The Best American Poetry 2013 (21 page)

156

Norm's wet underarms—

proof he's yet to discover

Arrid Extra Dry.

157

Grandfather Peyton

has furnished the mansion with

all sorts of Fox props.

158

Don't worry, Ryan,

in ten years you'll be the star

of a Kubrick film.

This is the continuing story of Peyton Place . . .

from
Carbon Copy Magazine

The winter trees offer no shade no shelter.

They offer wood to the family of wood.

He comes in at the kitchen door, waving like a pistol

a living branch in his hand, he shouts

“Man your battle stations!”

Our mother turns to the kitchen curtains.

He shakes the branch, a house-size Great Dipper

points North over the yard:

Can it help? How about

the old dog, thumping her tail. Whose dog is she?

How about the old furnace, breathing.

Breathing the

world: a flier, a diver,

kitchen curtains, veterans, God, listen kindness,

we're in this thing like leaves.

from
Plume

Now I'll never be able to finish that poem to Bob

that takes off of a poem by Bob

where he's looking out the Print Center window

at a man in a chicken suit

handing out flyers on Houston Street.

Mine has Plato saying man is a featherless biped

and Aristophanes slamming a plucked chicken

on the table and declaring the definition apt but flawed

and it ends with Francis Bacon

dedicated empiricist

experimenting with frozen food

stopping his carriage in a snowstorm

and hopping out to stuff a chicken with snow

It worked but Bacon got pneumonia and died

Without making a pun on bringing home the bacon

the poem closes on Bob saving Bacon's life

with chicken soup. It would have been a long poem

and it would have made a lot of sense

and shown why I believe Bob Hershon is a wise man.

from
Hanging Loose

He told me I was casting aspersions on him,

and because he was sensitive and literary,

I knew he must be telling me I was sprinkling

unholy water on him, was sailing a phony

barb-hooked lure among his lily pads,

was gathering a lousy bunch

of actors to make a bad movie about him,

was pouring hot metal into molds

to anchor some satirical bobble-heads

that looked like him, was publishing

his rotten horoscope and crooked fortune

and knotting them, stitching them, looping them,

catching them up—but I wasn't, and I said so

right to his face, and he began to cast

his own aspersions on the character

he thought I was playing in his private drama.

The Georgia Review
and
Harper's

“Mommy, that man is a girl,” says the little boy

pointing his finger, like a narrow spotlight,

targeting the center of my back, his kid-hand

learning to assert what he sees, his kid-hand

learning the failure of gender's tidy little

story about itself. I try not to look at him

because, yes that man is a girl. I, man, am a girl.

I am the kind of man who is a girl and because

the kind of man I am is patient with children

I try not to hear the meanness in his voice,

his boy voice that sounds like a girl voice

because his boy voice is young and pitched high

like the tent in his pants will be years later

because he will grow to be the kind of man

who is a man, or so his mother thinks.

His mother snatches his finger from the air,

of course he's not
, she says, pulling him

back to his seat,
what number does it say we are?

she says to her boy, bringing his attention

to numbers, to counting and its solid sense.

But he has earrings
, the boy complains

now sounding desperate like he's been

the boy who cries wolf, like he's been

the hub of disbelief before, but this time

he knows he is oh so right. The kind

of man I am is a girl, the kind of man

I am is push-ups on the basement

floor, is chest bound tight against himself,

is thick gripping hands to the wheel

when the kind of man I am drives away

from the boy who will become a boy

except for now while he's still a girl voice,

a girl face, a hairless arm, a powerless hand.

That boy
is
a girl
that man who is a girl

thinks to himself, as he pulls out of the lot,

his girl eyes shining in the Midwest sun.

from
Columbia Poetry Review

What years of weather did to branch and bough

No canopy of shadow covers now,

And these great trunks, when the wind's rough and bleak,

Though little shaken, can be heard to creak.

It is not time, as yet, for rising sap

And hammered spiles. There's nothing there to tap.

For now, the long blue shadows of these trees

Stretch out upon the snow, and are at ease.

from
The New Yorker

Let's just see if it fits
, and your voice blurred, your hand brushing away

mine, me laughing because seriously who says that? I flashed out of my body

picturing you saying this to other girls, and laughed again. Those are words

that can only be said late at night in an outer borough, while Manhattan

glitters in rows of mocking unison from over the bridge. Those are the

moments when I think
how did I get here
followed shortly by okay whatever,

like now, sitting in the park, watching couples strolling hand-in-hand. Once I

made you cupcakes. In the morning before I left, I arranged them on a plate

and left them on your kitchen table. Don't worry, you weren't the first one I've

done that for. I'll just think of the whole thing as a stretching exercise.

from
The Common

Dear mailbox. I have abandoned the task. There is no more glory

to resurrect, spoils of the marriage to pick over. She finds me burdensome and has moved out into the guest house.

I don't remember building a guest house.

Many nights I have stumbled out into the unwilling streets and fallen

to my knees before you. O, mailbox. Your throat is swollen