The Best American Poetry 2013 (10 page)

and the machine filled it with food for the fish I scattered

over the water and they came like the rush of fat rain up

from the deep, glittering, swarming over nothing. It made me happy.

Then the green silence closing over them again. The little cat

waiting faithfully in the dark for his death and not complaining.

And us, knowing it is already a world without us, already a pond,

a cat, an orchard stuck with swords of light—

but the heart needs no reason for the belovéd.

from
Plume

after Willie Cole's
Malcolm's Chicken I

One of the many Willies I know wants me to know

there are still bits of hopefulness being made

in certain quarters of New Jersey. It's happening

elsewhere too, obviously, this Willie would say,

but have you seen the pants sagging like the skin

on a famished elephant and the glassy stupor

of counselors in the consultation rooms, the trash

bins of vendettas and prescriptions, have you seen

the riot gear, what beyond hope could be a weapon

against all that? The summer I drove six hours and

some change to Willie's place I found him building

a huge chicken out of brooms, wax, marbles (for eyes),

Styrofoam, and hundreds of matchsticks, but what

I remember is the vague sorrow creasing his face.

Like it wasn't a chicken at all at hand, like he'd never

even seen a chicken in New Jersey, or a feather

or drumstick—which I know to be untrue. A man can be

so overwhelmed it becomes a mode of being,

a flavor indistinguishable from spit. He hadn't done shit

with the letters and poems his wife left behind

when she killed herself. I think she was running,

I think she was being chased. She is almost floating

below ground now. The grave is filled with floodwater,

the roots of trees men planted after destroying the trees

shoot through her hips. Nowadays when I want saltwater

taffy or some of those flimsy plastic hooks good for hanging

almost nothing, I do not go to New Jersey. And I'm sure

no one there misses me with all the afflictions they have

to attend. Grief will boil your eyeballs if you let it.

It is possible to figure too much, to look too much,

to be too verbal, so pigheaded nothing gets done.

In those days, that particular Willie denied he was

ever lonely in New Jersey. His head, he said, was flushed

with snowfall, a blacksmith's hand-crafted tools,

and a button that, pressed the right way, played a song,

a kind of chain gang doo-wop. To which I said Bullshit.

Willie, that's bullshit, you stink like a heartbroken man.

I wanted to ask if he'd read the letters his wife left.

Somehow we made it from Atlantic City to the VFW bar

in Trenton without losing ourselves. I drove us through

a pre-storm breeze and a sickish streetlamp twilight

until there was rain on the windshield and voices

dispensing threefold news of what might happen,

what does happen and why whatever happened did,

the soul's traffic. Somehow we weathered all that.

The chicken is in a museum somewhere now, worth

more than God, I bet, and so much time has passed

I can't be sure which Willie made it. That night we had

some of its smell on our fingers. But the men we found

in the bar's humiliating darkness still invited us in.

from
The Los Angeles Review

I made a stage out of an abandoned house, small

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

to end in spangles, shaking what my momma

gave me in a symphony jiggling out over the dry

desert night. I danced after the knife thrower threw

his blades and before the velvet clown kicked away

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

urine dribbling down to the boards. There were

men in the audience, their hands hidden,

but mostly the darkness around me was oily

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

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

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

She watched my entire act. I hope she went away

with some kind of answer, but these steps remain

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

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

to stand on my own neck before anyone else could,

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

My talent is in looking like someone you want

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

There are other ways to dance but I never learned.

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

from
AGNI

For those who cannot camouflage themselves,

the alternative to fight or flight is tonic

immobility. The victim's one trick:

to keel over. The cooling skin expels

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

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

the creature; it feels nothing, though alive,

paralyzed while the predator remains.

Waiting in the closet behind my mother's

dresses, scent of hyacinth, I transmute—

mouth pressed in the wool of her one good suit—

into a speechless, frozen thing. The others

call me from far away, but I am fixed

right here. As if these shadows have cast doubt

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

and like the prey who plays at rigor mortis,

biding her time when the enemy is near,

while I'm inside this darkness I can see

no difference between death and immobility,

what it is to hide and to disappear.

from
Southwest Review

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

through Amherst's woods. She sidesteps mud puddles,

clears mosquito larvae swimming there.

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

in words and body, she wears Bettie Page–

bangs, yoga pants and sunburst tops, her age

irrelevant. She trots around burdock root, cuts

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

abrupt as mushrooms sprouting in her wake,

or lichen spreading across the rocks she mistakes

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

big cats sauntering past stopped trains, blown tracks,

retracing dead routes across the northern plains.

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

sidled around men and let them lap, her claws

retracted, still sharp, made long by menopause.

She sees herself in trillium blooming near

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

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

a bladder full of kerosene and sparking wires,

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

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

includes a morning hour—clary sage, wild

green oats, deer velvet, rose maroc, a vial

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

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

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

his sap eases through branch and leaf, the hulk

of late middle-age, and nothing polite is left

to sacrifice. He plods—he stumps—he hefts

his trunk along. He seems half worms and wood chips

and wears the holly crown around his hips

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

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

woods blazing, dodder's twining orange vines

trimming their legs, white flowers, burning tines.

from
Southwest Review

I'm this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere

in between, and everywhere in between

bony and overweight, my shadow cannot hold

one shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen.

My skin is mocha brown, two shades darker

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

I'm not offended by your question at all.

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

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

fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveled

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

in Tempe, in Waco, the one with the exquisite