The Best American Poetry 2013 Read online

  Art as style, science as a style, and intelligence as a style too,

  Perhaps the egghead style without the smarts. It’s politics

  Where stupidity and style combine to form the perfect storm,

  As a host of stylized, earnest airheads emerge from the greenrooms

  Of the Sunday morning talk shows, mouthing talking points

  In chorus, playing their parts with panache and glowing with the glow

  You get from a fact-free diet, urged on by a diminutive senator

  Resembling a small, furious gerbil. If consistency is the hobgoblin

  Of little minds, these minds are enormous, like enormous rooms.

  It wasn’t always like this. Maybe it wasn’t much better,

  But I used to like politics. I used to like arguing with Paul Arnson

  On the Luther League bus, whatever it was we argued about.

  It was more like a pastime, since if things were only getting better

  Incrementally, at least they weren’t steadily getting worse:

  Politicians put their heads together when they had to, Fredric March

  And Franchot Tone gave their speeches about democracy and shared values

  In Seven Days in May and Advise and Consent, and we muddled through.

  Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits, Charles Percy—remember them?

  They weren’t eggheads or Democrats (let alone beatniks), yet they could

  Talk to eggheads and Democrats (I’m not sure about beatniks),

  And sometimes even agreed with them. It was such an innocent time,

  Even if it didn’t seem particularly innocent at the time, yet a time

  That sowed the seeds of its own undoing. I used to listen to the radio,

  Curious as to what the right was on about now, but I’m not curious anymore,

  Just apprehensive about the future. I’d rather listen to “Take Five”

  Or watch another movie, secure in the remembrance of my own complacency,

  The complacency of an age that everyone thought would last forever

  —As indeed it has, but only in the imagination of a past that feels fainter

  And fainter as I write, more and more distant from a bedroom where I lie awake

  Remembering Sputnik and piano lessons, bongo drums and beatniks, quaint

  Old-fashioned Republicans and Democrats and those eggheads of yore.

  from The Virginia Quarterly Review

  DOROTHEA LASKY

  Poem for Anne Sexting

  Beautiful Anne

  I had not seen you for so long

  But then I saw you again

  In the form

  Was it Angelo?

  What was his name? The other man.

  But that wasn’t him

  What story is it that will be the real one?

  Icy eyes and the smoothest skin

  That’s the way I remember you

  On walks to the hospital

  Light gold suitcase in tow

  She too had your skin

  Clear and faintly rosy

  Immaculate also in white dress

  With black headband

  The other Anne had kohl-lined eyes yes

  Below electric eel lids, Deco crystal cuff on right arm

  She sipped her words

  Almost Cleopatra

  The lamplight on that face

  To say the thing I couldn’t

  To say the word

  I couldn’t say

  You wore the blackest clips in your short hair

  I saw a pantoum leg across the table from mine

  Anne Sexton, your black hair is always in my memory

  To see it shine along winter seascape

  While I bit your black heart

  No you bit mine

  No not black

  What bit

  Your heart was as red as anything

  Although even the other Anne’s lips parted were not red

  No no they were blue

  No no green

  No not that. They were mine.

  from Conduit

  DORIANNE LAUX

  Song

  Let me sing, dear heart,

  in these dark hours.

  Let me suck the chilled wind

  through the spaces

  between my teeth.

  Let me follow you

  past the trashcans

  stuffed with oily rags

  as you strain under

  the awkward weight

  of the metal ladder

  and traipse the perimeter

  of the house, lean it

  against the roof

  where it will sing

  in the weak, brief sun,

  rung by tin rung,

  and I’ll hold it steady

  while you climb,

  my beloved, to the gutters

  of dead leaves, sodden

  by rain, swarming

  with worms and bird droppings,

  and scoop them

  in your gloved hands

  like a wild-haired surgeon

  excising gobbets of decay,

  pulling the dark muck up,

  proffering it, glistening,

  to the light, before christening it

  a clogful, burning, hurtful stuff,

  and flinging the muddied clump

  with a delirious thud

  onto the bright new grass.

  Let me sing of your strong, wide back

  and bucktoothed grin,

  your threadbare jeans

  that slip down your hips

  with each stretch and reach

  of the clustered muscles

  beneath your scarred arms.

  I could drown in joy.

  Time is no friend. I can’t

  love you more and so,

  my Ascension angel,

  my husband, my hinged window,

  my triptych, my good right side,

  my open door, my bowl

  of foreign coins, let me praise

  your raised fist

  gripping the slick layers

  of our falls, our winters,

  the fires you will build

  from windfall branches,

  the thousands of suppers

  we will share without speaking

  in front of the TV, our bodies

  dropped like rag dolls

  onto the torn velvet couch,

  my hand on your bent knee,

  my life streaming

  behind your closed eyes,

  your dreams leaving

  their tea-colored stains

  on my chokecherry heart.

  Descend slowly now,

  carefully, one tightly cinched

  boot at a time, let me touch

  the rosary of your spine,

  your wing nubs.

  Let me sing as you climb

  back to me, as you turn

  to face me again

  and we stand

  in a bed of roses and thorns,

  the quagmire garden

  we have made, carpet

  of brown petals, split twigs,

  the latticed backs of sowbugs

  crushed beneath our feet.

  Let me hold you a moment longer

  in my mortal arms and sway.

  Let me open your mouth

  with my mouth. Let me sing.

  from River Styx

  AMY LEMMON

  I take your T-shirt to bed again . . .

  and by now it has almost lost its scent—

  your scent, as when you were here and turned

  towards the wall while I pressed my body

  into your body and sighed, “You smell like candy”

  into your T-shirted back. Yes, the smell is yours

  the shirt warmed by your lean torso, tufted

  and delicious. I’ve washed my clothes in your soap,

  but that wasn’t it—there must be something sweet your pores

 
; pour forth. In three days you will be here and we will drink

  from and with each other, sleep in close quarters,

  naked, awake to heat and singing cells and slickness. But now,

  too tired even to please myself, I breathe the shirt that covers

  my pillow and dream—our yes and yes and yes opening and opening—

  from Vitrine: a printed museum

  THOMAS LUX

  Outline for My Memoir

  The time my horse got stuck in the mud.

  (Two paragraphs; no, one.)

  Went blind in right eye, took some medicine,

  I could see again. Scary detail: when the Dr.

  first shined the little light

  into my pupil, he drew back, startled.

  (Three paragraphs.) Later HS: broken heart.

  (Since this happens rarely, milk for three, four

  paragraphs); milk, speaking

  of which: I helped my father peddle it,

  in a square white truck in a small round town.

  College, my 20s: I recall little to interest you.

  I did cover many pages with writing

  and read, and turned, a thousand

  pages for every one on which I wrote.

  (Don’t see how I can say what else happened then

  and be honest.) My 30s? Wore funny glasses.

  (Maybe a two-sentence self-deprecatory joke?)

  My 40s–50s? The best part

  was a child, named Claudia. I could say some funny

  things about her, but so could every father.

  Besides, family is personal, private, blood.

  (With above exception of daughter, those two decades:

  a paragraph; maybe two, if I insert

  journal entry on day of her birth?)

  I can’t bear to write of her mother, whom I hurt.

  Lately? Read like a hungry machine,

  in a new room, in a house I love; there is still

  my child to love, and friends,

  and a beloved, named Jenny.

  My vital signs are vital.

  I tend a little garden, have a job.

  (No way I could write more than a few sentences

  on these years

  under the sentence, again,

  of happiness.) If I live a thousand lives,

  then I’ll have enough truths, maybe, and lies

  to write my memoir, novella-sized.

  from The American Poetry Review

  ANTHONY MADRID

  Once upon a Time

  Once upon a time,

  There was a beautiful shark.

  She combed her long, blonde hair,

  And it made the halibut bark.

  It made the chicken oink,

  And the whale to run for Congress.

  A man should never obstruct

  The course of material progress.

  Yet a lamb cannot but weep

  When the kiddies come home from college.

  For they have forgotten to keep

  The agreement they made to acknowledge

  The woodpecker’s right to peck,

  And the maple’s to be pecked at.

  Let’s have a little respect

  For Rubber Duck with a doctorate.

  That provocative way of standing!

  All elbows and bangles

  And hips just like a coat hanger

  And ankles at right angles! I like

  The shape of the pouring soy milk,

  The sound of the splitting log.

  But Egret finds it regrettable that her

  Sister is dating a dog.

  Don’t listen to ’em, kid!

  And don’t listen to their questions.

  This corporation’s been ruined by

  Well-meaning false confessions.

  And the world is fast a-melting,

  Though I would have it slow.

  And I don’t think it’s helping:

  The way these animals go

  Straight from hatchery to quackery,

  And, if only to amuse,

  I’ll throw my hat in with Mike Thataway in

  Black patent leather shoes.

  Maybe I’m just like my mother.

  She’s never satisfied.

  Maybe I’m just like my father:

  Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

  Maybe I’m just like my cat:

  Licking invisible balls.

  Perhaps you’ll reflect upon that,

  Next time you’re screening your calls.

  And all the solvent and the solute,

  They were walking hand in hand.

  This the Indian poets were the

  First to understand.

  The ancient Indian poets

  Had their heads screwed on straight.

  Fixed on the body’s affluence

  And the effluents that escape.

  And the influence they enjoyed?

  Close-focus hocus-pocus.

  And every gezunte moyd

  In a juvenile honey locust

  Will prefer their Hindi distichs

  To the Indiana Hoosiers.

  We’re gonna be there from Spit Christmas

  All the way to Mucus New Year’s.

  But for now I draw the curtain

  And settle into Lent.

  Last person to go to Harvard

  Without knowing what that meant.

  from Poetry

  SALLY WEN MAO

  XX

  The night my sex returned, I shut the door,

  barricaded it with a rattan chair. The banging

  curdled the egg pudding and for ten minutes

  it was all tremor, all the time. There my mother

  was, half-asleep in her gender, and there my sister

  was, locked inside her purity panoply. And I, shut

  inside, obsessed with the insides of me, obsessed

  with the open-and-close of me, dead-sexed, hyper-

  sexed—I couldn’t stop mulling over how every seed

  burst, pummeled into pulp, jejune nectarine jabbed

  to the pit. Could anyone forget—the horrible panache

  of fruit? I despised softness, how a bite can sluice

  the flesh with teeth. I wanted to disperse like creosote

  in water; I wanted to reproduce like spores, tease

  like those stars seen so plainly out in the thawing sky

  but nonexistent, having exploded long ago.

  So entered sex, who loaded a carcass, asphyxiated

  creature, into the open suitcase. We shut it tight,

  zipped it, but the miasma stayed with us, angry visitor,

  as breath on the cinders, as grease in my hair.

  from Gulf Coast

  JEN MCCLANAGHAN

  My Lie

  We are always moving toward the valley,

  and the shadow of the valley

  moving toward us. This morning, naked

  except for a jaunty paper jacket,

  I lied to the gynecologist.

  I had read in the newspaper while waiting,

  having just told the same lie to the nurse,

  of Desmond Tutu prevailing on the world

  to bring a war criminal to court,

  and The Hague, hesitating, wanting to delay.

  I’d read of a girl severed in two,

  bent as she drew her bucket of well water,

  of lone farmers smote in their fields,

  and the slaughtered tribe Fur,

  a name I affectionately use for my own family.

  In Tallahassee I offer up my clean feet,

  my painted toes, my lie that I quit smoking.

  I study a picture of Bashir,

  his closed lips, his cheek inclined

  to receive a kiss—

  how we share the same cosmology,

  the same way of receiving a guest.

  I own up to my own crime

  against myself, which isn’t my simple lie
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  but not letting the world in,

  my words swallowed in a private wind,

  my thinking too small to deliver me

  to the edge of a greater valley,

  offering a hand, a sip of water, and something of faith

  in language, which brings you to me.

  from The New Yorker

  CAMPBELL MCGRATH

  January 17

  Flocks of ibis on old tractors in cleared fields sliding to sawgrass,

  cartloads of corn, or mangoes, or clean fill dirt,

  orchards of citrus and avocado, shade houses of the enigmatic orchid growers,

  dusty horses in a crude corral fashioned from cypress limbs where the canal is

  edged with sugarcane and banana trees by the freight tracks

  hard against the Casa de Jesus,

  convicts collecting trash along the roadside in their FLA CRIMINAL JUSTICE

  jumpsuits with the SHERIFF’S DEPT school bus on the shoulder, joyless troopers

  overseeing what appears to be a collection of high school kids caught with

  bags of pot in the glove compartments of their Trans Ams,

  security towers around the Krome Immigration Detention Center, razor-wire

  reefs on which the rough boats of the loas bound for La Vilokan have run

  aground,

  gravel quarry gouging the template, coral rock pits and barrows,

  panel truck offering shrimp and stone crab claws from the Keys,

  pickups selling roasted corn or watermelons, pickups heading into the fields

  loaded with campesinos,

  faces of the Maya picking pole beans in the Florida sunshine,

  Krome Avenue: The Third World starts here.

  —

  Midwinter and we have come to pick strawberries and tomatoes, flowers and herbs, our annual nod to hunting and gathering, a voyage into the remnants of agricultural South Florida, vanishing order endangered as the legendary panther. Sure enough, Rainbow Farms has been swallowed by exurbia, and we must head farther south in search of a passable field, crossing the canals where anhinga hitch their wings to hang like swaths of drying fabric beside the dye vats on the rooftops of Marrakech, tree farms and nurseries on all sides, freeholds of the Old Floridians or ranchitos run by cronies of long-deposed caudillos, ranks of potted hibiscus and parti-colored bougainvillea, bromeliads, queen palms, Hawaiian dwarf ixora. When we finally find a strawberry field it’s late afternoon and many have given up, but there are still a few families in the rows, hunched abuelas with five-gallon buckets they will never fill today, and I wander out among them and lose myself altogether.