The Best American Poetry 2021 Read online

  I love that the tallest mountain in our solar system is safe and on Mars.

  I love dancing.

  I love being in love with the wrong people.

  I love that in the fall of 1922 Virginia Woolf wrote, “We have bitten off a large piece of life—but why not? Did I not make out a philosophy some time ago which comes to this—that one must always be on the move?”

  I love how athletes believe in the body and know it will fail them.

  I love dessert for breakfast.

  I love all of the dead.

  I love gardens.

  I love holding my breath under water.

  I love whoever it is untying our shoes.

  I love that December is summer in Australia.

  I love statues in a downpour.

  I love how no matter where on the island, at any hour, there’s at least one lit square at the top or bottom of a building in Manhattan.

  I love diners.

  I love that the stars can’t be touched.

  I love getting in a car and turning the keys just to hear music.

  I love ritual.

  I love chance, too.

  I love people who have quietly survived being misunderstood yet remain kids.

  And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended the eulogy by saying, “I cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will say au revoir.”

  I love the different ways we have of saying the same thing.

  I love anyone who cannot say goodbye.

  from The American Poetry Review

  RITA DOVE Naji, 14. Philadelphia.

  A bench, a sofa, anyplace flat—

  just let me down

  somewhere quiet, please,

  a strange lap, a patch of grass…

  What a fine cup of misery

  I’ve brought you, Mama—cracked

  and hissing with bees.

  Is that your hand? Good, I did

  good: I swear I didn’t yank or glare.

  If I rest my cheek on the curb, let it drain…

  They say we bring it on ourselves

  and trauma is what they feel

  when they rage up flashing

  in their spit-shined cars

  shouting Who do you think you are?

  until everybody’s hoarse.

  I’m better now. Pounding’s nearly stopped.

  Next time I promise I’ll watch my step.

  I’ll disappear before they can’t

  unsee me: better gone

  than one more drop in a sea of red.

  from The Paris Review

  CAMILLE T. DUNGY This’ll hurt me more

  Don’t make me send you outside to find a switch,

  my grandmother used to say. It was years before

  I had the nerve to ask her why switch was the word

  her anger reached for when she needed me to act

  a different way. Still, when I see some branches—

  wispy ones, like willows, like lilacs, like the tan-yellow

  forsythia before the brighter yellow buds—I think,

  these would make perfect switches for a whipping.

  America, there is not a place I can wander inside you

  and not feel a little afraid. Did I ever tell you about that

  time I was seven, buckled into the backseat of the Volvo,

  before buckles were a thing America required.

  My parents tried, despite everything, to keep us

  safe. It’s funny. I remember the brown hills sloping

  toward the valley. A soft brown welcome I looked for

  other places but found only there and in my grandmother’s

  skin. Yes, I have just compared my grandmother’s body

  to my childhood’s hills, America. I loved them both,

  and they taught me, each, things I needed to learn.

  You have witnessed, America, how pleasant hillsides

  can quickly catch fire. My grandmother could be like that.

  But she protected me, too. There were strawberry fields,

  wind guarded in that valley, tarped against the cold.

  America, you are good at taking care of what you value.

  Those silver-gray tarps made the fields look like a pond

  I could skate on. As the policeman questioned my dad,

  I concentrated on the view outside the back window.

  America, have you ever noticed how well you stretch

  the imagination? This was Southern California. I’d lived

  there all my life and never even seen a frozen pond.

  But there I was, in 70 degree weather, imagining

  my skates carving figure eights on a strawberry field.

  Of course my father fit the description. The imagination

  can accommodate whoever might happen along.

  America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fire

  you have also seen a river freeze over, the surface

  looking placid though you know the water deep down,

  dark as my father, is pushing and pushing, still trying

  to get ahead. We were driving home, my father said.

  My wife and my daughters, we were just on our way

  home. I know you want to know what happened next,

  America. Did my dad make it safely home or not?

  Outside this window, lilac blooms show up like a rash

  decision the bush makes each spring. I haven’t lived

  in Southern California for decades. A pond here

  killed a child we all knew. For years after that accident,

  as spring bloomed and ice thinned, my daughter

  remembered the child from her preschool. And now,

  it’s not so much that she’s forgotten. It’s more that

  it seems she’s never known that child as anything other

  than drowned. My grandmother didn’t have an answer.

  A switch is what her mother called it and her grandmother

  before her. She’d been gone from that part of America

  for over half a century, but still that southern soil

  sprang up along the contours of her tongue. America,

  I’ll tell you this much, I cannot understand this mind,

  where it reaches. Even when she was threatening

  to beat me, I liked to imagine the swishing sound

  a branch would make as it whipped toward my body

  through the resisting air. She’d say, this is hurting me

  more than it’s hurting you. I didn’t understand her then,

  but now I think I do. America, go find me a switch.

  from Literary Hub

  LOUISE ERDRICH Stone Love

  I spent a star age in flames

  Bolted to the black heavens

  Waiting for you.

  Light crept over the sill of the earth

  A thousand upon ten thousand

  Upon a hundred thousand years

  But no light touched me

  Deep in depthless time

  Waiting for you.

  Fate flung me out,

  Hauled me here

  To love as a stone loves

  Waiting for you.

  Touch me, butterfly.

  Like you, I have no hands.

  Kiss me, rain.

  Like you, I have no mouth.

  Snow sit heavily upon me.

  Like you, I can only wait.

  Come to me, dear

  Unenduring little

  Human animal.

  I have no voice

  But your voice.

  Sing to me. Speak.

  Let the clouds fly over us.

  I have spent a star age in flames

  Just to hold you.

  from Freeman’s

  KATHY FAGAN
Conqueror

  The lights are green as far as I can see

  all down the street, sweet spot pre-dawn,

  a Sunday, no one out. I measure time

  in travel now. This route’s a favorite, half

  derelict, half grand, an oak hydrangea

  blooming on old wood. I left a note

  in felt tip for my dad, prepped him, then

  reminded him last night, but at 4 I had to

  mime and mouth for him Go back to bed,

  my head tilted on sideways prayer hands.

  He looked blank, obeyed. The ophthalmologist

  explained how hard it is to see behind

  his pupils; I forget the reasons why.

  I’m at the terminal with the other early flyers,

  thinking of the faces of the ancient kings

  I’ve seen, their ears of stone, and their eyes,

  no matter the direction or the time, looking,

  as we must presume, ahead, and not inside.

  from The Kenyon Review

  CHANDA FELDMAN They Ran and Flew from You

  Your days are ordinary to and from school along the park esplanade.

  The children alert as birds and as flitting and as chirping. The sunlight

  through the Ficus and jacaranda canopy. The children run and fly

  from you to perch on the rainbow half shell egg seats. Children alight

  above your head onto the mama bird’s yellow-ringed neck. A yellow

  clump of wildflowers they pull from the ground and suck the stems.

  They warn you not to eat the petals, which are poisonous. Into the red

  birdhouse, children chatter and cor-cori-coo in echoing loops and

  in the echo’s end, they call out again. You watch them kaleidoscope

  like butterflies. They flap and fight over the lavender and spring yellow

  and peach winged seats. You watch the clambering onto the royal blue

  musical instruments emerging from the ground; curling into the body

  of sound, into the shape of tuba and trombone bells. The children take off

  their socks and shoes to scale a snail’s hump. The reward is a tree

  dangling its baubles of pitanga cherries—and adjacent a fence’s vines

  laden with passionfruit—children rip open the top with their teeth and

  slurp out the seeds and neon juice. You watch the children assemble a row

  before the national flags and the banners sketched with national songs.

  You listen as the children pitch their voices in unison.

  from The Southern Review

  NIKKY FINNEY I Feel Good

  On the occasion of the state of South Carolina taking control of the $100 million James Brown I Feel Good Trust, willed to the education of needy students, and after the death of Prince

  Whores raised him with intellect

  and savoir faire, teaching:

  pack your fragrant pants proper

  like a mattress, stock the edges

  for comfort, with newspaper

  headlines & purple velvet cock feathers,

  scrupulously tilt the tucked

  microphone like it’s your johnson,

  hips travel best when horizontal of how

  the crow flies, keep spinning and splendor

  in your daily moves, know sound

  is gilt-edged & saturnalian like lightning,

  meant to enter but never land, cotton-slide

  your closed eyes all the way back to Watusi land;

  caterwaul & amplify,

  exalt yourself on your backside,

  spell yourself out with your alligator feet,

  the world will prefer you in heels,

  when you open up the door

  sport hot curls and a sexy cape,

  drop to your knees before, during, and after

  the end of every song,

  clothes are tight for a reason,

  sweat is money in any season,

  men pretending to be wallflowers

  are all ears and antsy in the parlor,

  straining at the bit

  for you to finish your dying.

  from The Atlantic

  LOUISE GLÜCK Night School

  I am against

  symmetry, he said. He was holding in both hands

  an unbalanced piece of wood that had been

  very large once, like the limb of a tree:

  this was before its second life in the water,

  after which, though there was less of it

  in terms of mass, there was greater

  spiritual density. Driftwood,

  he said, confirms my view—this is why it seems

  inherently dramatic. To make this point,

  he tapped the wood. Rather violently, it seemed,

  because a piece broke off.

  Movement! he cried. That is the lesson! Look at these paintings,

  he said, meaning ours. I have been making art

  longer than you have been breathing

  and yet my canvases have life, they are drowning

  in life—Here he grew silent.

  I stood beside my work, which now seemed rigid and lifeless.

  We will take our break now, he said.

  I stepped outside, for a moment, into the night air.

  It was a cold night. The town was on a beach,

  near where the wood had been.

  I felt I had no future at all.

  I had tried and I had failed.

  I had mistaken my failures for triumphs.

  The phrase smoke and mirrors entered my head.

  And suddenly my teacher was standing beside me,

  smoking a cigarette. He had been smoking for many years,

  his skin was full of wrinkles.

  You were right, he said, the way

  instinctively you stepped aside.

  Not many do that, you’ll notice.

  The work will come, he said. The lines

  will emerge from the brush. He paused here

  to gaze calmly at the sea in which, now,

  all the planets were reflected. The driftwood

  is just a show, he said; it entertains the children.

  Still, he said, it is rather beautiful, I think,

  like those misshapen trees the Chinese grow.

  Pun-sai, they’re called. And he handed me

  the piece of driftwood that had broken off.

  Start small, he said. And patted my shoulder.

  from The Threepenny Review

  NANCY MILLER GOMEZ Tilt-A-Whirl

  It was a hot day in Paola, Kansas.

  The rides were banging around empty

  as we moved through the carnival music and catcalls.

  At the Tilt-A-Whirl we were the only ones.

  My big sister chose our carriage carefully,

  walking a full circle until she stopped.

  The ride operator didn’t take his eyes off her

  long dark hair and amber eyes, ringed

  like the golden interior of a newly felled pine.

  She didn’t seem to notice him lingering

  as he checked the lap bar and my sister asked

  in her sweetest, most innocent—or maybe

  not-so-innocent—voice, Can we have a long ride

  please, mister? When he sat back down

  at the joystick, he made a show

  of lighting his smoke and the cage

  of his face settled into a smile

  I would one day learn to recognize.

  Here was a man who knew

  his life would never get better,

  and those dizzying red teacups began to spin

  my sister and me into woozy amusement.

  We forgot the man, the heat, our thighs

  sticking to the vinyl seats, our bodies glued

  together in a centrifugal blur of happiness

  beneath a red metal canopy

  as we picked up speed and s
tarted to laugh,

  our heads thrown back, mouths open,

  the fabric of my sister’s shirt clinging

  to the swinging globes of her breasts

  as we went faster, and faster,

  though by then we had begun to scream, Stop!

  Please stop! Until our voices grew hoarse

  beneath the clattering pivots and dips,

  the air filling with diesel and cigarettes, and the man

  at the control stick, waiting for us

  to spin toward him again, and each time he cocked his hand

  as if sighting prey down the barrel of a gun.

  from New Ohio Review

  JORIE GRAHAM I Won’t Live Long

  enough to see any of the new

  dreams the hundreds of new kinds of suffering and weeds birds animals shouldering their

  demise without possibility of re-

  generation the heart in your tiny chest opening its new unimaginable ways of

  opening and to what might it still

  open. Will there still be

  such opening. Will you dare. I will not be there

  to surround you w/the past w/my ways of

  knowing—to save

  you—shall you be saved—from what—

  home from fighting are you, remembering how he or she or they looked at you

  while you both fed the machine or built the trough in dirt

  where it will be necessary to

  plant again—will it open—will the earth open—will the seeds that remain—will you know to

  find them in

  time—will those who have their lock on you

  let the openings which are

  chance unknowing loneliness the unrelenting arms of

  form, which knows not yet the form

  it will in the end

  be, open and

  form? Will there be islands. Will there be a day where you can afford to think back far

  enough to the way we loved you. Words you said

  for the first time

  as we said them. Mystery your grandfather said one day, after saying shhh listen to the

  birds & you sat so still,

  all your being arcing out to hear,

  and the bird in its hiding place gave us this future, this moment today when you can recall—