The Best American Poetry 2013 Read online

  Book of Forget

  I made a stage out of an abandoned house, small

  enough for me to look bigger, and I walked from end

  to end in spangles, shaking what my momma

  gave me in a symphony jiggling out over the dry

  desert night. I danced after the knife thrower threw

  his blades and before the velvet clown kicked away

  his chair and hung himself, his tongue thick and purple,

  urine dribbling down to the boards. There were

  men in the audience, their hands hidden,

  but mostly the darkness around me was oily

  and the floods couldn’t pool much further than the music

  carried. Once a woman came and sat in the front row,

  wife to one husband who stayed overlong in my dressing room.

  She watched my entire act. I hope she went away

  with some kind of answer, but these steps remain

  the same regardless of who watches: one two, and I turn,

  three four, I cock the hip. I wanted to be a contortionist,

  to stand on my own neck before anyone else could,

  but the world is full of women who can halve themselves.

  My talent is in looking like someone you want

  when the lights are on and like anyone who’ll do when they’re off.

  There are other ways to dance but I never learned.

  There are other ways to forget. This one barely works.

  from AGNI

  ELIZABETH HAZEN

  Thanatosis

  For those who cannot camouflage themselves,

  the alternative to fight or flight is tonic

  immobility. The victim’s one trick:

  to keel over. The cooling skin expels

  foul smells, teeth clench, eyes glaze, the heart sustains

  a sluggish thump. What’s outside can’t revive

  the creature; it feels nothing, though alive,

  paralyzed while the predator remains.

  Waiting in the closet behind my mother’s

  dresses, scent of hyacinth, I transmute—

  mouth pressed in the wool of her one good suit—

  into a speechless, frozen thing. The others

  call me from far away, but I am fixed

  right here. As if these shadows have cast doubt

  across my way of seeing. I don’t want out,

  and like the prey who plays at rigor mortis,

  biding her time when the enemy is near,

  while I’m inside this darkness I can see

  no difference between death and immobility,

  what it is to hide and to disappear.

  from Southwest Review

  JOHN HENNESSY

  Green Man, Blue Pill

  Her first assumption: life’s hard, so Mom runs trails

  through Amherst’s woods. She sidesteps mud puddles,

  clears mosquito larvae swimming there.

  They’ve got a right, too, she says. Trim, spare

  in words and body, she wears Bettie Page–

  bangs, yoga pants and sunburst tops, her age

  irrelevant. She trots around burdock root, cuts

  the tap to grind for toothache, back spasms, dandruff,

  abrupt as mushrooms sprouting in her wake,

  or lichen spreading across the rocks she mistakes

  for hunting cats at first. Even they’ve come back,

  big cats sauntering past stopped trains, blown tracks,

  retracing dead routes across the northern plains.

  She’s run through hot flashes, frost in her mane,

  sidled around men and let them lap, her claws

  retracted, still sharp, made long by menopause.

  She sees herself in trillium blooming near

  the brook, cracked robin’s eggs, fronds growing clear

  of jack-pine roots. Once, she’d have brought the fire,

  a bladder full of kerosene and sparking wires,

  but now she’s grown more careful near her man.

  Love pats, tongue prompts, powders—with help the plan

  includes a morning hour—clary sage, wild

  green oats, deer velvet, rose maroc, a vial

  of blue pills—what hasn’t this old May Queen

  already fed her Corn King, Jack-in-the-Green?

  And he needs his run, too. Thick-limbed, slow-pulsed,

  his sap eases through branch and leaf, the hulk

  of late middle-age, and nothing polite is left

  to sacrifice. He plods—he stumps—he hefts

  his trunk along. He seems half worms and wood chips

  and wears the holly crown around his hips

  these days. Life’s hard, my mother likes to say,

  still hard. Me, I like to remember them in flagrante,

  woods blazing, dodder’s twining orange vines

  trimming their legs, white flowers, burning tines.

  from Southwest Review

  DAVID HERNANDEZ

  All-American

  I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere

  in between, and everywhere in between

  bony and overweight, my shadow cannot hold

  one shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen.

  My skin is mocha brown, two shades darker

  than taupe, your question is racist, nutmeg, beige,

  I’m not offended by your question at all.

  Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight?

  Both boxes. Bi, not bi, who cares, stop

  fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveled

  his eye to a bedroom’s keyhole. I go to church

  in Tempe, in Waco, the one with the exquisite

  stained glass, the one with a white spire

  like the tip of a Klansman’s hood. Churches

  creep me out, I never step inside one,

  never utter hymns, Sundays I hide my flesh

  with camouflage and hunt. I don’t hunt

  but wish every deer wore a bulletproof vest

  and fired back. It’s cinnamon, my skin,

  it’s more sandstone than any color I know.

  I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader, I was too

  apathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block,

  two blocks to the voting booth. For or against

  a woman’s right to choose? Yes, for and against.

  For waterboarding, for strapping detainees

  with snorkels and diving masks. Against burning

  fossil fuels, let’s punish all those smokestacks

  for eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls,

  but build more smokestacks, we need jobs

  here in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Against

  gun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing

  a better fence along the border, let’s raise

  concrete toward the sky, why does it need

  all that space to begin with? For creating

  holes in the fence, adding ladders, they’re not

  here to steal work from us, no one dreams

  of crab walking for hours across a lettuce field

  so someone could order the Caesar salad.

  No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down

  the cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise,

  but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers.

  Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully

  steer a mower around the cemetery grounds.

  Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor

  the power grid. Some of us ring you up

  while some of us crisscross a parking lot

  to gather the shopping carts into one long,

  rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.

  from The Southern Review and Poetry Daily

  TONY HOAGLAND

  Wrong Question

  Are you all right? she asks, wrinkling her brow,

  and I think how unfair that que
stion is,

  how it rises up and hangs there in the air

  like a Welcome sign shining in the dark;

  Are you all right? is all she has to say

  with that faint line between her eyebrows

  that signifies concern,

  and her soft, moral-looking mouth,

  and I feel as if I have fallen off my bike

  and she wants to take care of my skinned knee

  back at her apartment.

  Are you all right? she says,

  and all the belts begin to move inside my factory

  and all the little citizens of me

  lay down their tasks, stand up and start to sing

  their eight-hour version of The Messiah of my Unhappiness.

  Am I all right?

  I thought I was all right before she asked,

  but now I find that I have never been all right.

  There is something soft and childish at my core

  I have not been able to eliminate.

  And yet—it is the question I keep answering.

  from Fifth Wednesday Journal

  ANNA MARIA HONG

  A Parable

  At the edge of the village roofed with mossy

  slate, stood a hermitage, an embassy, and

  a palace. Being spent, we chose to enter

  the palace, a very busy place. Messy as we

  were, we were treated like royals,

  Class E, which entailed the following

  advantages: Being served muesli in vintage

  glasses, being assuaged that the King’s

  boozy rhetoric would not become policy,

  and three, having the opportunity to bless

  the day’s carnage in homage to the deceased

  Queen. Such delicacies! For our wages,

  we were pinned with corsages dense with

  glossy leaves, which became permanent

  appendages. A page waved to indicate

  that it was time to go to the embassy,

  where nothing memorable happened. Then

  it was on to the hermitage, the last stage,

  where we would presage the image of ecstasy

  and thus emboss our legacies. We pledged

  to finesse the fallacy of hedge and spillage

  and erase the badge of unease around certain

  engagements. We gauged our audience and the time.

  We lost our accents and flimsy excuses in a gorgeous

  cortège. We learnt to parse our emphases.

  We became quite adept. In the distance, always

  the glass sea breaking. It was our time to savage.

  from Boston Review

  MAJOR JACKSON

  Why I Write Poetry

  Because my son is as old as the stars

  Because I have no blessings

  Because I hold tangerines like orange tennis balls

  Because I sit alone and welcome morning across

  the unshaved jaws of my lawn

  Because the houses on my street sleep like turtles

  Because the proper weight of beauty was her eyes

  last night beneath my eyes

  Because the red goblet from which I drank

  made even water a Faustian toast

  Because radishes should be banned, little pellets

  that they are

  Because someone says it’s late and begins to rise from a chair

  Because a single drop of rain is hope for the thirsty

  Because life is ordinary unless you plan

  and set in motion a war

  Because I have not thanked enough

  Because my lips moisten whenever I hear Mingus’s

  “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”

  Because I’ve said the word dumbfuck too many times in my life

  Because I plant winter vegetables in July

  Because I could say the morning died like candle wax

  and no one would question its truth

  Because I relished being sent into the coat room

  in 3rd grade where alone, I would turn off the light

  and run my hands over my classmates’ coats

  as if playing tag with their bodies

  Because once I shoplifted a pair of Hawaiian shorts

  and was caught at the Gallery Mall

  Because soup reminds me of the warmth

  of my grandmother and old aunts

  Because the long coast of my dreams is filled

  with saxophones and poems

  Because somewhere someone is buying a Rolex or a Piaget

  Because I wish I could speak three different languages

  but have to settle for the language of business

  and commerce

  Because I used to wear paisley shirts and herringbone sports jackets

  Because I better git it in my soul

  Because my grandfather loved clean syntax,

  cologne, Stacy Adams shoes, Irish tweed caps,

  and women, but not necessarily in that order

  Because I think the elderly are sexy

  and the young are naïve and brutish

  Because a vision of trees only comes to

  wise women and men who can fix old watches

  Because I write with a pen whose supply of ink

  comes from the sea

  Because gardens are fun to visit in the evenings

  when everyone has put away their coats and swords

  Because I still do not eat corporate French fries or rhubarb jam

  Because punctuation is my jury and the moon is my judge

  Because my best friend in 4th grade chased

  city buses from corner to corner

  Because his cousin’s father could not stop looking

  up at the sky after his return from the war

  Because parataxis is just another way of making ends meet

  Because I have been on a steady diet of words

  since the age of three.

  from Ploughshares

  MARK JARMAN

  George W. Bush

  Because he felt that Jesus changed his heart

  he listened to his heart and took its counsel.

  When asked if he felt any of that counsel

  had impacted the veterans he rode with

  on a bike trek through hills and river beds—

  some of the men without their limbs but able

  to keep up despite the chafing ghost pain—

  he said how honored he felt to be with them.

  But no, he said, still listening to his heart,

  the heart that Jesus changed, “I bear no guilt.”

  How much is anyone whose heart speaks for him

  responsible for what his heart has told him?

  The occupation of the heart is pumping

  blood, but for some it is to offer counsel,

  especially if it has been so changed

  all that it says must finally be trusted.

  Nested within the lungs, sprouting its branches,

  the heart is not an organ of cognition.

  But some would argue that its power is greater

  than the mind’s even, once the heart is changed.

  And so a change of heart he believed saved him.

  I hope we understand belief like that,

  for there are many we would grant that mystery.

  The challenge is to grant the same to him.

  Perhaps we can remember one of the columnists

  who often wrote as his apologist,

  arguing that a convicted murderer

  must still be executed for her crime,

  even though she had found the Lord in prison.

  Forgiveness was between her and the Lord.

  If we’re outraged at him or at each other,

  who will come between us and our outrage?

  If there’s no guilt to bear, what’s to forgive?

  Our losses are unbearable. Our pain

  will have to be the ghost of our
forgiveness.

  from Five Points

  LAUREN JENSEN

  it’s hard as so much is

  punctuated wrong. honest. human. my uncle

  committed suicide when i was in the sixth grade,

  basement/gun, gun/basement as if

  these things come in a package with the special bonus

  of a cracked open door, cigarette smoke,

  revolving fan. when i think of my uncle i find myself

  trying not to think about my uncle and then

  i think about him even more.

  how at a seminar that discussed “helpful tips

  for a successful interview,” two panelists debated

  whether first and last impressions

  were the most important part of it all, but i find it

  hard to imagine a leather band without a clock,

  a body without its belly or a poem without its middle.

  would “it’s hard as so much is” followed by

  the line i haven’t written yet satisfy (you)

  me? at times i forget to embrace the afternoon,

  only love the morning, only kiss what falls above

  the waist and there are so many parts of the day/body,

  body/day that go untouched and i think it’s because

  in the light i think about what others think

  too much. consider that (me writing) you reading

  this now might be wondering where the “heart” went

  and if this will eventually fit together, function

  how i want, but it won’t. but only because the middles

  are such a necessary mess that i could endlessly sift

  like the second drawer where an incomplete deck

  of playing cards and sewing needles and a ceramic

  monkey with a missing tail and other stuff

  can be found, and it’s the “stuff” that i love the most

  that i often forget, let go. like two summers

  before the gun went in my uncle’s mouth,

  and how his chevron mustache would scratch my face

  and how he would pick me up over his head

  and how his arms held me at my bathing-suited waist.

  from Mid-American Review

  A. VAN JORDAN

  Blazing Saddles

  Mel Brooks, 1975

  What’s so funny about racism

  is how the racists never get the joke.