The Best American Poetry 2019 Read online

  The days are sad and many people’s backs hurt.

  We are too occupied with our devices to notice

  what is crescendoing in the woods.

  Cell phones are like bird coffins in our hands.

  No one makes love without a mirror or a camera to witness—

  often the sounds are recorded.

  No one gets injured without posting pictures of the wound,

  the veering drive to urgent care, the forlorn face of the nurse

  sewing the stitches, the hot dog eaten afterward.

  What is this ceaseless self-focus, but the hoopla,

  hue, and cry of an un-held baby?

  A harelip never tended with a floral unguent.

  No rain or sun on our skin, only the hum and haloes

  of screens swaddling us. So when an angelic transvestite

  in powder blue hot pants and lustrous butterfly wings

  approaches us on the avenue with an offer of a piece of her soul,

  along with a piece of dulce de leche ice-cream pie

  and a shot of pink-tinted tequila, we are too vanished inside

  a dull vortex, looking at facsimiles of flowers, fountains & females

  to invite her inside and massage her exquisite feet.

  Instead, we become frantic and apoplectic to find that we’ve lost

  our chargers and it’s 3:17 am and the Apple Store is closed

  and we don’t notice the twenty-four-carat

  cut-adrift angel

  walking away on black pavement

  swaying her veritable ass—

  ferrying her gifts out of reach.

  from The Kenyon Review

  MARTÍN ESPADA

  * * *

  I Now Pronounce You Dead

  for Sacco and Vanzetti, executed August 23, 1927

  On the night of his execution, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant

  from Italia, fishmonger, anarchist, shook the hand of Warden Hendry

  and thanked him for everything. I wish to forgive some people for what

  they are now doing to me, said Vanzetti, blindfolded, strapped down

  to the chair that would shoot two thousand volts through his body.

  The warden’s eyes were wet. The warden’s mouth was dry. The warden

  heard his own voice croak: Under the law I now pronounce you dead.

  No one could hear him. With the same hand that shook the hand

  of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Warden Hendry of Charlestown Prison

  waved at the executioner, who gripped the switch to yank it down.

  The walls of Charlestown Prison are gone, to ruin, to dust, to mist.

  Where the prison stood there is a school; in the hallways, tongues

  speak the Spanish of the Dominican, the Portuguese of Cabo Verde,

  the Creole of Haiti. No one can hear the last words of Vanzetti,

  or the howl of thousands on Boston Common when they knew.

  After midnight, at the hour of the execution, Warden Hendry

  sits in the cafeteria, his hand shaking as if shocked, rice flying off

  his fork, so he cannot eat no matter how the hunger feeds on him,

  muttering the words that only he can hear: I now pronounce you dead.

  from Massachusetts Review

  NAUSHEEN EUSUF

  * * *

  The Analytic Hour

  1.

  A suspension in time. A pause, a parenthesis,

  a rarefaction, an exstasis.

  The error in the script: an inscrutable other.

  Not Erlebnis, but Erfahrung,

  its frozen terror. The funhouse you feared

  with its jeering maze of mirrors

  where all reference reveals the uncongealed

  humors of its clowning tutelar.

  2.

  To my right, the single window an oculus

  onto the world: a tiled roof,

  each tile gently overlapping the one below,

  hiding the nails, joints, seams,

  the structure that keeps the whole in place,

  armored against the elements.

  Above the neat row of houses, the contrails

  of a jet, its trail cleaving the sky.

  3.

  What are you thinking? I could ask you

  the same, but to no avail.

  I am thinking of the window. Refulgence.

  Luminosity. The grand fiat.

  The diaphanous curtains hung between

  the light and me—I who see

  but do not see. More light, for god’s sake,

  more light. Let there be light.

  4.

  I free-associate, though nothing is free.

  Free, feral, ferrous. A rusty

  outdoor faucet, the one that watered

  my mother’s garden,

  its brass now weathered to verdigris.

  The handle won’t budge.

  A drop of water hangs vestigial from

  the stiff rounded lip.

  5.

  Who needs a garden? Thy will be done.

  New spirits inhabit

  the stations of hearth and home. Take them:

  I give them to you.

  The clock avows the hour. Nothing happens.

  Nothing ever happens.

  An exercise in detachment, divestiture.

  I learn how not to need.

  from The American Scholar

  VIEVEE FRANCIS

  * * *

  Canzone in Blue, Then Bluer

  There wasn’t music as much as there was

  terror so the music became as much a

  part of the terror as the terror it-

  self with the swell of the arpeggio building and

  breaking, building and breaking, upon the shores

  of you. Your shores washed slowly away but

  not slowly enough, you still feel it, every grain

  of sand a note going under, bluing the

  body, granular and wet. This has happened

  before. You weren’t special. You belonged to

  no group of any more particular concern

  than another. But the music has become

  you. The hurt coming out, from your open mouth, could

  open a grave. Let every done-wrong haint throw

  its head back and groan. Not done-wrong as in some-

  body loved left, somebody is always left,

  but done-wrong as in someone who deserved to live

  as much as anyone else died by another’s hands

  or neglect or the indifference of someone

  who cared less or just not about you. And you sang

  like you cried until the music of leaving,

  of long-gone became you. Does it matter how

  many strings? It only takes one to make this

  music. But let’s say it was the sound of

  a choir that accompanied the run of

  blood down a leg. Let’s say a violin sped

  its notes down the side of a neck, a tirade

  of pricks. Or a high C from a voice thrown sharp

  as the pieces of skull a bullet through the

  head would leave. Or the river, the river rush-

  ing cold and rock-bottomed, with its own furious

  song carries you with it, sings you right over

  the falls. That is when terror is not blue but bluer,

  blue as capillaries bursting from an eye,

  blue as the vein under this razor, blue as

  the skin beat so far it breaks into song, a

  song like this. And I’ve sung this so many times dear

  my voice has almost given way, and I’m so scared.

  from Asheville Poetry Review

  GABRIELA GARCIA

  * * *

  Guantanamera

  Nothing lingers on the lips like a death song,

  my mother says, while shredding cassava

  and invoking the spirits—

  C
elia Cruz  José Martí—

  or singing blood verse, a church lady

  working the line, refugee intake.

  Celia rolling pride through a gap

  in her teeth, a cry that is palm tree split

  middle-of-night lightning,

  and my mother, hands full of seashell witchcraft,

  hands full of rooster feather prayer,

  says the ocean tastes different

  once we’ve drunk it all, once we’ve bongo beat

  to water bumping on a home-baked raft: we

  pilgrims who sway and dip to the sky because

  how close to almost-death is our trombone shriek

  and even if we deny it—our blackness

  our fufú plátano quimbombó-ness,

  we end up riding the rhythm

  on the right pause, roaring lineage on our hips

  and in our swings when

  we are dancing across the oceans like gods.

  from Cincinnati Review

  AMY GERSTLER

  * * *

  Update

  My dresses huddle in their closet.

  No histrionics, no tears. They’re undaunted,

  unhaunted, since you disappeared.

  Torture by laundry and mothball

  is all I can offer them, though it’s Christmas.

  And despite the holiday, there’s endless

  wrestling on TV. Is that your nudge to me:

  toughen up and roll with the punches?

  Here on earth, another rough era is birthed.

  Sea monsters burst from the surf,

  through waves of what we’ve mistaken

  for civilization. Any advice from the heights

  where you’re exiled? Some flutter of succor

  to dial back the angst to a dull roar? Though you

  are no more, the onions you planted, shoved

  underground, too, send shoots into this persistent

  rain, feelers like little green racks of antlers. Your

  bougainvillea’s ablaze with reds, magentas

  and noisy finches. The maple tree lost her leaves,

  then grew six inches. I’ll slip on my coat and hike

  to the river, praying I see your image, fringed

  by whitewater, in it. If I do, can you gift

  me with savagery-management tips, or some

  comforting sign, surreptitiously, via the mist?

  from Ploughshares

  CAMILLE GUTHRIE

  * * *

  Virgil, Hey

  Ah me! I find myself middle-aged divorced lost

  In the forest dark of my failures mortgage & slack breasts

  It’s hard to admit nobody wants to do me anymore

  Not even Virgil will lead me down to his basement rental

  Take a look at my firstborn son

  Who put me on three months’ bedrest

  For whom I bled on the emergency room floor

  Who declaims his device sucks

  Stabs holes in his bedroom wall

  Complains his ATV’s too slow

  Who plots to run away to join terrorists

  He’d rather die than do math

  And the little one ripped

  From my womb in the surgery room

  I pierced my nipples to unblock her milk

  Who pours lemonade on the floor for skating

  Howls in rage cause her cake isn’t pretty

  Carved No Mom on her door with scissors

  Who says, No fence but you’re kinda fat

  She’d rather die than wear underpants

  Virgil, hey! Send me down

  To the second circle of hell where I belong

  With those whom Love separated from Reason

  Where an infernal hurricane will blast me

  Hither & thither with no hope ever no comfort

  Rather than drive these two to school this morning

  And suffer forever with the other mothers

  from The New Republic

  YONA HARVEY

  * * *

  Dark and Lovely After Take-Off (A Future)

  Nobody straightens their hair anymore.

  Space trips & limited air supplies will get you conscious quick.

  My shea-buttered braids glow planetary

  as I turn unconcerned, unburned by the pre-take-off bother.

  “Leave it all behind,” my mother’d told me,

  sweeping the last specs of copper thread from her front porch steps &

  just as quick, she turned her back to me. Why

  had she disappeared so suddenly behind that earthly door?

  “Our people have made progress, but, perhaps,”

  she’d said once, “not enough to guarantee safe voyage

  to the Great Beyond,” beyond where Jesus

  walked, rose, & ascended in the biblical tales that survived

  above sprocket-punctured skylines &

  desert-dusted runways jeweled with wrenches & sheet metal scraps.

  She’d no doubt exhale with relief to know

  ancient practice & belief died hard among the privileged, too.

  Hundreds of missions passed & failed, but here

  I was strapped in my seat, anticipating—what exactly?

  Curved in prayer or remembrance of a hurt

  so deep I couldn’t speak. Had that been me slammed to the ground, cuffed,

  bulleted with pain as I danced with pain

  I couldn’t shake loose, even as the cops aimed pistols at me,

  my body & mind both disconnected

  & connected & unable to freeze, though they shouted “freeze!”

  like actors did on bad television.

  They’d watched & thought they recognized me, generic or bland,

  without my mother weeping like Mary,

  Ruby, Idella, Geneava, or Ester stunned with a grief

  our own countrymen refused to see, to

  acknowledge or cease initiating, instigating, &

  even mocking in the social networks,

  ignorant frays bent and twisted like our DNA denied

  but thriving and evident nonetheless—

  You better believe the last things I saw when far off lifted

  were Africa Africa Africa

  Africa Africa Africa Africa Africa . . .

  & though it pained me to say it sooner:

  the unmistakable absence of the Great Barrier Reef.

  from Poem-a-Day

  ROBERT HASS

  * * *

  Dancing

  The radio clicks on—it’s poor swollen America,

  Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation

  Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not

  A man who kills fifty people in five minutes

  With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose

  Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Or if terrorists

  Are mentally ill. Because if killing large numbers of people

  With sophisticated weapons is a sign of sickness—

  You might want to begin with fire, our early ancestors

  Drawn to the warmth of it—from lightning,

  Must have been, the great booming flashes of it

  From the sky, the tree shriveled and sizzling,

  Must have been, an awful power, the odor

  Of ozone a god’s breath; or grass fires,

  The wind whipping them, the animals stampeding,

  Furious, driving hard on their haunches from the terror

  Of it, so that to fashion some campfire of burning wood,

  Old logs, must have felt like feeding on the crumbs

  Of the god’s power and they would tell the story

  Of Prometheus the thief, and the eagle that feasted

  On his liver, told it around a campfire, must have been,

  And then—centuries, millennia—some tribe

  Of meticulous gatherers, some medicine woman,

  Or craftsman of metal
discovered some sands that,

  Tossed into the fire, burned blue or flared green,

  So simple the children could do it, must have been,

  Or some soft stone rubbed to a powder that tossed

  Into the fire gave off a white phosphorescent glow.

  The word for chemistry from a Greek—some say Arabic—

  Stem associated with metal work. But it was in China

  Two thousand years ago that fireworks were invented—

  Fire and mineral in a confined space to produce power—

  They knew already about the power of fire and water

  And the power of steam: 100 BC, Julius Caesar’s day.

  In Alexandria, a Greek mathematician produced

  A steam-powered turbine engine. Contain, explode.

  “The earliest depiction of a gunpowder weapon

  Is the illustration of a fire-lance on a mid-12th century

  Silk banner from Dunhuang.” Silk and the silk road.

  First Arab guns in the early fourteenth century. The English

  Used cannons and a siege gun at Calais in 1346.

  Cerignola, 1503: the first battle won by the power of rifles

  When Spanish “arquebusters” cut down Swiss pikemen

  And French cavalry in a battle in southern Italy.

  (Explosions of blood and smoke, lead balls tearing open

  The flesh of horses and young men, peasants mostly,

  Farm boys recruited to the armies of their feudal overlords.)

  How did guns come to North America? 2014,

  A headline: DIVERS DISCOVER THE SANTA MARIA

  One of the ship’s Lombard cannons may have been stolen

  By salvage pirates off the Haitian reef where it had sunk.

  And Cortés took Mexico with 600 men, 17 horses, 12 cannons.

  And LaSalle, 1679, constructed a seven-cannon barque,

  Le Griffon, and fired his cannons upon first entering the continent’s