The Best American Poetry 2015 (5 page)

Let's go to the shooting range. I have no business expertise,

but I'd love a guy who is good with rope.

from
The Journal

When I see an escalator I have to kiss

everyone on it, don't you? If you like these

pastries—our lawyer calls them perfidy rolls—

there are more on his helicopter.

He's Serbian or something,

whole family wiped out

by his other family. But he's fine now.

Drop a kiss on the cultural floor,

three-second rule applies. I don't even know

who I'm kissing anymore, do you?

Sneak away to where the world snaps in half

and come back with sanctions, come back

with sauces, come back with Haribo,

come back with
Inferno
flashcards,

come back with the glottal nonstop.

Dear Ciacco, your flowers were delicious but barely

a lunch so we dug a new grave for the stems.

“Finish us up,” they sang, “or finish us off.”

Lie down in sewage to stay down; sit up

only for people-will-see-me-and-die-level fame,

smiling like your teeth are on fire.

Oh darling you know what they say:

why have one factory

when you can have five. Our lawyer always

reminds us, “Little hands, long hours.” Indeed!

If I could eat my voice I would, but I'm off

to seize the world, the inside of its machine.

This is the way Celan ends, not with a bang

but a river. Woolf, too; she goes out

the same goddamn way—

I mean, wind any creature tight

enough and it does what it has to do.

from
Lemon Hound

Abracadabra: The anus. The star at the base of the human

balloon. Close it tight as the sun, then let it unfurl:

Crepe paper, the spiraling heart of the pipecleaner flower.

Do you know what to do? Pry open that shopworn diary.

Easy. Use your fingertips, mirrors. See what you're hiding

from yourself. Use spoons to reflect: Your ass, backwards,

goes raveling outward like an expanding universe.

Have you considered
muscerdae
, the soft and smooth

innumerable droppings of mice?
Guano
, the bats' own

jellicate wallpaper? Read those fewtrils for alphabets and become

kahuna. Revere their secret dictations until,

like all things, the secrets reorder the order of your language.

Make those soft, inward labyrinths your own. Know them

not for their oubliettes alone, but for what they release:

Omina. Fortuna. The ways in which you see and might become.

Parousia. That moment in which the body feels least heavy, most

quiet, uncalmably calm. Consider: Between
scatology
and
eschatology

remains only “he.” Not “the man” or “man” or “men” but Old English,

see? Us all, perhaps, though this is not the point. The point is

this: We can take in language from either end and make language

understood—again, from either end. Embrace your exits, where bloom

virginities of every orifice. Where bloom oracles: We are all full of shit.

We could choose to make this space in us so small no digit, no wind, no

x
could ever pass through. Or we could open a world any finger or tongue

(yours?) could enter into and speak. We could make a primer. Have you considered:

Zero—the shape that comes to mind—in its most common, most practical functions

makes everything the same as or equal to itself.

from
Ninth Letter

Kintsugi
is the Japanese art of mending precious pottery with gold.

What's between us

seems flexible as the webbing

between forefinger and thumb.

Seems flexible but isn't;

what's between us

is made of clay

like any cup on the shelf.

It shatters easily. Repair

becomes the task.

We glue the wounded edges

with tentative fingers.

Scar tissue is visible history

and the cup is precious to us

because

we saved it.

In the art of
kintsugi

a potter repairing a broken cup

would sprinkle the resin

with powdered gold.

Sometimes the joins

are so exquisite

they say the potter

may have broken the cup

just so he could mend it.

from
The Southern Review
and
Poetry Daily

House is not a metaphor. House has nothing

to do with beak or wing. House is not two

hands held angled towards each other. House is

not its roof or the pine straw on its roof. At night,

its windows and doors look nothing like a face.

Its stairs are not vertebrae. Its walls may be

white. They are not pale skin. House does not

appreciate your pun on its panes as pains.

House does not appreciate because house

does not have feelings. House has no aesthetic

program. House does what it does, which is

not doing. House does not sit on its foundations.

House exists in its foundations, and when the wind

pushes itself to full gale, house is never the one crying.

from
Conduit

I washed your father's pants in the kitchen sink.

That should have been enough to tell you.

I am still convinced there is no difference

between kneeling and falling if you don't get up.

The head goes down in defeat, but lower in prayer,

and your sister tells me each visit that she has learned

of a new use for her hands.

I've seen this from you both: cartwheels through the field

at dawn, toes popping above the corn stalks like fleas

over the heads of lepers. Your scarecrow reminds me

of Jesus, his guilt confused for fear.

The sun doesn't know; the fog lifts

everything in praise.

from
The Volta

From two pieces of string and oil-fattened feathers he made a father.

She made a mother from loss buttons and ocean debris.

Lacking a grave, they embottled themselves

in a favorite liqueur, the pyx and plethora of clouds—

with the heart striped and clear-cut, they rekindled the stars,

created a glossary of seeds.

Down the fire ladder, rung after fiery rung, they gather, salvage,

fiddle about, curse and root, laugh themselves silly,

en masse assemble a makeshift holy city. In the holy city,

makeshift, they assemble en masse, silly themselves,

laugh and root, curse the fiddle, gather salvage rung

after fiery rung as they ladder their fire down.

A glossary seeded creates stars, strips clear the diamond-cut heart.

They sold clouds, the plethora and pyx of liqueur. Favored themselves

embottled in grave lack, ocean debris, and loss buttons,

where Mother made a father who made feathers

from fattened oil and string pieces for two.

from
The New Yorker