The Best American Poetry 2019 Read online

  Interior. The sky darkened by the terror of the birds.

  In the dream time, they are still rising, swarming,

  Darkening the sky, the chorus of their cries sharpening

  As the echo of that first astounding explosion shimmers

  On the waters, the crew blinking at the wind of their wings.

  Springfield Arsenal, 1777. Rock Island Arsenal, 1862.

  The original Henry rifle: a sixteen shot .44 caliber rimfire

  Lever-action, breech-loading rifle patented—it was an age

  Of tinkerers—by one Benjamin Tyler Henry in 1860,

  Just in time for the Civil War. Confederate casualties

  In battle: about 95,000. Union casualties in battle:

  About 110,000. Contain, explode. They were throwing

  Sand into the fire, a blue flare, an incandescent green.

  The Maxim machine gun, 1914, 400–600 small caliber rounds

  Per minute. The deaths in combat, all sides, 1914–1918

  Was 8,042,189. Someone was counting. Must have been.

  They could send things whistling into the air by boiling water.

  The children around the fire must have shrieked with delight

  1920: Iraq, the peoples of that place were “restive,”

  Under British rule and Winston Churchill

  Invented the new policy of “aerial policing” which amounted,

  Sources say, to bombing civilians and then pacifying them

  With ground troops. Which led to the tactic of terrorizing civilian

  Populations in World War II. Total casualties in that war,

  Worldwide: soldiers, 21 million; civilians, 27 million.

  They were throwing sand into the fire. The ancestor who stole

  Lightning from the sky had his guts eaten by an eagle.

  Spreadeagled on a rock, the great bird feasting.

  They are wondering if he is a terrorist or mentally ill.

  London, Dresden. Berlin. Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

  The casualties difficult to estimate. Hiroshima:

  66,000 dead, 70,000 injured. In a minute. Nagasaki:

  39,000 dead; 25,000. There were more people killed,

  100,000, in more terrifying fashion in the firebombing

  Of Tokyo. Two arms races after the ashes settled.

  The other industrial countries couldn’t get there

  Fast enough. Contain, burn. One scramble was

  For the rocket that delivers the explosion that burns humans

  By the tens of thousands and poisons the earth in the process.

  They were wondering if the terrorist was crazy. If he was

  A terrorist, maybe he was just unhappy. The other

  Challenge afterwards was how to construct machine guns

  A man or a boy could carry: lightweight, compact, easy to assemble.

  First a Russian sergeant, a Kalashnikov, clever with guns

  Built one on a German model. Now the heavy machine gun,

  The weapon of European imperialism through which

  A few men trained in gunnery could slaughter native armies

  In Africa and India and the mountains of Afghanistan,

  Became “a portable weapon a child can operate.”

  The equalizer. So the undergunned Vietnamese insurgents

  Fought off the greatest army in the world, so the Afghans

  Fought off the Soviet army using Kalashnikovs the CIA

  Provided to them. They were throwing powders in the fire

  And dancing. Children’s armies in Africa toting AK-47s

  That fire thirty rounds a minute. A round is a bullet.

  An estimated 500 million firearms on the earth.

  100 million of them are Kalashnikov-style semiautomatics.

  They were dancing in Orlando, in a club. Spring night.

  Gay Pride. The relation of the total casualties to the history

  Of the weapon that sent exploded metal into their bodies—

  30 rounds a minute, or 40, is a beautifully made instrument,

  And in America you can buy it anywhere—and into the history

  Of the shaming culture that produced the idea of Gay Pride—

  They were mostly young men, they were dancing in a club,

  A spring night. The radio clicks on. Green fire. Blue fire.

  The immense flocks of terrified birds still rising

  In wave after wave above the waters in the dream time.

  Crying out sharply. As the French ship breasted the vast interior

  Of the new land. America. A radio clicks on. The Arabs,

  A commentator is saying, require a heavy hand. Dancing.

  from The American Poetry Review

  TERRANCE HAYES

  * * *

  American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

  For her last birthday I found in a used New Jersey

  Toy store, a six inch Amiri Baraka action figure

  With three different outfits: an elaborately colored

  Dashiki with afro pick; a black linen Leninist getup,

  And a sports coat with elbow patches & wool Kangol.

  Accessories include an ink pen & his father’s pistol.

  If you dip him in bathwater, he will leak

  The names of his abandoned children. Pull a string,

  He sings “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”

  Sweeter than the sweetest alto to ever sing

  In the Boys Choir of Harlem. The store clerk tried

  Selling me the actual twenty volume note LeRoi Jones

  Wrote the night before Baraka put a bullet in him.

  I would’ve bought it. But I had no room in my suitcase.

  from Harvard Review

  JUAN FELIPE HERRERA

  * * *

  Roll Under the Waves

  we roll under the waves

  not above them we bodysurf and somehow we lose

  the momentum there are memories trailing us empty orange

  and hot pink bottles of medicines left behind

  buried next to a saguaro there are baby backpacks

  and a thousand shoes and a thousand gone steps

  leading in the four directions each one without destinations

  there are men lying facedown forever and women

  dragging under the fences and children still running with

  torn faces all the way to Tucson leathery and peeling

  there are vigilantes with skull dust on their palms

  and the trigger and the sputum and the moon with

  its pocked hope and its blessings and its rotations into the spikes

  there is a road forgotten with a tiny sweet roof of twigs

  and a black griddle threaded with songs like the one

  about el contrabando from El Paso there is nothing

  a stolen land forgotten too a stolen life branded and

  tied and thrown into the tin patrol box with flashes of trees

  and knife-shaped rivers and the face of my mother Luz and

  water running next to the animals still thrashing choking

  their low burnt violin muffled screams in rings

  of roses across the mountains

  from Love’s Executive Order

  EDWARD HIRSCH

  * * *

  Stranger by Night

  After I lost

  my peripheral vision

  I started getting sideswiped

  by pedestrians cutting

  in front of me

  almost randomly

  like memories

  I couldn’t see coming

  as I left the building

  at twilight

  or stepped gingerly

  off the curb

  or even just crossed

  the wet pavement

  to the stairs descending

  precipitously

  into the subway station

  and I apologized

  to every one

&nb
sp; of those strangers

  jostling me

  in a world that had grown

  stranger by night.

  from The Threepenny Review

  JANE HIRSHFIELD

  * * *

  Ledger

  Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is 3,592 measures.

  A voice kept far from feeling is heard as measured.

  What’s wanted in desperate times are desperate measures.

  Pushkin’s unfinished Onegin: 5,446 lines.

  No visible tears measure the pilot’s grief

  as she Lidars the height of an island: five feet.

  Fifty, its highest leaf.

  She logs the years, the weathers, the tree has left.

  A million fired-clay bones—animal, human—

  set down in a field as protest

  measure 400 yards long, 60 yards wide, weigh 112 tons.

  The length and weight and silence of the bereft.

  Bees do not question the sweetness of what sways beneath them.

  One measure of distance is meters. Another is li.

  Ten thousand li can be translated: “far.”

  For the exiled, home can be translated “then,” translated “scar.”

  One liter

  of Polish vodka holds twelve pounds of potatoes.

  What we care about most, we call beyond measure.

  What matters most, we say counts. Height now is treasure.

  On this scale of one to ten, where is eleven?

  Ask all you wish, no twenty-fifth hour will be given.

  Measuring mounts—like some Western bar’s mounted elk head—

  our catalogued vanishing unfinished heaven.

  from Times Literary Supplement

  JAMES HOCH

  * * *

  Sunflowers

  Standing in front of Van Gogh’s portrait,

  the winter one with the bandage and heavy

  green overcoat, blue hat with black fur,

  every stroke pained as the mangled face

  he is showing us, mangled but repairing

  as if he’s lived through something worth

  pleading, shellacked and deft on canvas—

  my son asks What happened to his head?

  He’s still a kid and doesn’t know the story,

  the unbearability of loving the ones who leave.

  When I don’t answer he eats the quiet,

  the way when I turn down the radio’s litany

  of casualties, he hunkers like a monk

  burying his head in a bowl of Cheerios.

  But really, what is there to say about that—

  A photo of my brother patrolling a field

  of sunflowers in Afghanistan. It’ll be years

  before he understands the ear, that presence

  implicates the missing. It’ll be just after

  school lets out, driving to the grocery store,

  and he will tell me about another Van Gogh,

  a vase of sunflowers, they studied in art class.

  Simple task: To record in journals how each

  differs, this head from that, this paint from that.

  We will be crossing the creek bridge

  and he will be mid-sentence and I will be

  thinking summer—Roadsides lined with flowers

  in black buckets, and birds taking seed

  out of ones we plant along the garden fence,

  wondering if he knows about Gauguin,

  the Yellow House in Arles. And just when

  I feel I am almost useful, he will ask:

  Did your brother have to kill anyone?

  What I don’t know becomes signature.

  What I can’t say becomes silence

  and silence scores the mind, and the mind,

  never letting go, takes the marks and makes

  a house of the cuttings. But all that’s outside

  the frame. We are here now, looking

  backward and forward at a painting of a man

  injured by love. And if I had the means,

  I’d ditch the day, turn all elsewheres noise,

  and hold truant the coma calm of a museum.

  And if I had the heart not to feel this forever

  is not the one my son wants, I’d break it,

  strew it against the bric-a-brac and static.

  To stay still this long is a terrible thing to ask.

  from The American Poetry Review

  BOB HOLMAN

  * * *

  All Praise Cecil Taylor

  Rhythm is the Life of Space of Time danced through.

  —Cecil Taylor

  Them laugh them cry them fingers flip wise

  Troll the riverbed dead not dead not dead

  Once after the concert you told me it was not after the concert

  This is the concert is just what you said

  I remember that now along with dead not dead not dead

  So a blew note blows trill still the hurricane of silence

  You mentioned how the string got unstrung and when it rung

  That’s where it begun so begin again a little closer to the end

  Where the bend won’t bend and the bang hangs a blend

  Right at the point and left with the joint just hammer

  Hammer the pale night nail (hammer the pale night nail)

  The jawdropper corral where the pedal dance flail

  That’s the cozy up to it reborn, where the Stop sign is a square

  Baby understands, rocks the baby grand and rolls the key

  Till the lock screams “I Give” and all the dough

  Comes rolling up to Heaven’s creak, squeak squeak

  from Black Renaissance Noire

  GARRETT HONGO

  * * *

  The Bathers, Cassis

  It’s too hot to think much about the ochre cliffs of Cap Canaille

  or the moan of a tour boat’s engines grinding through the aquamarine

  of the Mediterranean.

  I’m inside measuring the width of the white ribbon of the wake

  like a long skin shedding itself from the exoskeleton of a Zodiac boat,

  assessing valuations of finitude amongst my household property,

  gazing at the bathers as they take turns diving off the limestone promontory

  below and to my left,

  lazily frog-kicking through the cerulean waters of Port-de-Cassis.

  Their bodies are pale as salamanders as they scoot through

  the zaffre and viridian

  back to the rock-toothed shore where they pull themselves up,

  amphibian-like, stunning the air with their glistening bodies.

  It is a sensate joy that releases like ecstatic vapor

  from off their skins and sea-drenched hair.

  A hand has touched them and pass’d over their bodies,

  but not over mine.

  If I were to walk a serrated shore, worn by wind and the idylls

  of companionship,

  I’d be twenty again and arrogant as Icarus

  making survey of his father’s domain,

  scanning the surface of the sea for a boil of sardines

  glinting like a scatter of coins.

  Preposterously, I’d glance neither to my left or to my right,

  and launch myself straight into a dive of my own,

  unshowy and silent as I cut the immaculate waters,

  joyous only in the theater of my own being, alone

  as the brown salts that dry on the stoic, limestone lips of the sea,

  unconsecrated by touch, the liquidinous mask of my face

  submerged and upturned, trailing shrouds of sapphire and indigo.

  from The Kenyon Review

  ISHION HUTCHINSON

  * * *

  Sympathy of a Clear Day

  By melon carts and feral cats skinning off adobe

  walls, we thread the white heat of day on the square,

  to the café minarets
level at our eyes, vapor coils

  of virgin snow peaks through them, ready to spring.

  Travel is sympathy. Not so, you point at what’s below:

  birds and monkeys shuck to perform by their cages;

  snakes rise in fragrant droppings on carpets children

  squat with whisks while tourist dollars and coins fill baskets.

  Souks edge the lubric traffic. Commerce, from the good

  cool of this café, prowls and gnaws the city to the bone.

  Mighty caravans appear still with oaths and murmurs

  from across the equator, no longer with tents, for cheap

  hotels proliferate as madly as the war raged for oil.

  From this height we are in a spell of fabrics, lavender

  and saffron, those loggias of black soften in the haze

  glow basalt and move in fluid swaths against shadows.

  Bless Churchill’s cruel, romantic eyes, in one regard,

  for painting the sky’s fragile lilac and radio wafer,

  no longer audible, over the bazaar’s broken watercolours.

  His self-centered ego now turns unseen, incessant drones.

  “To celebrate,” you tell me with mock triumph, “a holiday

  is to become free for the unaccustomed day: the clear day.”

  The clear day I repeat, then shudder remembering another

  phrase, the God-land compressed within itself, and remind you.

  Any reprieve but none from the unredeemable world.

  Weighted voices. Clouds cover the propane tank on the terrace;

  we come down to go to the desert, that final archive where

  dragnet of stars blanch at sunset over travelers in slow progress.

  from Freeman’s

  DIDI JACKSON

  * * *

  The Burning Bush

  for Brianne Ortt (1979–2016)