unavoidable,

  so he let me go, and he paid for it.

  And the only price I had to pay

  was, when I was home on holidays,

  to suffer his barbed commentary

  about the very education he

  was financing, which ironically

  had to do with the core values of

  Western Civilization. I can’t

  remember—is forgiveness one of them?

  We both got a C in Forgiveness

  but later bumped it up to a B minus

  when, in a surprising twist, my son

  ended up at Kenyon. My father

  took real pleasure in that, though he

  was already dying by then. I thought

  of him at graduation, how proud

  he would have been for his grandson

  who, he might have joked, was a better

  student than he had ever been—all

  our ignorance put aside at least

  for that one day of celebration.

  from The Yale Review

  TERRANCE HAYES

  * * *

  Ars Poetica with Bacon

  Fortunately, the family, anxious about its diminishing

  food supply, encountered a small, possibly hostile pig

  along the way. The daughter happened upon it first

  pushing its scuffed snout against something hidden

  at the base of a thorn bush: a blood covered egg, maybe,

  or small rubber ball exactly like the sort that snapped

  from the paddle my mother used to beat me with

  when I let her down. At the time the father and mother

  were tangled in some immemorial dispute about cause

  and effect: who’d harmed whom first, how jealousy

  did not, in fact, begin as jealousy, but as desperation.

  When the daughter called out to them, they turned

  to see her lift the pig, it was no heavier than an orphan,

  from the bushes and then set it down in their path.

  They waited to see whether the pig might idle forward

  with them until they made camp or wander back toward

  the home they’d abandoned to war. Night, enclosed

  in small drops of rain, began to fall upon them.

  “Consequence” is the word that splintered my mind.

  Walking a path in the dark is about something

  the way a family is about something. Like the pig,

  I too wanted to reach through the thorns for the egg

  or ball, believing it was a symbol of things to come.

  I wanted to roll it in my palm like the head

  of a small redbird until it sang to me. I wanted

  to know how my mother passed her days having

  never touched her husband’s asshole, for example.

  Which parts of your body have never been touched,

  I wanted to ask. I’d been hired to lead the family

  from danger to a territory full of more seeds than bullets,

  but truth was, in the darkness there was no telling

  what was rooting in the soil. Plots of complete silence,

  romantics posing in a field bludgeoned by shame.

  The heart, biologically speaking, is ugly as it pumps

  its passion and fear down the veins. Which is to say,

  starting out we have no wounds to speak of

  beyond the ways our parents expressed their love.

  We were never sure what the pig was after or whether

  it was, in fact, not a pig, but some single-minded soul

  despair had turned into a pig, some devil worthy of mercy.

  Without giving away the enigmatic ending, I will say

  when we swallowed the flesh, our eyes were closed.

  from The New Yorker

  W. J. HERBERT

  * * *

  Mounting the Dove Box

  I ordered it for him online and then

  I nailed it under eaves where he could see

  a pair fly in and out with twigs, and when

  chicks fledged, they’d wobble, testing wings, and he

  would be distracted, maybe feel less pain,

  but no doves seemed to nest, though one flew in

  and we both held our breath. Then heavy rain.

  More chemo. He withdrew, black terrapin

  that settled in the mud and disappeared

  while I sat t
here and thought about the box.

  That fall as days seemed slow and cold, I cleared

  out ivy, watched the “v” of passing flocks

  while under eaves, a twig cup, half-hewn boat

  its hold, like his, unraveling, remote.

  from Southwest Review

  TONY HOAGLAND

  * * *

  Cause of Death: Fox News

  Towards the end he sat on the back porch,

  sweeping his binoculars back and forth

  over the dry scrub-brush and arroyos,

  certain he saw Mexicans

  moving through the creosote and sage

  while the TV commentators in the living room

  turned up loud enough

  for a deaf person to hear

  kept pouring gasoline on his anxiety and rage.

  In the end he preferred to think about illegal aliens,

  about welfare moms and health care socialists

  than the uncomfortable sensation of the disease

  sneaking through his tunnels in the night,

  crossing the river between his liver and his spleen.

  It was just his typical bad luck

  to be born in the historical period

  that would eventually be known

  as the twilight of the white male dinosaur,

  feeling weaker and more swollen every day

  with the earth gradually looking more like hell

  and a strange smell rising from the kitchen sink.

  In the background those big male voices

  went on and on, turning the old crank

  about hard work and god, waving the flag

  and whipping the dread into a froth.

  Then one day the old man had finally finished

  his surveillance, or it had finished him,

  and the cable TV guy

  showed up at the house apologetically,

  to take back the company equipment:

  the black, complicated box with the dangling cord

  and the gray rectangular remote control,

  like a little coffin.

  from The Sun

  JOHN HODGEN

  * * *