The Best American Poetry 2015 (8 page)

Go devil.

Public programs

like

Race.

Dems a Repub

of dumpster molesters,

Congressional

whole-part bidders on your ugliest clown.

Left wing, right,

the missing moderates

of flightless fight.

Private

like

the Runs.

God evil.

Somebody had to clean that shit up.

Somebody, some love who raised you, wise.

Feathered razors for eyebrows,

alto,

tenor.

Wasn't no branch.

Some

say

a tree,

not

for rest either.

For change.

When was we a wild life,

long-eared

and short. Prey,

 some prayed for

the flood. And were

struck by floating,

corporate quintets

of Rocks and Roths,

 assets bond Prestige.

First

Organizer

ever

called a

Nigga,

Noah,

but not

the last

Occupier of Ararat

. . . got thick

on

Genesis

and electric cello, cell phone shaped UFOs

fueled by

the damp, murdered clay

of divinity-based

Racial

Mountain

Dirt.

Somebody had to clean that shit up.

Some native body,

beside the smooth water,

like a

brook

Gwen say,

“I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.”

Chaser if

you straight.

Ark Old

Ark New

Ark Now

Only        Only

 Sidney P      Simple JessB

would      would

___ Spencer T    ___ Dizzy G

to turn       to accent

the dinner     the p's

cheek       not the “. . . nuts.”

Change the record, Record Changer.

Name

Change

the changing same.

Something only you could Art Messenger

 & dig in any chord.

High water, like the woods of secrecy,

always a trail a ways a coming.

God evil.

Move the “d.”

Go devil.

 The Mosque watchers know.

Also de wind, de wind

and de Word, spoken and written,

in hidden in love

with the intestines

of Testament.

 Eyes like

 a woman's fist,

her hard facts––not the crying,

domestic consonants

 “of non being.”

Soprano,

piano,

or the cultural cowardice

of class,

in any chord

of standardized “sheeit” music, lowcoup risks slit.

 Though flawed, too,

by penetrable flesh,

some blue kind.

 Unlike

a pretty shield,

loaded free.

  Wasn't just Winter

or lonely. Those.

Wasn't just Sundays

 the living did not return.

 Crouch if you a bum or one of Mumbo Jumbo's reckless,

poisonous reeds. A neck crow man ser vant
n

 a jes' grew suit.

Us am,

an unfit

second

Constitution.

 Us am, an ambulance full of . . .

broke-down,

as round as we bald.

 Obeying

hawkish

eagles.

Why the young Brothers so big, what they eatin',

why they blow up like that, gotta wear big white tees, gotta wear white

skin sheets, like maggots, like lard, like they the domestic oil of death

and klan sweat, “who . . .” blew them up, doctored, “who . . .” pickin'

them off like dark cotton, make them make themselves a fashion of

profitable, soft muscular bales, somebody got to clean this shit up.

 All us, U.S. animals,

on one floating stage

we knew

was a toilet,

the third oldest in the nation, unreserved.

Wasn't no bank

or branch.

 Yes we Vatican, despite Alighieri's medium rare, rate of interest.

It

was

confirmation.

 Some say

black fire

wood.

 Some love that changed our screaming

 Atlantic bottoms

when all we

 could be

was thin olive sticks,

with battered whore-ti-cultural beaks, and eastern screech.

Flushed, too, every time
The Yew Norker

or one of Obi Wan Kenobi's traitorous X Jedi Clampett hillbillies

fresh prince'd us . . .

The real religion,

our “individual expressiveness”

wasn't dehuman-u-factured

by a Greek HAARP

in a Roman uni-dot-gov-versity.

Where we Away

our Steel, “flood”

means “flow.”

Where we Tenure

our Ammo, “podium”

means “drum.”

Flood,

flow.

Podium,

drum.

Flood,

drum.

Podium,

flow.

Drum,

podium.

Flood,

flow.

Used to be a whole lot of chalk around the Ark,

then anger, then angels, rehabbed wings made of fried white dust,

fallen from when the board of knowledge was public and named

after a stranger or [rich] crook, an anti-in immigrant-can'tameter

stretched across the teepee-skin, chairs of class

where we clapped

the erasers,

fifty snows old,

like we were

the first Abraham,

where we clapped

the Race Erasers

and drove away

from K James V and K Leo PB

in shiny Lincolns,

sprinkling holy sheeple from the sky,

their

powdery

absolute

Rule.

Just add oil-water.

Belongs

to humanity.

Just add sugar-rubber.

Belongs

to civilization.

Gold.

Days.

Nights.

Ounces.

A forty.

Mules move.

A forty.

Move.

Move.

Move

mule.

Whatyoumaycall “how we here” and get no

response . . . how we . . . where we fear, how we hear how we sound and

how sometimes [time is some] even our own sound fears us, faults us,

and remembers the first us, confronting Columbus with thunderbolts,

when “was-we” not good-citizen sober, “was-we” voting and drowning,

and rotting like “we-was” the wrong targets of the armed guts of our

own young?

Now a daze,

tribe-be-known,

the devil

the best historian we got.

Anyhow.

from
Poetry

Is it harder for the bachelorette or her suitors?

The brown oyster mushroom

on her face is possibly the most perfect

nose I have ever seen. I think people

might actually win love. The funny guy always

appeared safe but later you saw him

in the dark green yard

puking, a thin

sweat on the back of his neck.

I want the air I breathe

to maintain my body's

mystery. I worry I'll run into you at a party

then I remember I don't go to parties

so I'm safe. I have no godly discipline.

When someone yells I still huddle

under a want for ice cream.

How can you love people

without them feeling accused?

If I wanted to win

I would draw harder lines

and sit next to them, stay

awake, rattle the box of bullets.

When we touch my heart

gets green

and white, preppy, bordered,

oh! she says and perks up.

It hurts to not be everyone else. If love dies

it was already dead.

from
Powder Keg

On starless, windless nights like this

I imagine

I can hear the wedding dresses

Weeping in their closets,

Luminescent with hopeless longing,

Like hollow angels.

They know they will never be worn again.

Who wants them now,

After their one heroic day in the limelight?

Yet they glow with desire

In the darkness of closets.

A few lucky wedding dresses

Get worn by daughters—just once more,

Then back to the closet.

Most turn yellow over time,

Yellow from praying

For the moths to come

And carry them into the sky.

Where is your mother's wedding dress,

What closet?

Where is your grandmother's wedding dress?

What, gone?

Eventually they all disappear,

Who knows where.

Imagine a dump with a wedding dress on it.

I saw one wedding dress, hopeful at Goodwill.

But what sad story brought it there,

And what sad story will take it away?

Somewhere a closet is waiting for it.

The luckiest wedding dresses

Are those of wives

Betrayed by their husbands

A week after the wedding.

They are flung outside the doublewide,

Or the condo in Telluride,

And doused with gasoline.

They ride the candolescent flames,

Just smoke now,

Into a sky full of congratulations.

from
The Iowa Review

1.

Afternoon brings my neighbor outside

in her florid pink nightgown,

exposed breasts like pendulums

as she kneels in the gravel

speaking to an empty planter. As the two of us

wait in the kitchen

for her children, it is clear

her thoughts float

from the back of the skull to the front.

Unstoppered bottles. Pills on the table:

blood pressure cholesterol diabetes arrhythmic heart

dispensed out of sequence

from the calendar of forgotten days.

2.

How resigned she seems

to the eviction notices her body is receiving,

the way a daughter sags against

the door jamb.

Family members speak in code

about selling the house.

3.

Because she is a system of bone and blood

Because her hands are rusted hinges

Because wisps of spiderwebs float behind eyelids

Because her heart leaks and something has palmed a piece of one lung

Because her body is a test tube

4.

Tomorrow she will be outside again, offering

up her sweat to the sun

as she tends the perennials and

sluices water, working her garden

which is purpose, which is happiness—

even as petal and pistil we fall.