The Best American Poetry 2013 (7 page)

I did what you told me to,

wore antlers and the mask, danced

in the untilled field, but the promised

ladder never dropped from the sky.

In the burned house strays ate bats

on the attic floor, and trotted out

into the dark with wings in their mouths.

I found the wedding dress unharmed,

my baby teeth sewn to the cuff.

There's a deer in the woman, a moth

in the chimney, a mote in God's one good eye.

The fire is on the table now, the bear is in

the cradle now, and the baby is gone.

She's the box of bones under the bed,

the stitches in your lip, the moon and the hollow

in the geode, in peaches heavy with June.

If I enter the river I must learn how to swim.

If a wolf's ribs are bigger than a man's,

and if the dead float, then I am the witch's

second heart, and I am the sea in the boat.

from
FIELD

They lie like stones and dare not shift. Even asleep, everyone hears in prison.

Dwayne Betts deserves more than this dry ink for his teenage years in prison.

In the film we keep watching, Nina takes Darius to a steppers ball.

Lovers hustle, slide, dip as if one of them has no brother in prison.

I dine with humans who think any book full of black characters is about race.

A book full of white characters examines insanity near—but never in—prison.

His whole family made a barricade of their bodies at the door to room 403.

He died without the man he wanted. What use is love at home or in prison?

We saw police pull sharks out of the water just to watch them not breathe.

A brother meets members of his family as he passes the mirrors in prison.

Sundays, I washed and dried her clothes after he threw them into the yard.

In the novel I love, Brownfield kills his wife, only gets seven years in prison.

I don't want to point my own sinful finger, so let's use your clean one instead.

Some bright citizen reading this never considered a son's short hair in prison.

In our house lived three men with one name, and all three fought or ran.

I left Nelson Demery III for Jericho Brown, a name I earned in prison.

from
The Believer

1. The Economy

We used to make things we didn't understand (Marx), consumed by

people who didn't understand us, and now we don't even understand the

people who are making them, that is us. Our misunderstandings progress.

We consume things that are familiar, and the more familiar they get, the

less we know or sympathize with ourselves, the people who make them.

We are not familiar with the parts of these things that other people make,

but we love to use them. Technology is familiar, people are not. The

people who make TVs know us from TV better than we know them or

ourselves. When we are not on TV, we are waiting to slit our (their)

throats. The German economy thrives because Germans make “the thing

that goes inside the thing that goes inside the thing.”

Can you love people you don't understand? With a blender and a mixer

and an iPhone.

The Jesuits would be pleased.

Why would God need to choose a people when there are all these

machines around.

What else would He do with the Salvation Army warehouses?

2. Pound in the Ozarks

5 time grimace:

pro patria

pro domo

pro usura

pro forma

pro pane

3. Expansive Song

Space is my Baby

Time is my Bitch

(with Vince Cellucci)

4. I Broker

“in this army you break down your body like a gun

ascertain its needs and reassemble it for action when they've been met”

The Manual

splitting hairs for commodities

the centrifugal force that dismembers matter into sellable minis

the broker broke down his body and ordered its needs from a catalogue

everything arrived by mail overnight and the broker reassembled

hermself

by the time the market opened

herm hoped to make enough to post a profit

on the increasing needs of herm body

“every day you don't sell you buy”

herm ever-expanding ever-needy body

was an expense that had to be covered by greater profit

so when herm body incorporated the city the country and the globe

it had to be broken down and fed

by myriads of catalogues from outer space

whence the profits had to also eventually come

today herm franchised copper on mars and sold

the green algae noon meal of the cloned venus from last night

i went to sleep without a shower and woke up malcontent

but my daughters brought me time for breakfast

i was happy with the design

some retro some yet to be duplicated

what counts is attitude

5. San Michele

it's got to be raining in Venice

to write like Henry James

was never your wish in even

the most twisted version of yourself

from
House Organ

How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,

jotting down little things,

noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,

then wondering what will become of me,

and finally to work alone under a lamp

as if everything depended on this,

groping blindly down a page,

like someone lost in a forest.

And to think it all began one night

on the steps of a nunnery

where I lay gazing up from a sewing basket,

which was doubling for a proper baby carrier,

staring into the turbulent winter sky,

too young to wonder about anything

including my recent abandonment—

but it was there that I committed

my first act of self-expression,

sticking out my infant tongue

and receiving in return (I can see it now)

a large, pristine snowflake much like any other.

from
The Southampton Review
and
Slate

The Irish were not, the Germans

were not, the Jews Italians Slavs and others

were not, or were not exactly or not quite

at various times in American history.

Before us the Greeks themselves

were not (though the weaker enemy

Persians were), the next-up Romans

themselves were not either.

And later the Europeans were not

until Linnaeus named by color,

red white yellow and black.

Even the English settlers were only

vaguely at first to contrast with natives,

but then with Africans, more and more

of them slaves to be irreversibly,

totally different from, they were.

Then others were not, then were,

or were not, but gradually became,

leaving only, for a time, black

and yellow to be not.

Then there were other words

for those who were still or newly

(see
immigrant
,
Arab
) somehow not

the same and therefore not.

Thus history leaves us nothing

but not: like children playing at being

something, we made, we keep

making our whiteness up.

from
Harvard Review

First your dog dies and you pray

for the Holy Spirit to raise the inept

lump in the sack, but Jesus' name

is no magic charm; sunsets and the

flies are gathering. That is how faith

dies. By dawn you know death;

the way it arrives and then grows

silent. Death wins. So you walk

out to the tangle of thorny weeds behind

the barn; and you coax a black

cat to your fingers. You let it lick

milk and spit from your hand before

you squeeze its neck until it messes

itself, its claws tearing your skin,

its eyes growing into saucers.

A dead cat is light as a live

one and not stiff, not yet. You

grab its tail and fling it as

far as you can. The crows find

it first; by then the stench

of the hog pens hides the canker

of death. Now you know the power

of death, that you have it,

that you can take life in a second

and wake the same the next day.

This is why you can't fear death.

You have seen the broken neck

of a man in a well, you know who

pushed him over the lip of the well,

tumbling down; you know all about

blood on the ground. You know that