The American Poetry Review

AMERICAN “. . . one thing that makes humans uniquely human is that we future, making decisions now on what we believe will make us happy later. Apparently, we’re pretty bad at this. . . . And yet we futuree on. We can’t help it. Future-ing is what allows us to shape our lives, an essential part of what Gilbert calls POETRY REVIEW ‘our psychological immune system.’” BROWNE, pp. 16–17 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 VOL. 50/NO. 5 $5 US/$7 CA JENNIFER CHANG THE LONELY HUMANS & OTHER POEMS

ROGER REEVES SOMETHING ABOUT JOHN COLTRANE

MARY RUEFLE EIGHT POEMS

ALSO: PATRICK ROSAL PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS WENDY XU DANIEL NESTER

APRWEB.ORG PHOTO: NATHAN ACKERMAN 2 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW The American Poetry Review (issn 0360-3709) is published bimonthly by World Poetry, Inc., a non-profi t corporation, and Old City Publishing, Inc. Edi torial offi ces: 1906 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735. Subscription rates: U.S.: 3 years, $78.00; 2 years, $56.00; 1 year, $32.00. Foreign rates: 3 years, $129.00; 2 years, $92.00; 1 year, $49.00. Single copy, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 VOL. 50/NO. 5 $5.00. Special classroom adoption rate per year per student: $14.00. Free teacher’s subscription with classroom adoption. IN THIS ISSUE Subscription mail should be addressed to The American Poetry Review, c/o Old City Publishing, 628 N. 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123-3002. www.aprweb.org. JENNIFER CHANG 4 T he Lonely Humans & Other Poems Editor Elizabeth Scanlon ROGER REEVES 7 Somethin g About John Coltrane Business Manager PATRICK ROSAL 10 When Prince Was Filipino Mike Duff y & Learning to Slaughter Editorial Assistant DOROTHEA LASKY 12 T he Ballet & Other Poems Thalia Geiger STEPHEN IRA 14 Rage and Grief General Counsel JENNY BROWNE 15 Too Late to Stop Now Dennis J. Brennan, Esq. MICHAEL DUMANIS 18 Annunciation Contributing Editors Christopher Buckley, Deborah Burnham, MARY RUEFLE 19 The Understanding & Other Poems George Economou, Jan Freeman, Leonard WENDY XU 20 Poem Beginning to Sound Gontarek, Everett Hoagland, Steven Kleinman, Teresa Leo, Kate Northrop, Marjorie Perloff , & Other Poems Ethel Rackin, Natania Rosenfeld, Michael SHARA LESSLEY 22 The Hawthorn & The Monarch Ryan, Jack Sheehan, Peter Siegenthaler, Lauren Rile Smith, Valerie Trueblood, Joe Wenderoth EDWARD HIRSCH 23 An Appreciation of Muriel Rukeyser, “St. Roach” Founder Stephen Berg BLAS FALCONER 26 Strata & Other Poems (1934–2014) PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS 28 The Void Co-founder MELISSA BRODER Sidney H. Berg 29 A Conversation & ALEX DIMITROV (1909–1973) DANIEL NESTER 31 Pom pous Symmetry Periodical postage paid, Philadelphia, PA, and at additional & Other Poems offi ces. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Poetry Review, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, DIDI JACKSON 32 Void & Aubade on Hawk Mountain Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735. Nationwide distribution: TNG, 1955 Lake Park Dr. SE, Suite 400, DERRICK AUSTIN 33 Diary: Six Days in October Smyrna, GA 30080, (770) 863-9000. Media Solutions, 9632 Madison Blvd., Madison, AL 35758, (800) 476-5872. Printed MICHAEL BAZZETT 35 It’s Not You, It’s Me in U.S.A. MICHAEL BAZZETT 37 Menu & Other Poems Advertising correspondence should be addressed to The American Poetry Review, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, AEON GINSBERG 38 Marble Run for the Intramuscular Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735. Cyborgs Vol. 50, No. 5. Copyright © 2021 by World Poetry, Inc. and Old City Publishing, Inc. a member of the Old City Publishing CASEY THAYER 40 Reminding Myself That We Are Group. All rights, including translation into other languages, Not Remarkable are reserved by the publishers in the United States, Great Brit- ain, Mexico, Canada, and all countries participating in the Universal Copy right Conventions, the International Copy- right Convention, and the Pan American Convention. Noth- BOARD OF DIRECTORS ing in this publication may be reproduced without permission Jonathan Katz, Chair Major Jackson Elizabeth Scanlon of the publisher. Dana Bilsky Asher Eileen Neff Ava Seave Margot Berg Ethel Rackin Nicole Steinberg All previously published issues of APR from the fi rst in 1972 to BOARD OF ADVISORS 2013 are accessible online through JSTOR—www.jstor.org. Linda Lee Alter Rayna Block Goldfarb Judith Newman The American Poetry Revieww receives state arts funding support Natalie Bauman Werner Gundersheimer Carol Parssinen through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Richard Boyle Lynne Honickman S. Mary Scullion, R.S.M. state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Marianne E. Brown William Kistler Peter Straub This magazine is assisted by a grant from The Die trich Paul Cummins Edward T. Lewis Rose Styron Helen W. Drutt English Foundation. The columns in APR are forums for their authors, who write Ann Beattie Carolyn Forché Joyce Carol Oates with out editorial interference. Robert Coles Edward Hirsch Cynthia Ozick Rita Dove Emily Mann Frederick Seidel The Editors are grateful for the opportunity to consider unsolicited manuscripts. Please enclose a stamped, self - addressed envelope with your manuscript or submit online at www.aprweb.org. ANNUAL PRIZES Subscriptions: p. 27 THE STANLEY KUNITZ MEMORIAL PRIZE: A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning Index of Advertisers: p. 37 poem in The American Poetry Review, awarded to a poet under 40 years of age in honor of the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets. THE APR/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE: In partnership with The Honickman Foundation, an annual prize for a fi rst book of poetry, with an award of $3,000, an introduction by the judge, publication of the book, and distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 3 THREE POEMS JENNIFER CHANG

The Lonely Humans In the Middle of My Life A type of hickory, it grows by water. I’m nobody’s child, I write my father So are we fools to drive to the river and lie the next day the day after our most savage storms to a friend on the phone a time have finally stopped to see zone away: I’m fine. I used to write a tree we’ve never seen before? letters to everyone I loved; now To hike in cold mud through a leafless forest, I head for the woods, phone to behold clearings now cluttered by whatever fell last night—mostly oaks, in hand. My friend, with whom no hickory—to attend the mad performance a decade ago I’d exchange of a newly roaring current. heartaches, each one stamped I do not want to call it singing, with exacting artlessness—writing the wounded poet’s head howling letters about other letters, we marveled downriver. Remember we scorned how our words arrived wherever his broken heart, broken rashly by himself, some say, for wanting love we weren’t, signed Yours Love Soon, across too soon. You say I am unfair, that too much the Atlantic over the hardly blue rain is what makes the river rush (there is no “we” Blue Ridge beyond basins of western in what you say, dearr): we hear it plains. I once loved a man as mythology. We hear it outside who’d force the weight of his body ourselves, a surfeit of music quickening into a felt-tip pen, scoring torn wind against winter trees, branch-taps I mistake for premonitions. Of what? That the tree paper with savage loops of cursive. is here, ready to spring to life again. I am He wrote everything down— unfair. I want to love honestly; I want love whirling manifestos, treatises overtaking honest. Every tree is the wrong tree. oceans of thought. In person, This is the direction we get lost in. he could not stop talking, Beech, sweetgum, more oak. But she and loudly, was impatient too, you say, it is possible she willed him to look back. We do not love alone louder, arms sweeping away is what I think you mean. When I walk behind you, the air, what I wanted to say, the back of your head is golden, ungovernable an animal voice I often found light I cannot look away from. Is it love abhorrent, though that to follow you I find myself choosing wasn’t I the animal, enraged an unexpected path; should we find the tree, that being together will it be I who led us there or you? Long gone are the leaves alternate, compounded, each was nothing an arrow, the thrust of a green thought; like our letters? Those accordant along the forest floor centuries crack and turn silences, sweet hectic to dust. We have children, grudges, grappling for words. I remember a Dionysian mortgage, habits the longing inside my head, mostly bad, and yet every December his beautiful letters, I imagine spring, our time past and to come, how when you follow me mine, my fingers tracing the ridges I track the blazes to reach the river, and often of consonants, questions I have to stop myself from looking back. and postscripts littering margins, To stay together, look away, some god said. uncontainable form, the page Here in these trees, our voices have no a stage for candor. To know another faces, we’ve walked like this for an eternity. is the terrible work of love, is it not? Who said that? I note the clouds, see through tree canopy, late summer, a bowl of black plums

4 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW on the kitchen table exposed where the hill’s eroded awaiting my return. I am walking from too much rain. up a steep hill Everything’s weather, in the forest along a city I want to say, but how parkway: what you hear is I mean that voice my breathing, the roar who knows. In letters of midday traffic, trees I’ll never send my father, moaning in sudden strong I number days wind. It is too late of drought and flood, this August’s in the season for flowers, manic squalls bursting sewers but there are wild herbs beyond capacity, city blocks with tiny white blooms, gone riverine the truculence of fungus for one night, two. Today the air’s newly sprung and stiff with thirst, my marigolds plentiful after last week’s rain. unplucked and dying, the other My friend’s trail is drier, yellow annuals, stiff- unnamed, and ornery stemmed in a glorious green pot, from Texas sun. Go ahead, not a leaf left, bought we each say to the other to look at, not to care for, how when our voices tangle. careless of me It’s 100° out. Writing to not even remember has no voice its name. Write because voice is a metaphor, what you can’t say, long-told I know, having read How advice told again: I’m nobody Poems Get Made. Longenbach to my father, and he’s nobody calls it “a perceiving” to me. Do you hear that? The wish sensibility” that lets us pretend for such visceral immediacy. —Near 90 here—someone is talking to us, “a wish What Is Music for visceral immediacy,” She told me a story about a boy, listen: the child of a cousin, who had not no one is here, fared well. How the conversation veered the voice in my head here I can’t recall. I had shifted I thought I loved, my embouchure, butchering Varèse merely clean syntax as I again dashed ahead and generous diction. Of that man, of the metronome. That I “I” might have said, “as I loved would never be a great flutist nobody, nobody loved me”—that figure was her tragedy and not mine that is and is not me, it would take me years to realize. First chair that was me, perhaps will be me. in a minor ensemble, she fixed I don’t particularly like writing her blue gaze on me in the first person, in the future tense, with no expression, listening though pleasures abound. for what she once called Eventually, I will not have to wait my pure tone for my father when deciding if I were worth teaching. In the afternoon light of her living room I paused when she sighed to come home again. I will not a melody I could not reach, have to avoid the question her voice a second golden instrument, “And how is your family?” It will not then digressed, sparked always hurt——Are you by a sudden shade of white by the creek?—being his daughter. evoking summers on the Upper Peninsula, Yes, but it’s so dry the children wild with moss and lake water. this could be Texas. The room where it happened I don’t know why had a view I hurt. I wish!! And and a wall of books here is where we, that sometimes, in the dark, looked like ladders, our voices, rest. I see sometimes a row of shoulders, an oak’s roots twisted, men colluding. Before the accident, the boy was the first to dive in, first

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 5 to dock his kayak, first to toss down dinner and dart from the house, and now, that day, he scaled the shelves   CHICAGO like a chased animal. One cried STOP another WAIT, and then a noise, a low moan that swiftly Heard-Hoard gathered in the wood, a kind of rondo Atsuro Riley sounding like horses              stampeding,           my teacher said, her flute across her lap,           mine leaning tiredly at my neck,   !  Cloth $20.00 a habit I’d acquired in rehearsals as violins usurped, once again, the concerto’s compulsion. Even after the shelves collapsed books kept falling, the last colts galloping The Missing Mountain after the dust of elders— New and Selected Poems ordinary stallions, old tireless Michael Collier mares, clouds we all traverse   "# $           %   just to keep up. Never the same again, she sang,   $     %  but he survived, and we were, for a while, glad       & '( )     for this new quiet, the next year   on the lake, when he’d avoid Paper $20.00 that room and make of lake-wading an occasional breaststroke, gently, not even reaching the easy cove we measured as a lap. The worst Who’s on First? can happen and not be New and Selected Poems that bad, I think she meant to say, Lloyd Schwartz though perhaps thinking back  $         was how she endured our lessons.            * %     $  The stories she told        were of other people’s misfortune,  * $        that without the expected glory   Paper $20.00 the boy would still live, curled at the banks of the lake mute as a frond, growing duller and without distinction. Her own son had been watching, Blue in Green at the threshold. He had been fine, Chiyuma Elliott and wasn’t that fine      $%       %       %  +*,  for her?      When my phrasing stumbled,   she took my place, a mark of artful instruction or Paper $18.00 impatience, and sound opened the room, her sound spacious as escape. I don’t know what happened to the boy or my teacher. Her son lived in the northeast, visited rarely The University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu and rarely alone. I remember his name, but not the name of her husband, who for years of Wednesdays, opened their door, his face an austere pallor, calmly nodding towards the music stand where she waited, sometimes playing Debussy, her favorite, sometimes looking out the window. He’d sit in the kitchen reading the paper while I played my weekly disasters, and then, when it was time to leave, he’d walk me back to the door and wish me well.

Jennifer Chang is the author of two books of poems, most recently Some Say the Lark, which won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award.

6 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW SOMETHING ABOUT JOHN COLTRANE ROGER REEVES

Something about a tree in shallow sleep Or be momentarily, wasp in the hedge Listening for what it wants to remember: Sheltering from the rain; a woman’s skirt The note of a seed, its neck sliding through Hoisted and gladdened above her knee, the hem, Dirt and its confusion—nothing cleansed The hem of her garment touched by the faun’s eye Of struggle. The weight lost after death, And holy, holy, holy is thy name and the snow A confrontation of death. John Coltrane The woman becomes on the floor and the water Even in death is a perfect instrument Ticking against the bottom of the pail, and, Lord, Of water and working the day past its zero— The bridge opening above the faun in the air, The fires in the trees, a legless rabbit And he is what memory permits—pine needles Drifting across the sky—dream of a mule Turning on the skin of a bucket of water, Covered in crows opened in front of a mule A bare shoulder in the rain, Covered in crows, their wings beating against him God somewhere he ain’t supposed to be. Like skin. An autumned tree in autumn Something about Marion Brown Watching fire autumn the other trees. When the light came to the Georgia faun, It doesn’t have to make sense now; it can It was in a trickle of water, a brown leaf Make sense later on. A mule covered in crows— Suddenly underfoot in the spring’s ringing Sometimes, you got to stick a little grass Green, the leaf underfoot spoke, speaks, became In your mouth to sound like God. Allow crows. A ladder of tongues—ghost and the good wood Something about John Coltrane A house fire needs—yes, good God, good God yes— Something about the bells in a faun’s hair, Became the pleasure of placing your mouth— A black boy standing in the rain at the edge Oh yes, Lord, right here, right now, Lord—on something Of the road, wondering how to cross it Holy and holding it there until every Without summoning his death or its hand- Sound in you becomes water—water moving Maidens, the grasshoppers clicking against him Over stone, moving in the hair of the trees, Like he’s the water the world has been meaning Moving over the breast of the bee, beaver, To come to—all the world’s water trapped inside Buck of the day, its brown shoulder bearing Him and needing to be let out. Something The hesitant light, its crown and thorn, water About water waking a ghost, and the ghost Moving over the infinite gates of the city, Waking a seed, rain in the hair of the world, Moving as the wing of the wasp, which is And the world opening its sudden flesh The voice of God, water moving over the two The way stone opens sound against it—a bridge Realms of the body, moving as the name of God— Thrown from one absence to another, Something is coming to kill him, As if to say, Extinction, I can live there too. And something is coming to be born. Something about Marion Brown Today, he is both. Something beyond blood. Wasp somewhere in the hedge sheltering from the rain. In a Georgia afternoon, the faun listens To the Holy Ghost in a trickle of water Something about Aretha Franklin And is suddenly thrown down on the floor Cousin Mary, don’t weep. The eternal Of the Sanctified Church, the woman’s feet Without the wound of eternity begins now. Lifting, stomping against the wooden boards, Sometimes, you can be made more than your body And God somewhere he ain’t supposed to be While still in your body. Now, that’s power—

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 7 A dog suddenly crying in the stables For which there was no source so call it mercy, For no other reason than something lifted Grace, or nothing but becoming power. In him in the afternoon, lifted way up Prayer. Hawk. The dream of a tree. . . . And shook him into a moan and blade of grass The dream, also an autopsy— Gathered by a gale wind into a speaking What came in the middle of the night, a tree Thing. Just ask the Georgia faun all caught up Muttering about the muddle of fragrance, In some running and gladdened by it. Happy Wounded sky bewound in light, morning Is what the old folks say. The boy, happy, Misted in murder, maggots chattering Happying in the field with nothing more Dawn’s red rousing, calling it milk, Than his body and the dark landing its dark My Cherie Amour’s mystic wobble— Against him. It doesn’t have to make sense now. The autopsy, also a dream—what came: It can make sense later on. The faun coming A boy who found his work on the road In the rain. The dark bending about him. And had to lay down there with his work— Power, Cousin Mary, power in the faun The hostility of living between the bullets Climbing into the tree as the dark earth flying. And the bullets hanging you against the night, And the clouds coming together above him, By the lapel, for examination, for a song, And no danger, no danger to hanging For the smiths of gold, for gold, for the gallows, In the lower heavens as a bell, For the fragrance of a field covered in crows As foreign pollen breaking in the wind, And the crows lifting as if a great black tent Scattering its brown voice on anything Rising to shield the field from pestilence That will bear and not bear its gold. Vine, Fence, But the crows just rising crows, the fragrance A pail of water, the exposed shoulders of God. Of freedom but not freedom itself—and here Now, that’s power, Cousin Mary. And nothing Silence, what came in the middle of the night— Dying rudely or for a dream of the rood. An autopsy, a dream: a boy on the road, The dream of this tree is not what will die Crows bowing and bowing and bowing to the dead. In it but what will live upside down Something about Michael Brown In the rain, trying its voice in heaven And on earth. Power, eternal power, Something about Mahalia Jackson’s wig, The crow and angel of it, its closer- Cousin Mary. Don’t weep. Walk-with-Jesus, with-thee, satisfied, lonely, Something about the Dream of a Tree Holy, ghost, blessed in rapture, actual Something about a mule covered in crows, And otherwise, her wig, a walking on water The mule ridden by a faun with bells in his hair, With the faith of a wig; each wave of black hair And the boy ringing across the field, A pew strapped to the forehead of prayer And the field ringing across the boy, And singing all in it. What’s it all about And all this ringing opening and with Is burning beyond loss, learning to rise And full of and tarrying and the silk skin of In and out of disaster smelling of smoke And glory and the hem of a garment and Help me, That can heal the sick—wild cathedral Holy Ghostt and yes, Lord, yes and the tiny racket In the wilderness opening itself A seed makes cracking open in the dark and the stone To any light, dream, or dram of song unhitched In the field worshipping the field by letting From heaven; And the mules and men get so happy, The day fall all about it without moving, Hallelujahed, they strut, brown-suited, bewound And the dusk riding the rain and the tree In light like bow-legged Louis Armstrong Dreaming and the light, the light without At the Newport Jazz Festival, 1970, Mahalia Confession, castigation or beauty Lining out ECSTASY and sweating through it But beauty, and the faun thrown down Until it can do nothing but rain In memory of once watching a hawk And the second line, confused, leaf-strewn, late Plucking red coins from the breast of a squirrel, Limps onto stage, but Mahalia Jackson’s wig And the faun mimicking the hawk, his head Keeps flying, and the rain touches evening’s brow Dipping forward in the gesture of prayer, Bringing with it the stars and Mahalia His mouth working against the wind, the invisible Jackson’s wig flying as if a star Breast and belly of an animal and the seed Suddenly freed from the mouth of God Of something opening inside him A Black tooth blessing. No longer, no longer

8 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW Shall you take things second or third hand—joy 2022 december awards Ecstasy, pleasure, the blessing of sitting in the rain While gathered in the hair of some tree— Je Marks Memorial Because Mahalia Jackson’s wig is fl ying, And the dead, for once, are dancing, too—in the rain. Poetry Prize Judge Roger Reeves’ fi rst book of poems, King Me, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013. Grace Cavalieri His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Poetryy, among others. He’s won awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The is the author of 26 poetry Whiting Foundation, and Princeton University. His next book of poems, Best Barbarian, is collections, the Poet Laureate forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2022. of Maryland, a playwright, and the producer of “The Poet and the Poem” on Public Radio.

Winner receives $1,500 and publication. Honorable Mention receives $500 and publication. APR ON SOCIAL MEDIA All finalists published in Spring 2022 Awards issue. $20 entry fee includes copy of Awards issue. Submit up to three poems per entry between Oct. 1 and Dec. 1. Name and address on cover letter only. Submit online  @TheAmericanPoetryReview www.december.submittable.com/submit or by mail at P.O. Box 16130, St. Louis, MO 63105.  For complete guidelines visit @AmPoetryReview www.decembermag.org.  @american_poetry_review decembermag.org

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 9 TWO POEMS PATRICK ROSAL

When Prince Was Filipino Before you could type your name in light to find where in the world your body was hype It was 1983 I was 14 years old the night before fiber optic before Charmaine Makaiyak led me in secret we got terachomped before we hired a machine to the basement kitchen of St. Matt’s cafeteria to count the hits She put her lips on my left earlobe and soft-sang two choruses of Prince’s “Do Me” a girl let me hook one finger so I might finally learn how to slow dance right into the loop of her tight stonewash Was it winter?—because the prettiest sophomore Jordache knockoffs at the Annual Filipino Family Gala and I brushed my thumb back and forth took my hand and an icy wave over the little mile of sweat-cooled skin climbed up my banks a blizzard wind hiding under the cropped neon tanktop shook both my alleys and all my leaves riding up her side She taught me to move fell off my trees I never went to sleep It was 1983 What’s a bony floppy-haired boy to do America didn’t know what time it was— but keep his eyes wide open acknowledge and neither did we the tabernacles of silence built above him and then open his arms to enter the thick religious mist of grape hair spray that surrounds the girl who is about to kiss him?

Every once in a while it is good for us to remember there was one February of the last millennium when Prince was Filipino just like me five-foot-two in big-heel shoes He sang so good and played every instrument All the rumors we wanted to believe He was our Ecclesiastes of Nasty our Funky Future our unrepentant sweet and sinful serenade

While all the grown-ups spazzed out to Laura Branigan Charmaine and I convened in the dark tearing at the seams of rayon to study the country that history hid inside us Every time we shifted our hips we killed another century By August they’d pop Ninoy in the skull and drop him bloody on the tarmac of Manila International so we slow jammed and sucked each other’s lips under the fat dazzle of a disco ball Dawn and dusk I watched both Jersey skies turn purple OK Prince was never Filipino And I was never very American even when I was one of two horny kids trying to get back to where our parents’ tropics first burned and so what a lucky bum I was when Charmaine snuck me into the room where custodians kept all the fire I held her until the sun bumped through and the heavens swelled the color of a busted left eye socket

10 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW Learning to Slaughter After a while I let the fl ies bite my legs I never got sick of the children singing karaoke I wasn’t amazed when the young ones kept on cutting the air with all the tin in their bodies all the rust in their bodies The pig squealed so wide I could see the pink ridges of the roof of its mouth The pig kicked so hard the four men had to let go It kicked and kicked until it fl ipped off the block into the dirt My cousin touched the spot along the neck with his fi ngertips as if there were no knife to push hard through the hide A girl waited on her haunches holding a bowl to catch the blood I stopped speaking to anybody and that was the closest I got to prayer I put down the knife It was just a matter of time before the music started again though the children were well into the second chorus I let myself weep openly in the unpaved street The amateur muggers and sommeliers of cheap rum didn’t even sneer as they skipped over my ankles I knew forgiveness: The children stopped for nothing not even the strange sobbing of an uncle Jacob Saenz My aunt said Enough and it was enough Throwing the Crown The men brought buckets to wash away the blood When they were done Throwing the Crown by the water was so clear Jacob Saenz, winner of the you could sip it from someone else’s hands 2018 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is available in APR’s online store at Patrick Rosal currently serves as inaugural Codirector of the Mellon-funded Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden, where he is a Professor of English. He is the www.aprweb.org and at author of fi ve full-length poetry collections including the forthcoming The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems. other outlets. Throwing the Crown was chosen by guest judge Gregory Pardlo.

Jacob Saenz is a CantoMundo fellow whose work has appeared in Pinwheel, Poetry, Tammy, Tri-Quarterly and other journals. He has been the recipient of a Letras Latinas Residency Fellowship as well as a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He serves as an associate editor for RHINO.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 11 SEVEN POEMS DOROTHEA LASKY

The Ballet People write poems The Endless Garden About all of their The dancers Fake love Everything will be a tree In a terribly bright In the afterlife Real love is a tiny flower Light blue gauze And after we have ruined this one We barely touch between us Retained the mystery With an endless party Real love is tenderness Of oil and money Skating on a lake The spirits will make us flowering acres Blue and ice To enjoy the limitless fruit An illusionary time Voice Where poetry feels inevitable When you spot me there We all said horrible things to each other You m ight take down a golden peach The terrific clown You said I’m crazy so I said you’re boring And say, eat eat, my beloved Who lies inside Oh but you were never my friend Every blue dress In the context of things, we certainly were even And I’ll snatch your fruit from you Does he see me The ghost said: All you do is make stuff up Ever since the day that we first met Always a star I’ve been the snake in the endless garden So I said in sighs: But doesn’t everyone Always a root Waiting for your stupid kindness Horrible auras When someone dies Your big dumb hand to sever At the door Eventually you forget their voice But no matter where we start Death is such a lie It all ends in an ocean You meant more to me Hard and fast It buzzes around you than any of them On the approaching blue dawn Poetry you are the red room of my life You meant more to me than any of them Until then I said as I wound around the bend Where I go to be any age A deep low whisper But you never listened What is language anyway Where I can be anything at all Just like every single person in the poem An ending that never happens You just up and went About your business Winter While half complaining Love is like a butterfly Maybe I was born weeping While half When you’re around A sort of loss of faith Not really complaining about anything It’s like the smallest lilacs In the utter blanketing darkness And when we took offou r outerwear Are in bloom forever And our lungs were filled with a sort of paste I muttered it Nothing was abstract Between us Until I meant it Certainly not my love of you I feel the tiniest tender flowers I mustered: Poetry will save us all Still like everyone I forgot my name The smallest little lilacs The orange plants magnified The name of my town Between us like many glowing eggs Everyone surrounded I forgot nearly everything That we gently volley By endless fires and disease Including you And roll back and forth between us as a song But you meant more Maybe I was born kneeling Than any of them Despite the world and all its cruelty Atop the orange mountain I remembered that We dare not break them No rebirth in sight Until the end We use every ounce to give them care I should have stayed alive Despite it all I told the end, a little quietly My mad heart The frigid sun—it said nothing Small and insidious You know they tried Your heart and all its madness But they couldn’t stop me An aquarium with the tiniest fish I waited until they forgot about me Always sweet and green forever And then I ran Small and insidious That is what they will say Of our love

12 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW Spring Never blame a rat for being a rat Never blame a cloud for being a cloud Never blame a person for being who they are Which in my case is short and stocky And quite ill Never blame a friend for not being your friend Never blame her for stabbing you in the back It was you that could have stopped her, after all Never blame the sun for being the sun Or the moon for you know, being itself Never blame a face for being a face Or the stars for being true to the sky When things start, they start Never stop them from being so Never blame an aquarium from housing fi sh Or a lock for keeping you in Never blame the color blue for being very blue Never blame the rat when he bites you on your back He’s just doing what’s he’s supposed to do His fanged teeth Their hanging down The way you missed them The way you miss the sea All these pretty fl owers Drugged in the water Creative sunrises The very fact Of their undertaking That there is a spirit to things You know, it is everywhere All this beauty The living art The self The roses And all Katherine Bode-Lang

Dorothea Lasky is the author of fi ve full-length collections of poetry and one book of prose. Her THE REFORMATION newest book is Animal (Wave Books).

“. . . the speaker in these poems achieves her own form of grace, writing directly of the female body and learning to trust her own instincts. She wrestles with self-defi nition . . . revealing, for readers, one woman’s path through contradiction and tradition.” —Robin Becker

Available from APR’s online store

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 13 RAGE AND GRIEF STEPHEN IRA

All that matters is feeding the lake. I bend over my work I don’t matter. The lake matters. while the Goddess hovers You must keep feeding the lake. —Jean Rhys writhing in famous stillness, like a paused fl y, between

There’s a goddess for the two magnets me attended by inside of her dogs. two tall black dogs I serve her. named Rage & Grief. My reasons You’re humiliated, though my own just like this, whenever remain unknown the familiar arrives. to me. Something is mine You believe nothing once I cannot touch it. you have ever known I pace the strand could save you now. with my hands folded, Stark tall passing her columns, black dogs passing her obelisks, attend the Goddess, with her her two tall dogs. tall head toward the sea. You wanted a place by the lake. There’s a goddess for me, I wanted to sing a song there or anyone. That’s the pattern, with the voice that I sing in at home. but sometimes, you say I feel like food Stephen Ira holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has published work in Poetryy, Fence, tagvverk, and others. Ira for a lake I can’t see co-founded and co-edited Vetch, a magazine of trans poetry, and or buy property on. is currently a poetry editor at the magazine Strange Horizons.

14 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW University has loads of international students and TOO LATE TO STOP NOW I was accustomed to these guys lining up every Thursday. I wasn’t accustomed to only seeing their eyes, or to anyone wearing disposable surgical masks, pale blue flags of a strange not-so-distant JENNY BROWNE country we’d all be living in soon enough. Van’s concerts have all been canceled, Frankee mes- saged me on WhatsApp as I walked the long way home to our flat, cutting through the Botani- cal Gardens, the late morning sun making a sur- prising if blurry poached-egg-like appearance on the horizon. I told him a poet from Texas was When I write I like to listen to the same song over “Haven’t y’all ever encountered a work of art around the place. and over again, although need to listen feels a more that made you feel watched,” I asked, “something Frankee’s next question was more straightfor- accurate phrase. This repeated listening returns that made you want to change your life?” Van ward than usual, if also a bit loaded: He wants to me to a place where I can see the next thing I Morrison had been born and raised in East Belfast. know if you’re free to meet this Friday? Was I free? want to say, although of course I don’t mean see It couldn’t hurt to bring him up, but the students Freer than I’d felt in years actually. The weather with my eyes, just like I don’t mean returns me to a were a polite bunch who smiled carefully and since our December arrival had been uniformly placee exactly, although I wish I did. laughed nervously and it occurs to me now that I wet and cold, but I still woke every morning Let me try this again. When I sat down to was likely asking a more loaded question than I’d with a glowing, almost giddy disbelief that I’d write about one of those songs, it returned me to intended, as words like encounter and watchedd can managed to arrive here—a new world, and not the place where I first heard it, the place it came still evoke Belfast’s notoriously troubled past. in the instant-coffee-fueled-make-a-new-life- from and even the place where I’m listening to Despite being born post-1998 Good Friday plan-every-morning mode of a twenty-year-old it now. These places have nothing in common Peace Accords, my students still breathed sectarian who still believed she had time to do or be any- except inside of me, which is the place a story air, especially when it came to their educations. I thing, but with the more weathered expectations begins, as well as where it ends: recall one soft-spoken rugby player explaining that of a still-married mother nearing fifty, my desires I’m on my way to meet Van Morrison for coffee. he’d “never even met a Catholic until Uni.” They fully entangled in the lives of my beloveds. It gets I text my husband from the backseat of Fran- were third years, closing in on graduation, and so harder to change your life. Or even to imagine kee’s shiny red BMW. Frankee teaches mindful- about the same age I was when I began climbing how you might. ness at Queens University in Belfast, Northern out onto the roof to drink bad coffee before bik- Together my husband and I had lost brothers Ireland, where I have been living for several ing to my work-study job folding shiny pamphlets and fathers, gotten and given up jobs, crashed cars months on a 2020 Fulbright Fellowship at for the Office of International Programs. I wasn’t and added second bathrooms. We almost lost each the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Fran- sure where I was going but it was somewhere other at one hard turn. Closing my eyes, I can kee wears square black glasses, pedals around the other than where I was, and this would become still return to the foggy morning, three years ear- compact center of Belfast on an E-bike and is something of a pattern. My students’ futures lier, driving South Presa Street, sure I needed to great company, if prone to spontaneous Zen-ish loomed even more uncertain, though not in ways burn down my life because I couldn’t recognize interrogation. any of us had even begun to expect. Boris John- who I was or what I had loved. When, as Sea- “And what do you have to offer the North son had finally managed to wrestle Brexit through mus Heaney’s translation of Dante puts it, “In the of Ireland?” he asked five minutes into our first Parliament, leaving details of the so-called North- middle of the journey of our life/I found myself meeting. I’d just shoved a handful of onion crisps ern Irish backstop in flux. Most everyone believed astray in a dark wood/ where the straight road had in my mouth. “My attention?” I replied, my mouth still full. He nodded, but not in a way that indicated whether this was or wasn’t an acceptable response. “And did you know your own face before you were born?” I don’t recall what I said to that one, Yes, that Van Morrison, I reply but eventually I also learned that Frankee was life- long pals with Van the Man. to my husband’s surprise face emoji. Yes, that Van Morrison, I reply to my husband’s surprise face emoji. It has been nearly a quarter century since an otherwise unremarkable college boyfriend from Boston ghosted me cold while also gifting me this would be the big drama of 2020, although been lost sight of./How hard it is to say what it immeasurably by leaving his copy of Astral Weeks when my husband asked our cab driver how he was like . . .” behind in my boom box. My apartment that sum- imagined Brexit would change his life, he replied, Actually, it isn’t that hard to say what it was mer perched above an equally unremarkable mid- “Two cheeks of the same backside if you ask me, like at all. I told my husband I felt more “seen” by western Chinese take-out place. Each morning as so it is.” another, and we began the long hard work of fig- I climbed out the window onto its roof to drink a Some friends back home in San Antonio uring out how to see each other better again. cup of scalding Nescafé, I pressed play. The early remained understandably confused about where Relocating our family, even just for this year, air smelled like greasy dumplings and soft tar and exactly Belfast was located, geographically on the felt like a new project we could create together. It my hopes for what the still-unfolding day might island of Ireland yet in an administrative region of was going to change our lives, if not permanently hold seemed to hinge on whether or not I’d got- the UK. The images of a blood-red hand I noticed at least ekphrastic-ly, providing a different window ten up early enough to listen long enough to hear on flags all over town also meant we were inside in which our faces might be reflected with new Van Morrison sing “Cyprus Avenue” before work. the province of Ulster, which includes northern clarity against a background of different trees, the The song’s refrain of way up on, way up on worked counties on both sides of the border. One medi- dark Divis Mountains on the horizon, and framed on me—or so it felt—like a spell. One that sug- eval legend describes a boat race where the first by Samson and Goliath, as the shipyard’s immense gested I was going to change my life. chieftain to physically touch the land would lay and bright yellow cranes are known. I wanted our I’d actually described my little Van Morrison claim to it. As they approached, one cut his hand kids to learn the details of a different landscape listening ritual earlier in the week to students in off and threw it ashore. that they would then carry with them, tangible the creative writing class I was teaching for the Wash your hands well and often. A new sign had evidence that their world wasn’t thee world. I didn’t Heaney Centre. We’d just begun a module on flashed on the bus stop earlier that morning. It was know exactly where any of this would lead, but I ekphrasis, a term that commonly refers to poems mid-March by then, and as we wrapped up what believed I was okay with not knowing. written in response to other works of art. By way would turn out to be our very last class together, My more personal hopes also seemed reason- of example, I’d shown them Rilke’s one about I glanced over to where students in the Account- able enough. I was going to walk along the real looking at a headless Greek statue, which, in Ste- ing course that met next waited in the hallway. Cyprus Avenue and recognize the smell of a turf phen Mitchell’s translation, famously ends, from all The faces of three young Asian men were framed fire coming from a row of ceramic chimneys. I the borders of itself,/b urst like a star: for here there is no by the window cut into the door, and so appeared was going to find a traditional music session with place/ that does not see you. You must change your life. pressed behind thick shatterproof glass. Queens more fiddles than flutes. I was going to wave our

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 15 daughters off to their grammar school all spring But I have been listening to “Cyprus Ave- sion, if still insufficient, for what I was trying to looking straight out of a Derry Girls episode in nue” again, if a different version this time around. say to Frankee way back when he first asked what matching skirts, ties and wool blazers. I was going The BBC calls It’s Too Late to Stop Noww one I had to offer. It is also what we say with our bod- to encourage my husband off on his own adven- of the greatest live albums ever made. During ies when we linger before a work of art, or enter ture to buy a mid-80s Land Rover Defender he’d the summer of 1973, The Man toured with an a room where a loved one waits in a hospital bed. found online for sale in his grandfather’s Welsh eleven-piece group known as the Caledonia Soul Except so many cannot see their beloveds. Except hometown, a massive rumbling green machine Orchestra. At some point, he took to ending these I can barely stand to watch my new freshman stu- he would fix up to captain us around the rim of shows with “Cyprus Avenue.” The live recording dents back in Texas trying to impress one other Scotland all summer long. I was going to let my is an inspired, improvised, and ferocious take that on Zoom like eager, awkward birds. How frag- new path home change my way of looking, a new goes on for nearly ten minutes. You can hear the ile they seem, how lost. It has begun to feel like accent change my way of listening, and new ques- crowd’s excitement from the beginning. The piano we are living through a time devastatingly full tions change my understanding of myself. Most twinkles jazzy if a little restrained, biding its time. of what some call ekphrastic hopee as we attempt to importantly, I had time to let a new place happen All the little girls rhyme something / On the way back recreate the canceled world: classes, relationships, to me. home from school./ Then the leaves fall one by one by concerts, plays, exhibitions, graduations, weddings I am still an English professor, but I just had one by one by one by one/ Call the autumn time a fool. and funerals, and also that we believe we some- to Google what to call the verb tense of the sen- What does it mean to call the autumn time a how can. tences I just wrote, all those that begin with “I fool? I didn’t get to ask Van Morrison that ques- Most days I still struggle to walk beneath the was going to . . .” Grammarians like to refer to tion, but I thought of it often as I played the song weight of all we have lost, and so I’ve taken to this as “future in the past,” a way of talking about on repeat, obsessively, every evening as I walked repeating that one line: I am here to see you. Dearest a time in which something was still in the future, my dogs past a stand of Cypress trees on the San masked friend and dearest masked stranger, dearest even though now, at the moment of speaking, Antonio River as weeks of lockdown dragged into future fear and dearest dumb regret, I am here to see it is passed. Another way to say this is that we months. Texas’ deciduous Bald Cypress are differ- you. I say it again, and in the saying I have slowly use future in the pastt when something anticipated ent than the evergreen variety that grow in Bel- and painstakingly made a new ritual that is chang- does not actually occur, when an expectation is fast, with rooty elbows and long needles that turn ing if not my life at least my days, of which a life canceled. a deep red before falling, seemingly all at once, is made. In the time that has passed since that bright come winter. Herons and cormorants roosted on But isn’t a life also made of the future you morning when Frankee and I confirmed our plan the bare branches, their reflections opening and imagined? And what are we to do now, if that to head out past the sparkling waters of Belfast closing on the river’s surface. is what we call this in-between place when the Lough and on to where the steep Antrim coastline I likely told my Belfast students that the word future still feels dangerous, if not impossible, to peeks from beyond the Culloden Hotel to have ekphrasis comes from the Greek for description and accurately imagine? coffee with Van the Man Morrison, the legendary was originally a rhetorical exercise of close atten- I once read a book called Stumbling Upon Hap- singer has nearly gotten himself canceled, at least tion, one designed to recreate the experience of piness by a Harvard psychologist named Dan- in the social-media-speak sense of the word, for an object for an audience that was not there to see iel Gilbert, who suggests one thing that makes writing and performing COVID anti-lockdown it. And probably also that painting developed as humans uniquely human is that we future, making songs. I get it. I was going to go to his concert in an art intended to depict, and ultimately preserve, decisions now on what we believe will make us Derry. I miss seeing live music fiercely, and worry what would soon be lost. happy later. Apparently, we’re pretty bad at this. I for the livelihoods of performers and those who I am here to see you is what I heard myself say as couldn’t find my copy but I did come across Mal- depend on them, and I’m also not listening to I paused to watch the birds yet again, my throat colm Gladwell’s (?!) Amazon review which echoes these new songs. tightening with grief. And maybe this is a ver- what I remember of Gilbert’s argument on the

16 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW objective failure of human imagination, “We’re made a joke about “giving them that old Scien- At one point, Frankee slowed to point out some far too accepting of the conclusions of our imagi- tology smile.” I look at this photo now and shake murals on a towering iron “peace wall” built to nations,” Gladwell writes, and “Our imaginations my head. Was I trying to kill Sir Van Morrison? keep Protestant and Catholic sides of neighbor- aren’t particularly imaginative.” Another way to Of course not, but wasn’t what was going to hap- hoods apart. Many of these walls are still func- say this is that our versions of the future—and the pen already happening? The cautious Asian stu- tional, and perhaps still necessary. You can cross past for that matter—mostly resemble the present. dents? The weird hygiene warning at the bus over during the day, but not at night, another We unknowingly add and subtract details without stop? A known case of coronavirus already at detail I find myself wanting to describe whenever realizing how different things will feel when they Queens? Families from the girls’ school already en I hear the words social distancing. I also can’t help actually happen. And yet we futuree on. We can’t route home from spring break ski trips in North- wondering if this corner of the world was some- help it. Future-ing is what allows us to shape our ern Italy? The virus was here and was going to be how better prepared than others, having practiced lives, an essential part of what Gilbert calls “our here, and it would change all our lives, and in say- distance, resistance, suspicion and grief for hun- psychological immune system.” ing this I can’t help imagining the young strut- dreds of years. But I was going to. I’ve also come to believe ting lion he was on stage in 1973, pacing back and And I think then of my sweet Irish students, that future in the past is the verb tense of the forth as the band waits for his sign, all the guitars leaning forward in their seats, reading Rilke and pandemic. The unfinished sculpture. The vir- and the drums and the strings hovering in antic- trying to imagine their lives differently, now stuck tual happy hour. The great incomplete sentence ipation as he lowers his arm and ends the song, if with a version of the past becoming present again. of 2020. Yeah, my tongue gets tied/every time I try not a version of the world, with a final great shout: But is this not also the essence of the ekphras- to speak. And that’s the line in “Cyprus Avenue,” It’s too late to stop it now. ticc urge, the attempt to represent an experience the turn when the live version of the song really starts to feel like the moment we’ve been thrust into. Van Morrison stutters dramatically, enacting the act of feeling silenced, uttering a series of ptts and tssts, sounds not words. Or at least this is what How will any of us describe where we went this year and I hear now, and what I see, and what sticks in my head as I struggle to process—and maybe even what we saw this year? Will we even recognize ourselves? more to name—what has come to feel like pro- found grief for something that hadn’t even hap- pened yet. But I did get to meet him for coffee. I even Still we talked of meeting for breakfast the fol- for another, to bridge the gap in time and space ate several of the bracingly sweet Northern Irish lowing week, but then, on the way back to South with language, knowing it is likely impossible, fridge-bake desserts known as “fifteens,” so-called Belfast with Frankee, I glanced at my phone and but still trying, a kind of future-ingg even? Once I for the number of marshmallows, crushed biscuits found an urgent message from the U.S. State knew “Cyprus Avenue” as a song about possibility and candied cherries you dump together in the Department suspending all Fulbright programs because it found me at a time when all the futures food processor. The Man is in his mid-70s now worldwide. We would need to make arrange- I imagined still felt possible. Now when I listen and has long trimmed the epic ’70s sideburns that ments to leave as soon as possible. I turned the to it, I see a working-class Belfast kid crossing a fronted the Soul Orchestra. His leather-brimmed phone over and looked out the window as Fran- fancier tree-lined street than the one he lived on, fisherman cap and skeptical eyebrows made me kee drove all the way up Falls Road and back and the glimpse of the beautiful girl he was going miss my own father, or what he might have down the Shankill, playing impromptu black taxi to talk to. If he hadn’t been stuck with where he looked like had he lived long enough to come visit tour guide, pausing at an alley where his cousin was, and with who he was, as we all are. But still me in Belfast. had been taken, shot during the Troubles. Friends he made me feel it. Mostly, though, I think about Frankee had warned me that Belfast’s most and colleagues closer to my own age, no matter what Van actually said, the feeling he had of being famous son isn’t exactly known for his charm, what “side” they grew up on, all had some ver- trapped by other people’s nostalgia, by our longing and he did seem plenty ticked off about his shows sion of this story, a pervading sense of connec- to return to a place, a home that no longer exists, being canceled, but mostly he was kind, even tion via loss, so much that Belfast often seemed or perhaps never did. sweet to me. We talked about poetry, and when I a place wholly devoid of nostalgia as I was regu- asked him which of his own writing he was most larly reminded of how bad it had been, how much proud of, he didn’t hesitate. “What I’m writing things had changed, how I wouldn’t even recog- now,” he said. “Now that I’m old enough to actu- nize the place. Jenny Browne is the author of three collections of poems, Dear ally know something. It’s hard to be other people’s How will any of us describe where we went Stranger, The Second Reason, and At Once, all from the University of Tampa Press. A former James Michener Fellow at nostalgia.” this year and what we saw this year? Will we even the University of Texas in Austin, she has received grants from As we walked outside to take a picture, I leaned recognize ourselves? What will we call the con- the San Antonio Artist Foundation, the Texas Writers League, in closer to give him a kiss on the cheek, and he stellation of all who have been lost? and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 17 ANNUNCIATION Chessy Normile MICHAEL DUMANIS Great Exodus, Great Wall,

The words I put in him he troubles with Great Party and over, shifting in reverse the syntax of, as though a poet troubling the line with malaprop, but not a poet yet. He’s three. Great Exodus, Great He’s lived less time than most of the anxieties I’ve nursed for him. Wall, Great Party Please don’t roll over on the other boy, by Chessy Normile, I whisper from the ball pit’s burbling edge. winner of the 2020 Three years after he opened into the fluorescent APR/Honickman First annunciative light of the extraction room his eyes, I case the boiling pit’s perimeter Book Prize, is available for his lit smile and fail at APR’s website, to understand one thing he feels, www.aprweb.org, this human foal, vortex of appetite, machine and at other outlets. of noise, child who won’t blow Great Exodus, Great the softest sound into the pennywhistle, this charming man who can’t quite purse his lips Wall, Great Party was to activate the bubble wand, tiny muscles refusing chosen by guest judge Li-Young Lee. to hoist the necessary sails. The future promises countless encounters with useless specialists Chessy Normile received a BA from Sarah waving in his face wands, while tonight Lawrence College and an MFA from the my son waddles out three hours after being put down, the muslin penguin Michener Center for Writers at University pajamas sagging slack at the hip, of Texas Austin, where she was awarded to murmur to himself amid the assembled an Academy of American Poets University living room wreckage of miniature trains, Prize in 2018. She lives in New York and with trancelike clarity, his eyelids half-glued, edits a zine series called Girl Blood Info. this is my whole life, this is my whole life, and my world too.

Michael Dumanis is the author of two books of poems: Creature, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2023, and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. He teaches at Bennington College and is the editor of Bennington Review. -

18 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW EIGHT POEMS The Hazy Part of Art He stood on the rocks and fished MARY RUEFLE then sat on the rocks and drew the trout he’d caught Beautiful pictures they were, alive in every line The Understanding cannot go there, these words physically The rain is splashy. in front of your eyes Tangerine Peel The baby is fat as a cannot go there, What did the little tangerine do pat of butter. but if you look to deserve to die like this? Mother is sleeping. at your pancakes I am a scalp of myself, skinned No one is crying. when the little bubbles by my own thoughts. Ah poetry, Because it was time break and rise god of molting turkeys, save to live with strangers you may get some sense my brother from the truck, save baby was born. of the surface of his mind my mother from the fire, save Hearing the rain and when you eat them my sisters and fathers from the jumping in puddles he will fill you dust of their own homes, he feels another event with the whole benefit of being, save their children from drowning is due in time. heavy at times, so heavy in love, save my friends from Not knowing what, come lie with me going through the ice, save not guessing what, for a moment love all animals from starvation, and he listens to the rain those who have gone rogue, save as if it were a figment them too, strangers everywhere, of his new home. Poem in Which I try to save them, my husband He doesn’t know it’s Explain Myself and puppy. Ah little tangerine, the lonesome denial by all implications of the dictionary Because there was never an infant of all he wished for. you do not deserve to die. in our house, I never learned to cry. Da, he says, Da da da. Forgive me. Because there was not a goldfish I never learned to swim. Manger Story Without plants I could not grow, The Future Today they are storing the manger. without flowers I did not open. I may be wrong, but The lamb and the donkey get folded flat A pen was first created by God I think I am an acquired and put in a box with a hand-painted so he could write down events taste, said the saltine sign Do Not Disturb! Manger Scene! to come. Without events, laced with lavender. Watch that angel goddamnitt gets yelled. what use were our pens? And she was right, I Mary and her baby collapse in a crate Plenty, it turns out. could not “go” there, where she can’t quite hold him. This is how I write when I’m not rush into her arms They get stuffed with the hay being very careful. This is how for a surprising embrace. and fall asleep, like we do after I write when I’m a bit more careful. Yet that very day a light snow our dinner, only longer, and longer, This is the best I can do. laced the smaller flowers, like prisoners of their own dreams. all of them purple. The Big Star’s energy is turned off Spring! What Alka-Seltzer so it’s of no help at all Marcasite is this? I bubbled up to any of us, everywhere. I who speak here spent a winter as words hurried And the unpacking! It’s hard, life- in wisdom. It is a hard cold out of my mouth— draining work when that day comes. glittering place, its music disappearing O cracker, most intimate One by one the wise men wake up. as the snow falls laterally over of allies, when life is down The camel’s leg may be broken a level field. No one can hear it, no one to a dram and a farthing, but Mary’s breast is still perfectly can possibly listen to that kind of even I, the open blabber, round, like an apple in a parachute lost space. Sure, a few blue glints will try anything new, gently landing. but really, dusky friend— O future, O you. it’s like a photograph of the dead you only really see after they’re gone. First Communion And you feel the birds and the cats In my opinion, Walt Whitman and the dogs all need their claws Mary Ruefle’s latest book is Dunce (Wave Books, 2019). She was the first man clipped, that that’s all it would take lives in Vermont. on the moon, for you to feel it, but it’s winter even your ashes and the roads are closed, you don’t have on the last day any clippers, and if you did of autumn, half- you’d cut your own nails, broken by the wind, which have pierced you.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 19 FOUR POEMS WENDY XU

Poem Beginning to Sound Poem for Chores Myself as echo, failed synonym Today his esophagus aches Disappeared music returns to my father’s house The words choking a little inside their tubes playing against a white painter’s cloth nailed to the wall and swishing the blue soap around yesterday’s bowl, light hums the attendant (a flag was waving distantly) seams of dust— (the perimeter wet with flowers) He coughs twice Like a child burying favorite words in the sandbox into a shirt sleeve, the cat rustles I filled the undying year with tasks and shreds her papers (I keep at it) The mouse in the tub he released Planting fingers in the gaps between lines with a blessing: until next time I wrote notes into an opening for he who departed in color, I knew only lightly In the interim the To-Dos in neon went on and on (across from the oil-filling station, rosettes of cloud) In the mind, terrain of neurotransmitters It’s Saturday and I’ve made promises to remember the dead or cobwebs? Stopping at the desk Some circuitry ticking painfully in the forehead now that Uncle is gone to pluck an unripe word All days he sits down with the sun A needle-work of electrical wire passing whispers to his lime through the young heads of trees as he muddles Old books begin to bore me, their yellowing answers Birds squawking poetry beside a rusty pond Sweeps the broken glass to safety and Uncle in my mind turning always Polishes the chrome bits like the last abundant word I look for him there at the end of a task: his pinky finger curled up just so Poem for Feeling’s Sake A hook, or the enchanting sail Morning with a feeling to walk of his hand Limbs churning through air and the traffic so polite now at rest

Where the past meets the day’s magnetosphere The comma before the rest of him a hectic body, growing older and more unknown as the mood turns

Trees in the plaza boxing for sky Something dry and melancholy rustling underfoot

I passed the sunburned outline of a vine against the garden’s pale wall One bud in the neighbor’s gutter the other reaching as it opened

Who am I to think about philosophy, money? Reading books in my sweltering private factory When the color of the hour was really gemstone chiffon swirling in a giant god’s eye

When time coughed me up naked and dazzling I was hungry for nectarines and heavy cream Fish heads in broth, sprouted white beans

While up from here, past a cool starry nothingness: infallible satellites roaming in description

their chrome rabbit-ears tweaking out human signs

20 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW A Dream of Shandong Fog grasping concrete Some trees babbling into air Taneum Bambrick Why do I turn my head piously to the sky? Vantage Cranes of steel and smoke were opening their hungry beaks

Little sorrows arranged on the stove top at home: pills for Grandfather Uncle’s tank of air

Cords of dust traveling mischievously into corners while I spin around on a rock of my own invention

A servant to the black and white cat that hooks into my shirt-sleeve Her lavish ambivalence Vantage by Taneum Bambrick, winner of the I come here to think and eat up another sky 2019 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, is

To sit with Uncle available at APR’s website, www.aprweb.org, unbothered for a day and at other outlets. Vantage was chosen by in the shade of a maidenhair tree guest judge Sharon Olds. Discouraging intention like a brand new thing Taneum Bambrick is a 2018–2020 Stegner Nothing at all dark or lonesome when he wakes Fellow at Stanford University. She is a

I write land-shy words to Uncle winner of the Academy of American Poets as soft as mute wind University Prize, a Susanna Colloredo sailing across the tops of his hair Environmental Writing Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the

Wendy Xu is most recently the author of The Past (Wesleyan, 2021) and Phrasis (2017), 2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest. named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetryy, Tin House, Granta, Poetryy, The New Republic, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere. She teaches poetry at The New School in New York City.

First Editions from Winners of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize

Alicia Jo Rabins Heather Tone Maria Hummel Divinity School Likenesses House and Fire 2015 Winner 2016 Winner 2013 Winner selected by selected by selected by C. D. Wright Nick Flynn Fanny Howe

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 21 TWO POEMS SHARA LESSLEY

The Hawthorn walking the long blocks from fall to spring, the schoolboys in filed A woman thought companies ignoring even my shadow. she saw Christ Vanity’s a funny thing. The shelves in a tin pail of milk all lined with ointments and creams; on the barn floor my mirror, like a hunter’s camera rain outside His face set on a carcass, trying to game blue as marble the game. In captivity, elephants in the predawn have been known to grind their milking what were His tusks against the walls of their cells, keepsakes as a child nights passed upright and swaying a stone maybe as if to lull themselves away from sleep stashed in the dirt rather than toward it. I understand a conker like ones their defeat. As if happiness were a button boys collected for lost in the grass, not the protractor’s fuel and left rotting dance on a graph as we try to connect in heaps near our lives’ little squares. For years railway stations I mistook the Polaroid of my mother during WWI the casings holding me in the car as our first reminded Him of together, but here we are among the wild His mother the shape asparagus, high as bamboo, as though her hands made no labor could break her. In the photo, days she found she commands a rake, while I wait, six her temper—lost weeks to go in utero, my retinas we say—but is that pulsing toward scraps of light. true? the woman knew My second pregnancy took years it’s always there off my life. Bedridden and hooked in the tree in the limbs’ to tubes, I worried my daughter restraint beneath wouldn’t outlive the darkness of the shell the solvent the womb, her brain shedding any the hard dark synapse related to sight. In this photo, seed chemists rushed all is fine—my father watching over to ferment then sent my mother’s shoulder beneath a sky to trenches men too blue to be true, which has something cut from the farmland to do with why, when my daughter a woman saw begins to cry, having discovered— Christ in the mist after coaxing it from its pupa— fertilizer’s stale scent the withered butterfly, I call its death come in through a trick of light. In her sketchbook, the eaves come Jesus we trace the proboscis, the compound eye in the sweet that would have tracked the sun’s hay dampening descent. We label the antennae, the wings’ delicate panes. The monarch The Monarch wanted back its cocoon, I explain, because the light was too much. Once, I was decorative, could She fiddles with an orange crayon. stand very still, quiet as a thumb- I push the mesh cage aside; meaning, tack holding up what was important. I do what my mother did. Pretending I was handsome, too, in the right abandonment is natural, I smile. And lie. weather, my heart like a pool of metallic shavings, or the thoughtless whirr of a curtain catching whatever the pane let in. Is it true we worship Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife and Two-Headed Nightingale, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, an anthology of essays. Con- things made in our likeness? My face sulting Editor for Acre Books, she currently lives in Dubai. in my daughter’s face, sharp as time’s punch line: that she carries the youth that was mine. I watch myself

22 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW I remember two of the poems that Rukeyser read that night, “Waking This Morning,” where AN APPRECIATION OF she refers to herself as a violent woman trying “to be non-violent/one more day,” and “St. Roach,” which was about to appear in The Gates (1976), the last individual collection that she published in MURIEL RUKEYSER, her lifetime. After she read each poem that night, Rukeyser would let the page fall carelessly to the floor, and slowly the drift grew, like a scattering of leaves. “ST. ROACH” Ever since college, I have been enthusiastic about the eighteenth-century mystic, the mad, EDWARD HIRSCH religious polymath, Christopher Smart, who had wrenched his piercing observations, his extensive reading, and his jubilant faith into one of the most startling and unlikely epics of English poetry, Jubi- late Agno, and so I was amazed when Galway Kin- nell choreographed a group reading of the poem in New York at The Church of the Transfigu- St. Roach (c. 1973) ration, otherwise known as the Little Church Around the Corner. There was a full house for the twenty poets and a choir For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you, from Holy Cross to sing Benjamin Britten’s setting, Rejoice in the Lamb. I for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth, remember the grand procession, all those poets who are gone now, the older ones I looked up to, who included Etheridge Knight, Allen Ginsberg, Grace they showed me by every action to despise your kind; Paley, Philip Levine, David Ignatow, Allen Grossman, Nancy Willard, Jane for that I saw my people making war on you, Cooper, Joel Oppenheimer, Harvey Shapiro, Thomas Lux, Vertamae Gros- I could not tell you apart, one from another, venor, Paul Zweig, Stanley Plumly, and James Wright, who read the passage for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you, about Jeoffry, Smart’s one faithful companion. I wish I could write a piece for that all the people I knew met you by about each one of these poets; to me, they had a rumpled collective glow, as crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling if a group of union representatives had ambled into a fifteenth-century Ital- ian painting. Here they were, the wiry and the whimsical, the burly and the water on you, they flushed you down, lion-headed, some with high pipes, others with low growls, all of whom had for that I could not tell one from another come to give loving voice to the long dead, one of the great outsiders of Eng- only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender. lish poetry. It takes all sorts of major and minor figures—I don’t consider the Not like me. categories meaningful—to make a national poetry. For that I did not know your poems Rukeyser was the last to take the podium—she looked more fragile now And that I do not know any of your sayings but still vibrant and undiminished—and what happened next was upset- ting, strange and magisterial. In one of Kinnell’s last poems, “Jubilate,” he And that I cannot speak or read your language described the experience of listening to her edgy soaring voice, in full song, And that I do not sing your songs swelling light. It felt as if the podium was trying to lift itself. And that I do not teach our children to eat your food And now it became evident that our podium was not rising, it was Muriel who was sinking, or know your poems toppling in fact, hauling down on herself or sing your songs the microphone and amplifier and all their wires, But that we say you are filthing our food into a heap on the floor. From under this wreckage But that we know you not at all. her suddenly re-clarioned voice was heard: “Let Zadok Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time. worship with the Mole—before honour is humility!” You were lighter than the others in color, that was And as we disentangled her, she sat up and scanned about and said: “She that looketh low shall learn!” neither good nor bad. I was really looking for the first time. Rukeyser had collapsed at the podium. There was a flurry of activity, You seemed troubled and witty. everyone on stage lurched forward, Kinnell and Paley rushed to lift her, to Today I touched one of you for the first time. hold her up in her jeopardy. Someone in the back wanted to call an ambu- You were startled, you ran, you fled away lance, a doctor rushed forward, but Rukeyser was adamant: no ambulance! no doctor! She seemed to be suffering a stroke—she would die just two years Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch. later—but, for now, she wanted a seat so that she could finish reciting her pas- I reach, I touch, I begin to know you. sage. She was a performer, and one did not quit a performance:

I heard Muriel Rukeyser read her poems aloud twice, once in 1976, once in Eased into a chair at last, 1978. The first reading took place in a long narrow room on the top floor of she smiled: “Let Carpus rejoice with the Frog-Fish— the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. She was presenting with Gerald a woman cannot die on her knees!” Stern, who had recently hired me for my first job in Pennsylvania Poets in the By the time Rukeyser came to read “St. Roach” during the Bicentennial Schools, and he invited me to tag along. I hadn’t been to many poetry read- year in Philadelphia, she already had a lifetime of poetry and social activism ings yet—I have subsequently put in my ten thousand hours—and I was over- behind her—in her case, as her friend William Meredith put it, you couldn’t excited by the crowd. I recall that Rukeyser looked stately but not vigorous, wedge a knife between them. She was fully engaged in linking her personal and slightly tilted, I suppose, if you knew how to look—I didn’t—since she experience to a larger social experiment, the individual to the community. had suffered a few small strokes over the past decade. She seemed grandly old “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry,” she wrote in the first line of the to me—she was sixty-three—and had a face shaped like an oversized heart. first poem of her first book, Theory of Flightt (1935), and it was a mantra that I was carrying my copy of Breaking Open (1973) because I loved her poem she followed for the rest of her life. Rukeyser had strong Leftist commitments “Despisals.” I wouldn’t have had the language to describe it then, but I must that drove much of her work—she was a political troublemaker—but she was have intuited how it filters Martin Buber through Walt Whitman to come also hard to pigeon-hole because was neither a proletarian poet nor a socialist up with a personal ethos. It’s a sort of “I and Thou” for the American poet of realist. She brought a kind of romantic utopianism and modernist aesthetic to difference: the sensibility of the New Masses. T. S. Eliot may have disliked the poetry of Never to despise in myself what I have been taught Percy Bysshe Shelley, but both poets shadow her work. to despise. Not to despise the other. Rukeyser is a ragged modernist. Formally speaking, her poems were often Not to despise the it. To make this relation. rambling at a time when American criticism was clenching around the well- with the it: to know that I am it. wrought urn and the sacred object. She ostentatiously included politics in her

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 23 work at the very moment when New Criticism to be “non-violent,” she suggests, when our days fan of Don Marquis’ humorous verses and short was intent on divorcing poetry from history, and themselves are repeatedly filled with our country’s stories, Archy and Mehitabel, which describe the her reputation paid the price. I would say that she violence. adventures of a cockroach, who had been a free- also brought a messy irrationality into poetry in a In the preface to her first Collected Poems (1978), verse poet in another life, and an alley cat. There’s way that enraged poets who believed in tight form Rukeyser argued that there are “two kinds of a touch of self-mockery here, a backdrop of com- and rational control. It’s almost breathtaking the reaching in poetry, one based on the docu- edy wedded to politics. I don’t think we should way that her work routinely pissed off some crit- ment, the evidence itself; the other informed by shy from the fact that there’s also something dis- ics, like Louise Bogan, who attacked book after the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts turbing about the poem; it’s designed that way. book of hers in The New Yorkerr. I happen to love of life in which we dive deep and sometimes— The frisson comes from designating sainthood to Bogan’s poetry, which Marianne Moore described with strength of expression and skill and luck— the lowliest and most disgusting of urban insects. as “compactness compacted,” but it’s precisely the reach that place where things are shared and we Rukeyser plays on the fact that St. Roch is the opposite of Rukeyser’s Whitmanian free-verse all recognize the secrets.” These two divisions of patron saint of plague victims; he embraces inva- sprawl. It’s as if Rukeyser’s formal unruliness, her expression, two types of reach or ambition, don’t lids and others who are shunned. Rukeyser was freewheeling unconscious associations, troubled separate out so neatly in her work. For example, a secular Jew and yet I hear Christian sourcing Bogan’s mind. she was ground-breaking in the way she brought in this poem. For example, the prayer “Litany There were always contemporaries who the documentary into American poetry in the to Saint Roch” lingers somewhere in the back- admired Rukeyser’s poetry, but it would take 1930s, especially in her long poem “The Book of ground: “Saint Roch, whose heart was burn- another two generations, forty years or so, for the Dead,” which responds to the Hawk’s Nest ing with charity, pray for us . . .” Behind this, poets to start contending with her. We haven’t Tunnel disaster of 1931 in Gauley Bridge, West too, stands St. Francis’s “Canticle of the Crea- had many American poets with such a deep moral Virginia. The poem interlaces her own experience tures.” Galway Kinnell was using the same model compass, such a sharp historical sensibility, and of driving through West Virginia with a record of for “St. Francis and the Sow,” which he wrote such a committed social consciousness. She was testimonies and memorials from survivors, which about the same time as “St. Roach.” unusual in the way that she twinned poetry and are reportorial and gut-wrenching to read. And From the opening line, there is something science. She often hastened a poem because of yet even here the overall poem borrows a symbol- odd and old-fashioned in Rukeyser’s phras- her moral outrage, but she was also determined ogy from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a col- ing, “For that I never knew you . . .” The phrase to bring all of herself into her work in a way that lection of spells and inscriptions based on ancient “for that” is an archaic wording for the conjunc- hadn’t been done before. She wouldn’t split her- tombs and tomb paintings. These spells are “the tion “because,” i.e.: “Because I never knew you, I self off into different roles and identities. “To unverifiable fact” and they give a dream-like or only learned to dread you.” Here, the poet is not live as a poet, woman, American, and Jew—this Jungian weight to the documentary evidence. just employing an outdated English idiom, she chalks in my position,” she wrote in 1944: “If the Part of Rukeyser’s achievement, in fact, was is also using the diction to elevate the roach and four come together in one person, each strength- to bring the inner life to the outer one, to infuse invoke an older, more archaic form of knowledge. ens the other.” Three years later she wrote a nine- the facts with a sort of visionary utopian gleam. Most of us who grew up in cities were inculcated poem cycle for her yet unborn son that described What’s moving is the way she kept showing up with a primitive dread of cockroaches. That’s why pregnancy with an honesty and complexity that over a forty-year period to right the record, to “St. Roach” is such a decisive and unlikely praise was unheard of at the time. She chalked in single write about the Scottsboro trial in Alabama and poem. I can’t help but think of it as a response and mother to her position. the Union Carbide catastrophe in West Virginia, even an admonishment to Kafka’s pained depic- Rukeyser believed that American poetry, “the the Spanish Civil War and World War II, the tion of Gregor Samsa in “Metamorphosis.” outcast art,” had a crucial place in American cul- racial divide and the civil rights era. She protested Rukeyser’s lyric proceeds by a series of ana- ture. I agree with her that poetry has been an vociferously against the war in Vietnam. She sur- phoric repetitions. In the history of poetry, the essential resource that we have often wasted in our prised people by talking about the troubadours strategic device of anaphora (from the Greek: country. “American poetry has been part of a cul- of Provence and Languedoc and then declared, “a carrying up or back”) serves as the organiz- ture in conflict,” she declared in her prose book much to the dismay of some high school English ing principle for most catalogs and lists, as in the The Life of Poetry, which is as valuable today as teachers, that the Beatles were poets. She was not Hebrew Bible. It is a joyous piling up of partic- when she wrote it in the late forties. She goes on apologetic for writing out of the body and cham- ulars, which is why it was so useful to Whit- to define two essential features of American life: pioning women’s experience, a womanist subject man, whose litanies are the basis for American matter. When I was eighteen, I read her book The free verse. Here, the free-verse rhythm is almost We are a people tending toward democracy at the level Speed of Darkness (1968), and its sexual frankness stately, the diction slightly elevated. The opening of hope; on another level, the economy of the nation, shocked me awake: movement, a single sentence of eleven lines, estab- the empire of business within the republic, both include lishes the primary pattern: in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare. Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis It is the history of the idea of war that is beneath our Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you, other histories. . . . But around and under and above Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child. for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth, it is another reality. . .. This history is the history of they showed me by every action to despise your kind; The Speed of Darkness provided many people possibility. for that I saw my people making war on you, with a model of personal presence. A line in “The I could not tell you apart, one from another, Rukeyser understood that warfare has been inter- Poem as Mask”—“No more masks! No more for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you, woven into our history, and she opposed it with mythologies!”—provided the title for the first key for that all the people I knew met you by a vision of democratic possibility. She said: “To feminist anthology of the early seventies. A ques- crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling be against war is not enough, it is hardly a begin- tion and answer in “Käthe Kollwitz”—“What water on you, they flushed you down, ning. . . . W e are against war and the sources would happen if one woman told the truth about for that I could not tell one from another of war.” her life? / The world would split open”—provided only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender. Rukeyser spent much of her life opposing war the title for the next one. Rukeyser linked fem- and trying to imagine peace. She was concerned inist issues to human rights. When I met her in Rukeyser purposely uses a biblical cadence to with root causes and social imperatives. She didn’t the mid-seventies, she had recently come back invoke the despised roach. Christopher Smart view peace as something that automatically comes from South Korea, where she had gone to pro- provided a clear precedent in many of the most to us, but something to be constructed, like a test the imprisonment and death sentence of the arresting passages in Jubilate Agno, which lead work of art. It is something to be made, like love. dissident poet Kim Chi Ha, the basis for “The with the word “For,” as in “For I am not with- Rukeyser was unusual as a political poet because Gates.” She had a sort of porousness as a storyteller out authority in my jeopardy” and “For they work she was careful to locate the enemy within as (“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous well as outside of herself. It’s true, she argues, that she said) and registered the lives of other people instrument, because I am more unguarded than we need to reconcile ourselves with each other, on her pulse. For her, it was all personal. She said, others,” and: but we also need to reconcile our conscious and “the emotional obstacle is the real one.” I like her For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. unconscious minds, sleeping with waking, “our- impatience in the poem “Islands”: “O for God’s For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily selves with ourselves.” There is a fraught psycho- sake/ They are connected/ Underneath.” serving him. logical recognition in her work that we are all Rukeyser got the idea for “St. Roach” while For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he divided beings, that we not only need to unify she was stuck in a Washington, D. C., jail, where worships in his way. with others but also to make peace with ourselves. she had been locked up for an anti-war demon- This is where a late poem such as “Waking This stration. It was inspired by a close encounter with Rukeyser brings Smart’s sense of jeopardy to Morning” comes in. It’s hard for a violent person a real roach. Rukeyser’s son recalls that she was a her thinking about a common insect scapegoated

24 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW by terrified human beings. The language points what is happening here. Rukeyser is not so much “St. Roach” becomes an unlikely quest and wis- up that there is something cruel and excessive in projecting her own feelings as trying to describe dom poem. our war on these small indistinguishable beings, the life of another being, which she is observ- I think that “St. Roach” cleverly inverts the who are repeatedly targeted: crushed, stamped, ing, how it seems to her. There is a slight self- Nazi and Fascist symbolism of enemies as vermin. scalded with boiling water, flushed down the toi- amusement as she reaches to describe the reality It also eerily anticipates the use of the term “cock- let. The summary of the cockroach as dark, fast, of an utterly foreign creature, someone she has roaches” in the Rwandan genocide, where the and thin brings the speaker to a realization: “Not just stumbled into, who interests her. The rea- Hutu extremists justified exterminating the Tutsi like me.” This punch, which is delivered as a son that this is not simply personification is that people by labeling them inyenzii (cockroaches). It’s short, indented sentence, turns the poem. What the cockroach also stands in for a human figure, possible to dehumanize people by taking away happens next doesn’t have precedent in Smart but the otherness of another person. She is attributing their individuality; apparently, it’s easier to murder comes from Rukeyser’s own ethical stance toward human feelings to a something that both is and is people who are considered subhuman. It takes a the world. not human. certain sort of poet, but also a certain type of per- At this point in the poem, we understand what I’ve appreciated the last stanza ever since I son, to treat a cockroach as an individual and sanc- we have suspected all along: that the roach is both heard it more than four decades ago. It has a phys- tify an insect. It’s not an obvious move. It takes a itself and a representative figure. It stands for other ical charge. The time frame of the poem changes holy foolishness, the kind of grave and comic risk people, all the unknown and despised, the Other. from “Yesterday I looked” to “Today I touched.” you find in Christopher Smart and William Blake. The way the poet manages this identification is The speaker has learned that we need to under- Muriel Rukeyser was the sort of poet and per- by bringing the idea of cultural inheritance to stand things not just intellectually but also bodily, son who extended her democratic vision to other the cockroach. Think of Vietnam or El Salvador by touch. Who touches this touches a man, a creatures, other people, and stood up for the or any other culture that the U.S. has ignorantly woman, a cockroach: derided and detested. She wasn’t squeamish or confronted with our foreign policy. There may be territorial, she welcomed the stranger. She also something outlandish about Rukeyser’s catalog as Today I touched one of you for the first time. understood that she was living in what she called it applies to the cockroach, but something deep You were startled, you ran, you fled away “the first century of world wars,” a time of crisis and even self-evident as it applies to other cul- Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch. and global conflict, an unprecedented era of kill- tural heritages. Now the list presses forward with I reach, I touch, I begin to know you. ing, a nuclear world. But she didn’t lose her way, a series of conjunctions: For thatt is transformed she kept her bearings, and stood her ground. She In standing up for a lesser creature, Rukeyser is into And thatt and finally into But that. Each line is contributed to the aggregate. Her work is a tes- also speaking on behalf of all those who are differ- a unit, but there is no punctuation to stop the rush timony to the document and the dream life, and ent, such as Jews and women and disabled people of knowledge, the shame of not knowing: that’s why she opened the gates for so many others and refugees. Rukeyser was bisexual, and I have to walk through with dignity. For that I did not know your poems no doubt that today she’d include everyone under And that I do not know any of your sayings the rubric of LGBTQIA+. The end of this poem And that I cannot speak or read your language is also just a beginning. Formally, the poem comes And that I do not sing your songs full circle. Rukeyser began with the statements, And that I do not teach our children “For that I never knew you” and “for that I never Edward Hirsch has published ten books of poems, including touched you,” and now rectifies that ignorance. Gabriel: A Poem and Stranger by Night. He has also pub- to eat your food lished six prose books about poetry, most recently 100 Poems to or know your poems The last line progresses in three distinct parts: “I Break Your Heart. His new book, In the Heart of Amer- or sing your songs reach, I touch, I begin to know you.” Focusing on ican Poetry, will be published next spring by the Library of But that we say you are filthing our food touch and knowledge, on knowledge by touch, America. But that we know you not at all.

The psychiatrist Robert Coles said that the poem “St. Roach” provides “a beautiful lesson in the psychology and sociology of prejudice.” Rukeyser distances herself from inherent preju- dices, she turns a cold eye on them in herself, as she individuates the roach: “Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.” She specifically invokes racial difference in order to dismiss it as a bias: “You were lighter than the others in color, that was neither good nor bad.” The next couplet intensifies the speaker’s education in two simple declarative sentences:

I was really looking for the first time. You seemed troubled and witty.

This characterization of the cockroach is what is usually called personification, the attribution of human qualities to non-human beings and things, but I don’t think that adequately describes

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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 25 FIVE POEMS BLAS FALCONER

Strata Pancreas

You don’t understand, he says, again, from the Greek, from the backseat of the car, my son, pan-, meaning “all” who only months ago, could not fall asleep before whispering, first, or “whole” and kreas, mean- some secret in my ear. When I look ing “flesh.” in the rearview, he turns toward peaks A gland, like in the distance, and when I ask him to a sponge, se- explain, shaking his head, he sighs as if creting fluids to it isn’t worth the trouble. I had regulate blood the same words for my father, and one day, sugarr, to cursing, pushed him through the doorway break down. with the full strength of the body I had Common grown into. At forty-five, he could ailments include have pinned me to the wall, but at inflammation (pan- what cost? It’s a story we don’t like creatitis) and to tell, though my son and I ride between cancer (ab- dominal pain, the rocky hillsides in silence until he asks how long it takes to get weight loss, jaundice). It’s there, an apology in the sound possible to live of his voice if not the words. I do without one, my understand. Not long, I say, as we father says drive through desert mountains that on the phone, a have stood for six million years, dryness in and which I thought in my youth looked his mouth, his like the fallen bodies of giants, gods tongue sticking as grown over with yellow grass. he tells me what to expect if Rara Avis he’s lucky. And

A falcon, one of millions raised all day, everything, for sacrifice. An X-ray no matter how small, makes me reveals the bird, un-tombed, wrapped in linen, wings pressed think of it, hidden deep the length of its ghostly body. inside me, Force-fed mice, sparrows, it weeping. The bee couldn’t expel the bones, the claws, crawling in and died having eaten too much, blossoms the stomach packed: feather and scattered on fur, tail descending the throat. the glass One of many bred to brave tabletop. The sound of the dark with its king, beyond a pitcher fill- appetite, nothing left ing slowly to crave, thus, heavenly, saved. with water.

26 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW Where It Hurts Where do you go when you forget who you are? You sit at the window, and neighbors stop— Pilar, the seamstress—to say, Hello—Hector, Goodbye. Each time a shop door opens, small bells chime. In the morning, nameless mountains rise, and at night, I carry you to bed. Before you die, you wake in fits of pain, delusions. Mother asks where it hurts. Here, you cry, and here.

Apology for My Son Who Asks to Live with Us Forever When the car stopped in front of the house one night after the long drive, my father lifted me from the back seat. He’s awake, my brother said, Asleep, my sister, their small shoes turning stones on the narrow path. I didn’t open my eyes but could smell my father’s breath, warm and sweet. Is not, Is too—they argued as I floated like a dream through the dark above them, cradled under the great branch. The roots pushed deeper into the soft ground. I was neither, of course, and both. The sound of a key as it entered a lock. The sound of a door swinging open. Closed.

* We haven’t left the house in months, touching almost no one else, and you fall asleep holding my hand until your breathing grows long and steady, your face soft as if you’ve gone some place I can’t. My own father lies in a hospital on the other side of the country, and through the phone, over the sound of machines, nurses, their questions, his voice grows weaker, telling me what he won’t. Like the day you dove to the bottom of the pool, that stillness on the surface, me holding my breath. Or the summer my father, in a small boat with the white sail and simple red star, skimmed back and forth along the shore, where I stood, waiting. Years from now, I’ll be telling you this: Forgive me, Son. How can I spare you from what I have not been spared?

Blas Falconer is the author of three poetry collections, including Forgive the Body This Fail- ure (Four Way Books, 2018). A recipient of an NEA fellowship and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, he teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 27 THE VOID PHILLIP B. WILLIAMS

Our dog died in the ugly disaster must leave before it comes back. that is aloneness. She died on Even the trees the first floor, in my sister’s apartment lining the one-way streets flanked on a makeshift pad shifted halfway by liquor stores bright as the mansions from beneath her. And I caught the center of devils. Even the trees must first catch fire, of her dying, the shake, the after-bit drop their fire, stand naked in penance tongue swelling from her mouth. as we rake their burnt garments to the gutter. My girl. Good girl. She half-died alone Yes, even wakefulness must go toward sleep and finished with us there. and sleep must wake. Even the body My sister and I rubbed her side leaves then comes back and she shook and blinked then blinked as dirt, as a mind reeling into itself, no more but breathed a slow breath a brittle recollection: as I rubbed her head then kissed her Was our dog 13 or 14 when she died? forehead. Even in death she was mine When I kissed her forehead, was she to kiss. She was not ugly. Much like already gone or still passing through, the story of the boy from school the last bit of her dying mixing who was shot in the head and lived to talk with my sister’s breath, the vet appointment about it and lived to hear us all talk about it, of no use now. I closed her eyes. It’s no use, howls the hole that needed the help of others the entrance wound but they fixed up the boy to close. And his neighbors around him looked who spoke another language for a short time, into the hole in his head as if slowly realizing the trees bowing to hear him better they’d all that time been watching a friend beyond their dancing boughs, in spite climb from the vortex of skin-bone-hush, of their leaves that let in a little mothlight, the hole puckering like a fish and the head a little streetlight so that gaps of leaf- shaped darkness gasped across his face, it inhabited didn’t move, didn’t twist, mouth-shaped leaves on his face wasn’t dead but dead quiet. And I imagine and they spoke back to the hole, We too leave. the hole like a howl from a dog, We all leave. Hush. You’ll come back. Lazarus. like the diamonds in a chain-link fence Concrete Christ. A memory. that let sight in but not the flesh. This A haunting. A possession is the end, do not enter or take part in like an illness, like a bullet, what little you’ve been allowed to see. like a dog’s eyes staring back Howl like a warning. Howl like a plea. then merely open Do not pass. Do not step into this shape with no looking involved, in which everything ever missing takes shape: like a boy’s head the dead dog buried in the backyard, babbling on. the contour of sorrow that is any boy’s back darkening then disappearing altogether Phillip B. Williams is from Chicago, IL. He is the author of the books Mutiny (Penguin, 2021) from the door on his way to school, and Thief in the Interiorr (Alice James Books, 2016). Phillip has received a 2017 Whiting on his way coming back Award, the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2017 Lambda Literary Award, a 2021 Liter- but he must leave first. Everything ature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He currently teaches at Bennington College and is a member of the founding faculty for the Randolph College low-residency MFA program in creative writing.

28 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW any dead writer, who would you choose? I would A CONVERSATION love to eat steak with James Salter. I remem- ber when you were reading Light Years and I was just waiting for you to finish it because that book MELISSA BRODER changed my idea of what a beautiful sentence is. I couldn’t recover! I’m not even straight and it’s about straight people, not that it matters, but it AND ALEX DIMITROV was just so beautiful. When you encounter an actual art object, something gorgeous and well- made, it’s such a relief. mb Hahaha, I love that your blurb is your own poem. You are stronger than me. I just looked into I’ve known Melissa Broder for almost a decade. I tion. Like, I love that we are simultaneously talk- my soul and realized it’s blurbs of other people’s invited her to my first book party because I was a ing on the phone and texting each other about books that I mistrust. I must confess that I suspend big admirer of her writing and I wanted to meet personal injuries we have encountered as of late cynicism for blurbs of my own books, because— her. She was smart and funny and I could tell she (my father’s accident, half-year ICU journey, and I’m insecure and external validation gives me wanted to know something about what any of us death, as well as my resulting grief, and my fear five to ten minutes of relief. But I think that if I are doing here (which is also something I want to of my own grief; the loved one of yours who chose to live in a blurbless world—like, if I wasn’t know). Over the years she’s become a real friend betrayed you, and why it took you a long time to asked by a publisher to pursue blurbs, or if I made and I’ve continued reading her with even more perceive it as a betrayal—because it’s more famil- the decision to just go poem or text excerpt on interest. Her new book, Superdoom, is a selected iar for you, and for me, to feel shame rather than the back—then the five to ten minutes of valida- poems, offering the best from her last four poetry hurt) while this Google document bound for APR tion would no longer be a priority. I think the five collections: When You Say One Thing but Mean is being constructed, as though in a separate uni- to ten of validation is a response to the encour- Your Motherr, Meat Heart, SCARECRONE, and verse. Even now as I synopsize our text exchange, agement to chase blurbs. When it’s blurb time, I Last Sext. She’s also written two novels, is one of I do it with the public in mind. It’s not the raw begin from a place of fearing rejection—and so the few non-cringe voices on Twitter, and is at goods, which I suppose I must not trust are “palat- any blurbs procured are a relief. But I’d love to not work on multiple projects in Hollywood. What I able” or “interesting” or “literary enough.” engage in the entire blurb system, thereby circum- most value about Melissa is her kindness and how I like that Yeats quote. I’m going to go quote venting the fear of rejection in the first place—and no-bullshit she is. It’s a combination that makes for quote with you in trying to figure out for alleviating the need for its relief by way of a blurb. a great friend and poet. Here’s a conversation we myself what I do trust. Light Years is a great work of art, as is A Sport had in July of this year. and a Pastime—one of my all-time faves. —Alex Dimitrov When half-gods go, I like having dinner with you because you cele- The gods arrive. brate both being funny and laughing—giving and ad You’re one of my favorite writers and one rea- —Ralph Waldo Emerson receiving humor—and that is one of the few attri- son is because your subjects are god, death, sex, butes that make the company of another human and obsession. They’re more or less my subjects I wish I could just get directly to the gods, in being preferable (on occasion) to being alone. Also also and it’s probably why we’re friends. Through writing and in life. But for me as a human being simpatico; no small talk; straight to the vein. the four books of poems you’ve written, what has it seems I have to go through the half-gods and I would have dinner with Isaac Bashevis Singer changed in how you think about those subjects? their destruction in order to get to the gods. I at an old New York dairy restaurant I used to love I’m not really sure I’ve learned too much by writ- don’t always trust that I’m going to get to the as a kid, Ratner’s, which is gone now. I’d have ing about them. If anything, I kind of feel like I gods. Sometimes the destruction of the half-gods gefilte fish and creamed pickled herring, then feel know less and less. feels like the end of me. But I keep going. So it’s shame re: the fish, because Singer was a veg, and like my feet trust, or—in the case of writing— I wish I was still a veg (and I could be, easily, but mb I think the knowing we know less and less my voice trusts, or my fingers trust, even though am still fucking with beef jerky). Maybe one day might be the knowing! The wisdom of knowing I don’t. soon I will stop eating dead animals again. Singer we know nothing. This leaves room for the mys- Someone once said to me that faith is a muscle. would get the vegetarian meatballs, and we would tery, and what I love about the poetic form is that And I think this is probably true in my writing share noodles with cheese and apple cake in honor it allows for—and celebrates—mystery: negative and my life. You just keep going. of my Dad (it’s fantasy-Singer so he’d be totally capability, learning to love the questions them- Oh yeah, also, I would say I distrust blurbs. supportive of my desire to make our lone din- selves, or at least, to sit with them. A poem is a What are some things you trust and distrust? ner together a food memorial to someone else, and realm where we can live in a question—and gen- he’d also give me some Yiddish aphorisms about erate only more questions—and that’s a complete ad I also distrust blurbs and, to be honest, I don’t grief that don’t necessarily relieve my fear of my work of art. really read them. I decided after my first book that own feelings, or even help me stop judging them, I will say that there is one thing I have learned I never want another blurb on any of my books. but help me to at least laugh at the fear and the about obsession (though not through poetry) and There’s something embarrassing and who cares judging, and remember that I am part of a long that is: the day after you have a romantic dream about it all, you know? I haven’t had blurbs for line of fear and self-judgment, and that fear and about a person, do NOT contact them. a while now. These last two books have none. I self-judgment are probably the flip side of some Something I have learned about god (though said to Michael, my editor, I just want a poem on positive trait, and that I don’t have to judge the not through poetry): god’s will is never urgent. the back. That’s it. I didn’t want any quotes from judging so harshly). And of course, the hot Rat- Love: love is a verb, baby. I want it to be a feel- reviews or anything like that either. I guess that’s ner’s signature onion rolls would be served. With ing, a drug, but it’s a damn verb. another thing I don’t trust. I don’t trust reviews. pats of cold butter. I’d drink Diet Coke. I imagine Something I’ve learned through death: that I So little about aesthetics or what’s on the page gets he’d have tea and orange juice, but maybe he’d hit am a person who will talk to a tree. said anyway. Literary criticism isn’t criticism any- the Diet Coke too. more. It’s just like a PR sheet. ad I’m glad to hear you say that. We seem to be Do you know where you would have din- I was thinking, though, as you were talk- in a moment culturally where everyone “knows” ner with Salter? And how about a dead poet? I’d ing about our texts and phone calls and just how something and wants to tell us about it with a kind have roast chicken and sex with Emily Dickinson, we are in regular life and not in interviews, that of certainty and vehemence that, as a poet, I am I think. In the attic room. Or just sex with Lord you’re a writer I really trust. Trust in the sense that very distrustful of. I always think about those lines Byron, though it’d be an emotional nightmare you don’t bullshit. On the page but also at events from Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while when he didn’t text after (he wouldn’t). Would and in general. I remember I flew to LA once the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” What it be worth the comedown? Not sure. I feel like just to read with you at some bookstore because do you trust and what do you distrust as a writer? Emily could get clingy after, but probably only in I knew I would have dinner with you after. And And I’m also thinking of when you sit down to an epistolary way—which is fine, because my love you’re one of my favorite people to have din- write, too, not just in the world. I don’t even trust language is verbal. ner with. I was going to ask you that really cliché the narrative of my own life sometimes. Probably question about dead writers and who you would ad I love that. You know I always associate you trust that the least of all. invite to a party, but both of us prefer one-on-one with Diet Coke. Actually Coke Zero. I feel like mb One thing that probably should not be trusted stuff and parties annoy us. Partially because every- more writers should be associated with drinks. I is an author interview—or any public conversa- one’s so fake! So if you could have dinner with would preferably have a drink with Salter, actu-

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 29 ally. At Temple Bar, which used to be on Bleecker and is hopefully at its best lyrical, it’s definitely are funny in life are not funny on the page. You and Lafayette but it closed at the end of 2017. That prose. And I think it was during this time that my are. How do you think humor helps you access last week I was there almost every night and they poetry energies began to drift into prose. I don’t those most difficult and unknowable subjects? I were like, what is this guy gonna do when we think I’ve written a poem that I’m happy with think it has something to do with the fact that close? God help me. since 2016. I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write humor doesn’t try to teach you anything explic- I wanted to ask you how you chose the poems a poem. itly. It’s not preachy. And it often makes you con- in your new book, Superdoom. It’s a selected, so I would say that the poetry collection SCARE- sider the exact opposite of what you believe. it’s kind of like a greatest hits. How did you feel CRONE is my favorite book I’ve ever written. mb I get my sense of humor straight from my looking back at the four poetry books you’ve put But it’s out of print. Meat Heart is also out of print. Dad, who was dry as a bone. One time I went to out in the last decade? You’re writing novels now, So after Tin House published Last Sext—my last an Irish mystic and we discovered a “shield-shaped you’re writing screenplays, you left New York for collection of poems, which came out in 2016— being” in the soul globe behind my chest (don’t Hollywood though you’re the most New York we talked about doing an anthology of my out- you love symbols!) that had been passed on in my person I know, honestly. Was going back to the of-print work, plus the best from Last Sext. Also family for generations, and I think that’s the sar- poems strange? some poems from my first book, When You Say casm. Maybe it’s the nicotine addiction. Both are One Thing but Mean Your Motherr, which is some- mb May god help us all. So, yes, I moved to Los longstanding Broder family traditions. But I deff- times in print and sometimes not (and definitely Angeles from New York in 2013 because of my initely use my humor as a shield; also as a sweet- the work I feel most meh about—probably because partner’s health. We needed to be somewhere ener. When you fear vulnerability (well, the rejec- it’s my earliest—and which appears least in Super- warm and more easily navigable for someone dis- tion that might follow a moment of vulnerability) doom). Greatest hits! abled. I was really scared to leave the New York and have a simultaneous desire to connect deeply The way we chose the poems was I went poetry world and its context. Creatively, I feared with others, humor allows for those two states to through all of my books and picked my favorites. that I would be wearing dangly earrings and sell- coexist. It’s a bridge. And as for considering the Then the Tin House folks did a comb-through ing my poems on the beach by way of typewriter exact opposite of what you believe, definitely. I and picked their favorites of those I’d chosen, plus within a year. I had this dread that my poems tend to live in a state of believing multiple things added some of their favorites that I hadn’t chosen. were going to become the literary equivalent of a at the same time, I think. Or maybe disbelieving And we went from there. It was easy. bad Jim Morrison mural. But I moved here any- multiple things. Both. A gullible skeptic. It’s just As for screenwriting, that came about as an offff- way. I was able to keep my day job, and I had no how I’m wired. Infinite sides. Learning to love the shoot of my prose. There was interest here from intention of writing screenplays, let alone prose. questions. Negative capability, baby. differentp roduction companies in optioning and As I talk about in the introduction to Super- adapting my work for the screen and TV. We kind ad The Irish mystic! I remember going to so doom, I used to write poems in motion in New of decided that I would be best to adapt it. As many Bulgarian and Russian mystics as a child. York—frequently on the subway. I’m a perfection- of today, nothing I’ve written for the screen has Maybe they wouldn’t call themselves mystics. ist so I prefer to do my first drafts in places where actually been filmed—yet. Things are brewing Maybe they were witches. Anyway, sometimes I I’m not necessarily “supposed” to be writing (like and more will be revealed. But Hollywood isn’t really think those experiences had a lot to do with on the A train or in the bathroom at Cheese- like the book industry. If a book publisher buys a why I’ve followed poetry as far as I have. Who cake Factory) rather than at a desk. I actually don’t piece of work, they will be publishing it. If a stu- knows if I’ll keep following it. But I wanted to even have a desk. When I moved to LA, I could dio, production company, or network options a end on something big, like we began, because I no longer write while in transit. Like, it’s just not piece of work, or even commissions you to write know we both hate small talk. What’s your favor- safe to be typing poems while driving down Rose a pilot or screenplay, there’s no guarantee it will ite and least favorite thing about being alive? My Ave. So I began to dictate my words while driv- ever get filmed. There are a lot of “working writ- least favorite is that we don’t know anything about ing, or walking, using Siri and a free notes app. ers” in Hollywood whose scripts have all turned death. My favorite is having the ability to experi- All of my line breaks disappeared. The language into ghosts. But they aren’t starving. They’re eat- ence people through time and to actually begin to became more conversational. It turned into essays. ing off the ghosts. Personally, I love the ghosts! see them, for whatever they actually are. Though That’s how I wrote the book So Sad Today. Or it The ghosts have been keeping me in health insur- sometimes you never see someone, no matter how wrote me. ance for a few years. long you know them. After I wrote So Sad Today, I had an idea for my novel The Pisces. It sort of came to me whole ad To me you’ve always felt like a poet even mb Likes: being in a flow state. Dislikes: fear. on the beach in Venice. But I didn’t know if I in prose. There’s an overall largeness that I start Also, want to hear more about the Bulgarian and could write a novel. So I just tried it, doing what thinking about when I read your work. It goes Russian mystics, but we’ll take that offline. I had done for So Sad, which is dictating. I dic- beyond the self and beyond place and into things tated three paragraphs a day as an experiment. like death, love, the afterlife. Often through It took me about nine months to write the first humor, too. And I was going to ask you, I mean, Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems and lives in draft that way. While The Pisces concerns Sappho you’re so funny in life, but sometimes people who New York.

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30 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW THREE POEMS DANIEL NESTER

Pompous Symmetry Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be all the young Jesuses look the same // and that’s why I’m afraid // of deserts Because each word contains a world, we should use them and give meaning // we’re obsessed with trust // we’re obsessed // with origin stories // the to them. At times, we inhabit the same alphabets without anyone taking on guns I shot out in the desert // watching the saguaros // that ripped flesh another troubling kingdom, but I would still condemn them for performing // and I couldn’t stop getting caught in moshes // take down the tall one, under devil horns. someone always said // a nd that’s why // a ll the young Jesuses look the same // this extermination of meaning // sticks to my hands // it’s the pompous Because nostalgia doesn’t mean homecoming. Or flat melancholy. Or symmetry of desert towns // their false sense of self-reliance // that’s why compounded memories. We are not remembering the remembering. No // I try to forget // how to build a house // I try to forget // saying I don’t rose-tints. No 1979. No transitions between childhoods. need anybody // out here in the desert // while tanks of water // trainloads Because I can’t communicate from the edge. I can’t communicate wearing a of supplies // roll in at night. turtleneck. So tell me more. Tell me to flip off out of this town. Let’sg et out so that’s why I’m afraid // of deserts // and all the young Jesuses // look the of here and forget it for a couple years. I’ll call back. same. You won’t be glad to hear from me. That’s fine. I’ll call it coming close to everything I wanted, which is saying something. Some years are just better- sounding than others. That’s a fact. Go ahead and be a hot child in the city. Poem Written at Go ahead and fuse whichever conspiracy you want to with each other. Up Pete’s Candy Store Ending with and down has patterns, and it gets old, Sister Sledge. a Line from “Ray of Light” Because I’m through with crying just for me, Action Jackson. There were days when it was so my turn to wear the black robe. Because it’s more about worry, over whether you might get hurt. And it’s When it was “Pick on Me Day.” I got that. I got the chill between those salad days you want the most. The salads that went with the song. Almost reformed. Almost a house party. what I heard and wanted to hear. I heard the oh-snaps muttered behind each face on the L train to work. These were the days Because we can’t look back to what we once were. We ache. We long. Then we found heavy metal and stupid pants didn’t matter anymore. End of story. when the worship of authenticity went way too far. Like the poet who told me not to write about a “riot” unless it’s an actual riot. Because I don’t look like a girl anymore if I ever did. Today is the day I didn’t cry. You think there’s a difference between the devil and free spirits. These days people just send unsolicited dick pics to each other I’m not so sure. and start podcasts. But back then we’d wear Doc Martens and bling wallet chains over a blanket party. In another age we wouldn’t rock the word “evanescent.” Like, ever. Unless Daniel Nester is the author of five books, including Shader. His newest book, Harsh Realm: My 1990s, is forthcoming from Indolent Books. something was really evanescent. These days, when the radio comes on, I want to tell each face I see yo, trust me, home skillett— there are hella better jams than whatever this is. And I feel there’s a riot inside my head when I remember this, how guilty and out of breath I felt all the time. And I feel like I should have sinned more, should have exhaled more. I was all like, no duh, we are in the era between the two Elvises, someone just brought their pit bull into this narrow-ass bar, and you pick this moment to call for a Madonna marathon? You go, chimerical figurehead of evil at the end of this poem! And I feel like I just got home.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 31 TWO POEMS DIDI JACKSON

Void Aubade on Hawk Mountain

After three weeks of being left to dry and set, This is the time of year we sleep the two Eastern tiger swallowtails with the windows open even in the rain, I brought back from the dirt road hoping the sill and floor stay dry we hiked, both dead and broken enough. Birdsong begins into pieces like the painted parts before the sun of a small mechanical 20th century toy, with what sounds like a thousand voices, flitting thresholds cleanly run over while puddling, of consciousness in the trees. two males searching for salt and amino acids Yesterday we saw a garter snake in the sipped water that allows what drives them, sunning itself on the trail to Sunset Ledge, were eaten, all save the wings. and a dozen red trillium lined up to salute the eastern sun, their petals Of course, these are my favorites parts: already pungent and corpsey for carrion flies, the sooty tusk-like stripes pouring what gossip they can tell of winter, from the arched top wing, the velvety black bulbs inches deep, nestled together border on the bottom of both, and now for months and months. Still under the down, we are nude sadly, the thorax gone like Hepworth’s oval void. and touch each other’s bodies It is the year of the hole says Henry Moore in the pre-morning light. Rain checks in 1932. I am afraid it still is. our breathing and it is here I tell you I mean, the year of the hole. I mean of my dream of collecting yolk after yolk, so many a large bowl fills 1932. My husband, for our anniversary with a hundred tinseled suns. bought a bought a Celestron SkyMaster 25×100 But we don’t see the sun to scan the stars and all the blackness anytime soon, we exhaust ourselves that surrounds them. I watch him and return to sleep as the morning slips by on young and impatient feet. watch the heavens. He decides which are planets, which are satellites, which are fodder for black holes. But it is too simple Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in to know where all the emptiness resides, The New Yorker, New England Revieww, Ploughshares, Kenyon Revieww, and the Acad- emy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. how these gaps can give way to something ravenous, something that steals all of the light.

TE ACHERS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Are you looking for a lively, challenging, and entertaining APR welcomes comments, criticism, and dialogue in supplement for your reading list? response to work in the magazine. Authors of poems, Adopt APR for your class! We offer half-price copies and essays, and other work will be given an opportunity to subscriptions for classroom use. respond to letters scheduled for publication. Inquire: Letters should be sent to: Classroom Adoption Letters to the Editor The American Poetry Review The American Poetry Review 1906 Rittenhouse Square, 3rd Floor 1906 Rittenhouse Square, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735 Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735 T: 215-309-3722 E: [email protected]

32 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW DIARY: SIX DAYS IN OCTOBER DERRICK AUSTIN

When did my brother become God-fearing? ~~~ Over the phone, we caught up The ZZ plant on my desk, a housewarming gift, got fungus gnats on the past few months: the protests, everywhere. Bowls of soapy water laced with sugar haven’t done the trick. Black Is King, and our side hustles. Setting them out, I felt like I was preparing a dinner party. I used to joke I need to be more present. Communicate. that I had a monastic temperament. I could never be a hermit. I love a man’s I’ve been so driftless, weight too much, a weight so different from a great book. living in sublets in temporary cities. If the peace he’s looking for is a room When I told my mother I don’t want kids she said “Who will care for you with many windows within himself, when you’re old?” I worry he won’t find me there.

~~~ Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness, forthcoming from BOA Editions in Fall 2021, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions). He is a 2019–2021 Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford From the window, I notice the men who always smoke outside the deli are University. missing the loudest one today; Amazon trucks zip to and fro; and thin blue masks are being swapped for thicker, more durable fabrics.

~~~

Bought myself a luxury this week: body wash from a perfume house run by Carthusian monks in Capri. It’s so extra I couldn’t resist. It arrived today in a beige and white box. My skin doesn’t break out. The bathroom smells of lemon and cedar. I feel happy tonight, my heart open like a clear window facing a port city.

~~~

Read an article about a Frenchwoman’s book party: as a girl, she lived with her grandmother, a simple cook (“Do better with less,” her injunction). She published recipes for endives and ham, veal and mustard, “soup of the corridor,” and peaches in red wine. The book, a minor hit, is “perfect for our times of post-confinement where we learned modesty and self-reliance.”

~~~

Restlessly ate almonds. Worried about a cavity, I chewed on the left side of my mouth. All afternoon, I watched clips of Sister Wendy, shady and informative. Of The Wilton Diptych, she said: “Imagine a painting of angels wearing American flags and you will recover some sense of its tackiness.” In a painting of the Baptist I love, he pulls water from a reed with his lips and looks almost alive in a desert where nothing can harm him.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 33 THE APR/HONICKMAN FIRST BOOK PRIZE

For over two decades, this prize has been jump-starting the careers of some of America’s most vital poets. Are you next? This year’s guest judge: Jericho Brown Submissions open August 1 through October 31, 2021.

PRIZE INCLUDES: The winning author and all other entrants will be · An award of $3,000 notififi ed in January 2022. An announcement of the · Publication of a volume of poetry winner will appear in the March/April 2022 issue of The American Poetry Review. For complete Distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium guidelines, visit www.aprweb.org or send a self- Open to all U.S. poets addressed, stamped envelope to: Book publication in 2022 Now Accepting Submissions Online att www.aprweb.org APR/Honickman First Book Prize The American Poetry Review Entry fee $25. Manuscripts, following guidelines format, must 1906 Rittenhouse Square be postmarked or submitted online by October 31, 2021. Philadelphia, PA 19103-5735

34 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW MAGA hats, 30 years before they ever existed. This reading (coupled with the genius of Clifton’s IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME stunning economy) is a big reason why this partic- ular work circulates widely on social media. MICHAEL BAZZETT But I think it’s also useful to ponder this lit- tle poem as an ars poetica, where the poem is born out of a request—“they ask me to remember”— the classic desire that art serve as a mirror of the audience’s reality. That the poem closes with a sly refutation of that desire only makes it more fulfill- ing in the end. You’re not going to get what you want, Like many of you reading this, I mispronounced the water. This meant, as time passed, the world’s the poem announces, eyes twinkling, turning the words growing up that I first encountered in exhalations marred (and corrected) a lot of my mirror inward. You’re going to get what I want you to books. These words gained a life of their own in childish misconceptions and misreadings. But the want, it says, tilting the glass to an angle that trues the quiet hallways of my mind. This internal sense reality (and recollection) of this inner world can be what we see. The reader is left turned around, of sound and language had a tendency to trump remarkably insistent, and it should be held onto. with a set of fresh eyes, and bestowed a new man- the world’s, at least for a while, forming a music While the built-in narcissism of being a writer tra, Don’t tell me what I think I want to hear. Show me that was more reliably vital and personal than our may be indisputable—the ego and self-involve- what only you can show me. shared lexicon. This is why it delights me when ment of proclaiming, I was put here to say something; In other words, the poet says: It’s not you, it’s me. my students rhyme Goethee with both, pronounce listen up!—it is also fragile. A part of the poet’s job, I sometimes joke with my students that this ennuii as anöoey, or say penall as an echo of banal I think, is to listen to and replicate the weird idio- classic break-up line is a perfect distillation of the (which is frankly an improvement); they are giv- syncrasy of how we “mispronounce” the world. myth of Narcissus. How so often when we mouth ing themselves away as autodidacts, and revealing Lucille Clifton’s “why some people be mad at the phrase “It’s not you, it’s me” in an attempt to the soundtrack of their interior life. me sometimes” lives beautifully at this intersec- be gentle, we’re unwittingly revealing the truth One of the first moments I recall this inner lex- tion. Here is the poem in its entirety: that we’d rather relate with our idea of who some- icon breaking the surface was in the midst of a one is, our wavering projection, than with the second grade read-aloud: I was relating the dull why some people be mad at me sometimes actual person. Once the crush stage ends, and the arrival of the flesh-and-blood companion into the happenings of a turtle who for some inexplicable they ask me to remember reason had decided to visit a café, a word which relationship serves as a sort of interruption, we but they want me to remember again catch ourselves (almost) telling the truth: I pronounced with confidence and vigor, rhym- their memories ing it with safe. When Mrs. Hoffman, who wore “You’re not who I thought you were. You’re you.” and i keep on remembering Sometimes, I even offer my students a little poem, cat-lady glasses and smoked cigarettes at lunch, mine corrected me, I smiled patiently and explained to as a distillation: her the machinations of the silent “e.” It’s possible Like so much of Clifton’s work, the poem has It’s not you, it’s me, I used my own name, Mike, to demonstrate the a way of sidling up, whispering its sly and cut- said Narcissus alchemy worked by this quiet vowel. The pause ting wisdom into your ear, then wandering off to everyone that followed wasn’t long, but I recollect it as res- before you know what hit you. It contains inci- all of the time. onant. When Mrs. Hoffman’s husky voice kindly sive wit, honest music, an ability to glide through insisted, I was dubious and not particularly accom- many different registers, an utter lack of preten- It’s a break-up line so eternal that, when I was modating. My patronizing solution was to pick up sion. There’s plenty to pay attention to here: How living in Mexico a decade ago, it was one of the the read-aloud at the following sentence. those nineteen matter-of-fact words are placed in first Spanish phrases I was able to spontaneously A few years later, in fourth grade, I encoun- tension with the title. How the enjambment of “get” while watching TV. In this particular com- tered a word I still love, though it only tangen- each of the first four lines hinges on “memories” mercial, a young couple sit in a car, the man look- tially exists. That is to say, it’s in the dictionary and “remembering.” How that final line/syllable ing soulfully at his beloved, her dark eyes welling shorn of its acoustical moxie. It first landed on my lands with a beautiful abruptness, yet remains with tears, and he gently takes her hand and says, mind’s ear as a sort of sonic mixture between gris- unforeclosed by the punctuation of a period—a “No eres tu, es yo.” tlee and miserr, with connotations of both, a verb punchline, a concussion that implodes instead of The car door slams and the woman rushes cry- that meant someone had been swindled or duped. explodes like the detonation of a buried landmine, ing up the steps. We cut to him driving away then I inferred that the infinitive form was to misle, allowing the poem to end, audaciously, on a word rushing up his own front steps, a light glimmering which in my head rhymed with sisal, with perhaps of possession and ownership. in his apartment, where he flings the door open a stronger z-sound in the second syllable. Sadly, I’ve always loved that the opposite of the word and smiles bewitchingly at . . . I had been misled. When I realized my error— rememberr—etymologically speaking—is dismemberr. . . . his new love, the enormous flat-screen tele- a mere prefix? attached to a flat dead-end verb?— The word holds echoes of violence, of scars and vision glowing on the wall. I felt cheated. Mízledd had gone from peacock to healing, and rememberingg is thus a word that wants It’s a brilliant bit, one that offers as succinct a plucked fowl. The number of deliciously sinewy to pick up the pieces, gather the bodies. Discov- reading of the myth of Narcissus as I’ve encoun- words in my mother tongue had been reduced by ering this was startling. I can vividly recall the tered, and one that presents itself as a solution to one. To this day I prefer my version, and occasion- moment when I heard (sensed?) that old mean- the problem of other people. ally persist in hearing it this way when I run across ing lurking inside the everyday connotation of But poets write to be read, yes? Maybe it’s the word reading. the word. It seemed to rise out of the depths of more accurate to say we write to be overheard. If In this sense, the mind of childhood is an the pond of language and briefly kiss the surface I’m being frank, the initial, primary, and in some inviolate space. It’s the sheltered pond where we before flashing its tail and returning to the deep. ways sole audience for my poems is always and begin to discover the world through our own Because this was a strangeness not projected, but only myself. I write to amuse me, to discover and reflection wavering on the water. (Yes, I’m invok- discovered, its evocation of previously unknown uncover, to open, to crack and to creak, to fum- ing the myth of Narcissus and giving it a posi- realms restored a little of the wonder into my ble, to see how far in and down I can go. The tive spin.) Eventually of course we learn to look mother tongue that was lost with the demise greater audience is invited to merely eavesdrop on through the self to discover what lies beyond, but of mizled. the conversation, through publication—a word those initial years when we build a facsimile of Clifton’s poem knows and deeply feels this dis- that means simply to make publicc—and I do even- the world made largely of our own imperfect pro- covered meaning: that our bodies and families are tually tweak poems when thinking about this jections are, I think, precious. Given the negative both made up of members; that in recalling the sharing, but mostly as an act of translation. If I go connotations of the myth, this might seem a con- past, we reassemble ourselves and our stories in deep enough into that place, honestly enough, my trarian reading, but anyone who’s ever seen a baby acts of resuscitation; that these acts will always be hope is that you’ll find you there. first encounter themselves in a mirror knows how imperfect, unfinished. When done poorly, such a Poets are lucky to work in the medium of much delight there is in that discovery, how much reading might connote a crude child made of tur- words, which though they have value cost noth- wonder and incipient self-love. nips, or Frankenstein’s monster. When done well, ing. The dilemma is how to make people pay with It’s worth noting, too, that Narcissus’s reflec- we have the makings of a mindful history stem- that most valuable of currencies, their attention, tion was largely a function of meditative still- ming out of personal truth, offering a reading of when using materials so mundane. It’s like trying ness: it needed that shaded, sheltered grove; even the poem as a prescient and powerful nineteen- to build a woolly mammoth out of mounded grass the gentlest of breezes would leave its imprint on word demolition of the motto on those stupid red clippings, or being charged with making some-

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 35 thing wondrous and eternal from discarded plastic bags. And we must remain wary and intentional while working in the medium of a shared codified language, in a world where institutions and gov- ernments and Mrs. Hoffman are always ready to coax us back to the fold, away from the splintered, the weird, the wrong. We need to re-member our not knowing. It’s this putting-back-together connotation STANLEYANLEY KUNIUNITZ that led me to hang this phrase in my workspace: Every time I write a poem, I remember/ that I’ve forgot- ten how to write a poem. It’s a reminder that writing, MEMEMORIALORIAL PPRIZERIZRIZE for me at least, must marry my unknowing with my remembering. It must reassemble—precisely, lovingly, delicately, obsessively—what I don’t yet know, and what I’ve known since childhood, before the hegemony of our shared tongue shushes it into silence.

Coming Soon in APR

New work by

Cynthia Arrieu-King * APR announces the Thirteenth Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for poets under 40 years of age. Matthew Kelsey t A prize of $1,000 * t Publication in APR t Ginger Ko May 15, 2022 deadline A prize of $1,000 and publication of the winning poem in The American Poetry * Review will be awarded to a poet under 40 years of age in honor of the late Mike Lala Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets. The winning work will appear on the feature page (back cover) of the September/October 2022 issue of * The American Poetry Revieww. All entrants will receive a copy of the September/ October 2022 issue. Paul Muldoon Poets may submit one to three poems per entry (totaling no more than three pages) * with a $15 entry fee by May 15, 2022. The editors of The American Poetry Revieww will judge. Winner will be notified by July 1, 2022. January O’Neil See our website for complete guidelines: www.aprweb.org * Elizabeth A.I. Powell Send entries to: The American Poetry Review * Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize 1906 Rittenhouse Square Jason Schneiderman Philadelphia, PA 19103

36 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW THREE POEMS

MICHAEL BAZZETT

Menu Echo Once you’ve found your upholstered seat Remember when we used to and a slightly elevated vantage point remember things, she asks. from which to enjoy the war, perhaps And for a moment he looks you’ll wish to consider our menu. up from his phone. Yeah The seared tuna with lemons, halved he says. Then, gently, and roasted on the grill, provides an apt What made you think of that? accompaniment to the sophistication Nothing, she says. It’s just— of modern combat. The ruby flesh nearly Having memories was nice. melts on the tongue, the bed of arugula He nods and smiles absent- and shaved cabbage serving as a welcome mindedly as he scrolls. bit of structure. Might we also recommend a lightly oaked chardonnay to accompany Outside the snow falls heavily into the lake, the drones hovering in over the desert? ton after ton of silence Its slight muskiness complicates the aridity disappearing into itself— of what is essentially insect-delivered weaponry. Our marinated pulpo can be followed by a salad of fennel, dill, and pine nut Michael Bazzett is the author of You Must Remember This, which received the 2014 that will lightly cleanse the palate. Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, The Interrogation, and most recently The Echo When the concussion of distant artillery Chamber. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, which was named a New York Times Best Book of 2018. thrums up through your espadrilles nothing really hits home like our molten chocolate gateau laced with bourbon raked with AK-47 fire then served in spattered clumps alongside the still-smoking cartridge. That saltiness you taste Index of Advertisers Page is simply a touch of your own blood drawn quietly from your veins last night, while you dreamt of other things. Brickhouse Books 16 Carnegie Mellon University Press 13 The Play Colorado Prize for Poetry 13 december 9 Scene one: a man pushes an enormous boulder on stage. Pacific University 16 It is quite round, like avalanche boulders in cartoons. Painted Bride Quarterly 6 His palms are grey and leathery from the pushing. Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2, 17 His muscles strain and twitch like cables. Princeton University Press 11 A second man enters, stage left, holding a pale blue egg Saturnalia Books 9 in his fingers. This is the earth. The man crouches, extending his arm to place the earth in the precarious dark, looking Turtle Point Press 18 The University of Chicago Press 6 as if he’s trying to roast a marshmallow without getting burned. University of Notre Dame 16 For the rest of the evening, the audience contemplates this tension. The play is a comedy, but the punchline, Warren Wilson College 14 Women’s Review of Books 25 as is noted in italics in the program, costs extra. When the house lights come up, a smattering of envelopes APR Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize 36 is delivered to those patrons seated behind a velvet rope. APR Subscriptions 27 They open them to find cream-colored cards of thick stock, APR/Honickman Books 11, 13, 18, 21 perfectly blank. A rustling arises as the patrons turn the cards APR/Honickman First Book Prize 34, 39 in their hands, searching for a message; the sound APR/Honickman Titles 21, 30 resembles wind through dead grass more than laughter.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 37 MARBLE RUN FOR THE INTRAMUSCULAR CYBORGS AEON GINSBERG

There’s the tension I’m feeling when I’m anxious and the tension I feel when I have to puncture. I’ve always wanted to stab myself dead but at this point I’m used to the maintenance my body needs— I have the routine made like muscle memory. I’m going to live forever taking care of myself, I’m going to have to respect my body or die. Before medicalization there’s tension in the lacking, and I do so want to task myself with a further need to care for myself like I care for others. Offer me a kindness I’m quick to give away. There’s the tension of falling into the arms of anesthesia and how I have forgotten again to prepare to be caught; the first incision that splays me open. I don’t always tell the truth, but what I say is a version of it. If I can separate myself from my body my body can last forever without me. Oh god, I hope I awake a new type of me. I will wake up and feel okay about being alive and for now I will work toward that future. There’s a role for everyone when it comes to bettering yourself, no one gets better in a vessel. All of my dead friends are a flawless now. So I think about learning to shoot a gun and about the right angle to fit one in my mouth. I will outlive my life flashing before my eyes. The memories of my trauma feel worse than the trauma: assault, assault, assault, assault. I destroy my body because I want to be worthless. If I had a gun I would have nothing left, I would do everything to become flawless. One day I will wake up a better kind of robot. Every modification exhausts me. Every step I take to care for myself is two steps back. I emasculate myself in the eyes of a doctor knowing the ways that it takes a lifetime to heal. I will bury the hatchet when I bury myself or when I find something more fitting to use now that I am post-op. I might look better with a lance, sharp enough to pierce the tension. I worry about my syringe being bent going through my skin. What happens now that I am medicalized? Will I be loved the same as a new kind of robot? Nothing is perfect until you can no longer change it, and I’ve reached the apex of my maintenance without dying. I perform on myself like clockwork. My body is a fixer-upper, not a junker but not road safe. I will care for myself non-refundably. They can never give me back what I have had taken; I cannot get back years of my life lost to tension. I want to love myself while it is still possible to love—to care for my body like it is a stranger. There is nothing to do but become acquainted, nothing to be anxious about once I break the ice.

Aeon Ginsberg (they/them) is an agender transfeminine writer and performer from Baltimore City, MD. They are the winner of the 2019 Noemi Press Poetry Prize for their book Greyhound (2020). Aeon is a member of the Peach Magg editorial team.

38 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW The American Poetry Review and The Honickman Foundation are happy to announce the winner of the 2021 APR/HONICKMAN First Book Prize

NATASHAHA RRAOAO LatitudeLatitutudede

The APR/Honickman First Book Prize is an award of $3,000 and publication of a volume of poetry. Natasha Rao’s Latitude, with an introduction by Ada Limón, will be published in September 2021, with distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium.

The prize is made possible by the partnership between The Honickman Foundation and The American Poetry Revieww.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 39 REMINDING MYSELF THAT WE ARE NOT REMARKABLE SEY THAYER

Chasing monarchs in the milkweed you say also, also, wanting more. This is nothing unusual. Other children in other gardens are putting noses to horsemint where bees hum in nectar they’ll turn to honey. Nothing unusual. The corpse flower, its purple spathe an upturned skirt, stinks of rotting flesh to attract beetles and flesh flies for another chance to bloom. I must remember the dance of strobes in the swarm of lightning bugs is not innate, not a trick, as a scientist claimed, created by our blinking. The flies copy those around them until they synchronize. There exists an explanation. If I forget, I’ll waste a summer evening in the silence of a field’s empty theatre edged by woods, watching the spectacle and thinking it’s a showing only for me. Things die and are replaced. Also, also. Clouds pass as voyeurs on our joy while you chase butterflies in the garden. If I’m not careful, I’ll forget to see as ordinary the long miles the monarchs cover every autumn to find us. I’ll forget my indifference that meteorites blasting the earth’s mantle carried all our gold here, that my wedding band is extraterrestrial. We take in air through the same passage we take in water, it’s a wonder we can still breathe. I do not tell myself this. If I’m not careful, I’ll want to do whatever I can to save everything I see.

Casey Thayer is the author of Self Portrait with Spurs and Sulfurr and Love for the Gun, winner of the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize. His second collection, Rational Anthem, finalist for the Miller Williams Prize, is forthcoming. Recipient of fellowships from Stanford University and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, he’s published work in AGNI, The American Poetry Revieww, Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago. This poem is the winner of the 2021 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, an award established by APR to honor the late Stanley Kunitz’s dedication to mentoring poets.

40 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW