The Best American Poetry 2014 (21 page)

Imagine, not even or really ever tasting

a peach until well over 50, not once

sympathizing with Blake naked in his garden

insisting on angels until getting off the table

and coming home with my new heart. How absurd

to still have a body in this rainbow-gored,

crickety world and how ridiculous to be given one

in the first place, to be an object

like an orchid is an object, or a stone,

so bruisable and plummeting, arms

waving from the evening-ignited lake,

head singing in the furnace feral and sweet,

tears that make the face grotesque,

tears that make it pure. How easy

it is now to get drunk on a single whiff

like a hummingbird or ant on the laughter

of one woman and who knew how much I'd miss

that inner light of snow now that I'm in Texas.

from
Poetry

jammed my airspace w/ an
audible.com
podcast

& to-do list Deborah lent me this pen better

make use of turn off it filled up inside dear friends

[
swipe again
] invite me to Brooklyn [
swipe

again
] I briefly [
GO
] hate them am rush rush &

rushing headphones never let me airways

I run & the running [GPS:
average time
]

[
activity started
] [GPS:
per mile
] then a snow-

storm no school I cried & said
Mayor Bloomberg

should be scalded with hot cocoa
when someone said

yay for snow
I'm cutting it too close, Erin, if

a blizzard makes me [
too slow swipe again
]

cry I used to [
activity started
] long for snow

that quiet filling everything up what is time for

anyway? Jeremy says
It's funny how
[
Too Slow
]

[
same turnstile
]
“work” in your poems is a metaphor

for
[
Go
] [
Go
] [
Go
] [
Go
] [
Go
]
“free time”
[
same

turnstile
] “free time” what's that? is it NY?
What

are you talking about?
asks Erin,
Seriously what

are you talking about?
[
1 X-fer
] [
total time
] [
average

time
] [
GO GO GO GO
] crammed in the tiny bed

Still
I say
If you want me to stay, you need to lie still

the toddler tries why? must he? [
X-fer
] [
X-fer
]

[
all service on the local track
] fall asleep fast I pray

to whom? [
1 X-fer ok
] is this what I was

waiting for: the one nap moment of silence?

if that's what I wanted should have made other

don't you think choices?
What do you mean

by “dark”?
asks Erin
What do you mean by “in-

tolerable”? “unhinged”?
airways [
GO
] I give one son

a quarter for two or fewer complaints a day

& none for more the pediatrician confirms

they each have two testicles then shoots

the smallest boy in the arm that was the easiest

part of my day [
X-fer OK
] [
OK
] [
OK
] [
GO
] stroller

is it the lack of human [
X-fer
] contact? oh

please
have no time for
that
got to go to sleep

by 10 pm or am up all night something about

circadian rhythms then it's toddler-early-waking

Still night!
we tell him
Not time
timing time
Not

time to wake up!
we tell him
Go back
he won't

we're up it's dark is it too early to make lunch

or dinner?
What are you saying?
texts Erin
Can't

talk
I text back but want to say [
X-fer
] to ask

why is this life so run-run-run I run only thing

I can—free wasted time—control? long

underground F the train crosstown bus that

screaming is
my
son with his 50 small feet

kicking
Too slow bus!
screaming Meredith says

The breath is the only thing in your life that

takes care of itself
does it? [
too fast
] [
same

turnstile
] Rebecca wanted us to do something

radical at this reading I don't have time did

wash my hair lifestyle choice I know time

isn't “a
thing
you have” I meant to ask isn't there

some way, Erin, to get more not time but joy?

she's not home maybe running or at the grocery

or school [
X-fer
] can you anyone hear me? my

signal pen airway failed Deborah lent me

this one GPS
time left
or
time left
—two

meanings—I've forgotten to
oh!
left my
urgh!

meat in the freezer or oven on so what? don't

make dinner—ha ha who will? the military?—

don't rush multi-stop stop checking the tiny

devices brain sucking the joy out here's the

[
too fast
] [
swipe again
] [
OK
] express

from
The Kenyon Review

S
HERMAN
A
LEXIE
was born in 1966 and grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation. His first collection of stories,
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
(1993), won a PEN/Hemingway Award. In collaboration with Chris Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho Indian filmmaker, Alexie adapted a story from that book, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” into the screenplay for the movie
Smoke Signals
, which won the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. His most recent books are the poetry collection
Face
from Hanging Loose Press, and
War Dances
, stories and poems from Grove Press.
Blasphemy
, a collection of new and selected stories, appeared in 2012 from Grove Press.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
, a novel, appeared from Little, Brown Books for Children. He is lucky enough to be a full-time writer and lives with his family in Seattle.

Of “Sonnet, with Pride,” Alexie writes: “
Pride of Baghdad
, by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, is a graphic novel that tells the true story of a pride of lions that escaped during the Iraq War and were subsequently killed by U.S. soldiers. Well, I suppose ‘true story' is a loose definition of the book since we enter into the minds of the lions and various other animals. In any case, it's a tragic novel. I have reread it often. And think of it quite often, too, so when Seattle's Recovery Café, a drug and alcohol addiction treatment facility for homeless and low-income people, asked me to write them a poem, I immediately thought of those lost and hungry lions. I don't often write occasional poems, and don't know that I'd ever written a good occasional poem, but this one seems to have lasting power. We're all soul-hungry, right? Well, this poem does its best to make us consider and reconsider the universal nature of soul-hunger.”

R
AE
A
RMANTROUT
was born in Vallejo, California, in 1947. She is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, San
Diego. Wesleyan University Press has published all her recent books. They include
Just Saying
(2013),
Money Shot
(2011),
Versed
(2009), and
Next Life
(2007). A new book,
Itself
(in which “Control” appears), will be published by Wesleyan in 2015. She has received the Pulitzer Prize.

Armantrout writes: “ ‘Control' begins with the experience of learning (or trying to learn) to meditate. The first stanza reproduces the instructor's advice that we should ‘set obtrusive thoughts aside.' The third, fifth, and eighth stanzas develop my responses to this experience while the second, fourth, sixth, and seventh stanzas present the obtrusive thoughts as fragments of the debris field of American media culture. For instance, I recently heard a politician say, ‘It takes an American to do really big things.' He was talking about our space program, which, of course, is being systematically defunded.”

J
OHN
A
SHBERY
was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry, most recently
Quick Question
(Ecco, 2012), as well as numerous translations from the French, including works by Pierre Reverdy, Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel, and several volumes of poems by Pierre Martory.
Collected French Translations
, a two-volume set of his translations (poetry and prose), was published in 2014 (Fararr, Straus and Giroux). He exhibits his collages at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (New York). He was the guest editor of
The Best American Poetry 1988
, the initial volume in the series.

E
RIN
B
ELIEU
was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1967. She has four poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press:
Infanta
(1995),
One Above & One Below
(2000),
Black Box
(2006),
Slant Six
(2014). She is a professor in the creative writing program at Florida State University and is a member of the poetry faculty at Lesley University's low-residency MFA program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also cofounder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and the artistic director for the Port Townsend Writers Conference.

On “With Birds,” Belieu writes: “The very best thing about our home in Tallahassee is that it's presided over by a three-hundred-year-old live oak. She's a beauty, with a trunk fifteen feet around and limbs that stretch two houses in either direction. Of course, because of her size, she also serves as a superhighway for the many critters living in north Florida's canopy.

“I work on our deck most mornings, and in that time I've been reminded often and none too gently how unromantic nature is. The
impulse for ‘With Birds' came when I heard a meaty thump and looked up to find a good-sized slab of bloody snake carcass lying decapitated on the deck next to me. No doubt one of the hawks or barred owls that surround our house was clumsy with breakfast that morning. There is also the issue of one particularly loud and luckless cardinal—a ‘blast-beruffled plume' sort of fellow—who often shrieks nonstop pick-up lines from atop our fence while I'm trying to work. So I think of ‘With Birds' as an affectionate complaint. But, really, I like having all the wild things around me.”

L
INDA
B
IERDS
was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1945. She is the author of nine books of poetry:
Roget's Illusion
(Putnam's, 2014);
Flight: New and Selected Poems
(Putnam's, 2008);
First Hand
(Putnam's, 2005);
The Seconds
(Putnam's, 2001);
The Profile Makers
(Henry Holt, 1997);
The Ghost Trio
(Henry Holt, 1994);
Heart and Perimeter
(Henry Holt, 1991);
The Stillness, the Dancing
(Henry Holt, 1988); and
Flights of the Harvest-Mare
(Ahsahta Press, 1985). She has won the PEN/West Poetry Prize, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, the
Virginia Quarterly Review
's Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is a Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Of “On Reflection,” Bierds writes: “For some time I've been interested in the scientist Michael Faraday, and I've been particularly enchanted by a series of lectures that he delivered in 1860 at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Although written for children, the lectures attracted people of all ages, drawn by Faraday's enthusiasm and warmth, and by his conviction that common objects within our lives are often the best illustrators of scientific truths.