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22 Articles

Spirit Level When making an axe handlethe pattern is not far off. —Gary Snyder My mother was either horizontal on the couch,or vertical, a plumb line from her spineto the top of her head to the ceiling that spinswhen she drinks, alcohol and an air bubbletrapped, sealed and fixed inside her, her facecarved from wood, a tear gliding slowlydown the curve of her cheek. My motherwas once a spirit in this world. Onceshe breathed for me, above me, beside me,behind me. Now I feel her warm breathon my neck summer nights, peeringover my shoulder as I write every poem, whisperingLet me in. I let her in. I remember every timeshe picked me up or set me down, put meto bed or woke me from dreams, and nowI see how my whole life…

Petrichor Lecture Hant I on the after noun wanrain pourn in this embersan diego hand overthe reeding in hand thenroutes racing to saywhat fortunate whenrain can say Petrichorous petrichoruslector on petra palethrough rain in the desertdoes earth petrel rainprickling my skin inthe mourn trickledecember trails Year’s end petral withdrawalfuture’s end readin the haptic drift’shappening I’m umbralon board fated to fadein rain untravel untrammeluncastled rook Or king rooks sing petrachoralmorning in Normal Heightsrain on the ground or in airan air not raveling but in strandsor points noted railing wrenarrive rooks and wrensbend air in coarse weave and Waves the earth enters air querentthrough rain and swears petricorepetrikouros pretty and soar the airclears and wavers the sun sayerairs and wayers the cours coeurcorps chorus kouros kaurquai queer quer core Afternoon Lecture San Diego Museum of Art The sharp sounds of…

Crazy Sharon Talks to the Bishop I met the Bishop on the roadand much said he—same old porridgeI heard as a child, my little bodya “foul sty.” “Love has pitched his mansion.” MaybeLove pitched her silken tent.Love has raised its dwelling inthe place of reproduction, which can be fitted with a full moon devicewhich functions as a saving grace.And maybe everything can be rent,everything can be sole or whole—like an asshole. I met a Bishop, once,when I was a teenager mad as hell abouteternal fire and birth control.We were sitting in my mother’s living room— for I have built my poems ina place of opulent privilege—I held out my fingers, and wiggled them at him,and said “I’m trying to make you levitate.” He was not holding his crook, or his mitredhat, but he was wearing a…

Night Heron What now? You’d flown infrom a Midwest city namedfor its rowdy summertimeabundance lying saying youwere coming to visit friendsin San Francisco and I had takenthe train from chilly Oaklandto meet you and we rode northcarefully not touching I took youto the tiny one-room apartmentI had escaped to after a badbreakup and fried us nervouslysome potatoes in a cast iron pana little rosemary which wedid not eat because you kissedme hard and we went in a rushto the mattress I bought off a guyin a semi-famous band and had onlythe day before gotten offthe floor and onto the pinewoodbedframe I’d found and hoistedon my back and carrieddown out of north Berkeley armswide weaving through the sidestreetstoeing the center line to avoidsnagging the buckeyes leaning outit was about sufferingin public it…

Books Until the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest mass shooting by a single person in US history occurred in the middle of the night of June 12, 2016 in an Orlando nightclub, Pulse. 49 lives were lost and countless affected, including those of us reading this. We are the foundation, the mascara, the blush.We are the eyeblink, the heartbeat, the hush. We are the shades that never come off. (from “PULSE: for the 49 murdered and 53 wounded at Pulse nightclub, Orlando, Florida, June 12, 2016”) If the grief with which we must now deal pertains to entire groups of individuals, then is it the multiplicative utterances of poetry which most legitimately capture the cries of this dying? John Keene’s work, primarily fictional or biographical prose, can be situated in this space of contradiction…

I Put Tasks I Do for Free into a Folder Titled “Jobs” There are not enough hours in the day before I have to perform affection. That’s an objectively robotic thing to say, my therapist tells me, when I speakabout my responses to sentimentality. My weekly battle with the laser printer—a kind of intimacy, my pleading. I don’t want your flashing red light, I say, telling me you won’t go. I wear shoes I found on a sidewalk. That must mean something, my feetbathed in the ghost of someone else’s feet. When Cynthia, the taller and much-older cousin, looked under the deckand saw that the baby birds in the nest had their heads bitten off, I screameduntil someone inevitably told me to stop. I’ve always been this sensitive, hands clapped over my ears. A pure emotion, like thread…

THE ISLAND (CATULLUS 64)

Back then the evergreens tumbled downriverfrom the glaze-white runoff to the boot-stirred puddlesof amber young men who fulfilled our destiny,who clambered into ships, on horses, and in wagonspainting the newfound landscapes ours.Our calling was noble, heaven-sent, even.The gods gave us knowledge, and knowledge we turnedin service of a creed we used to believe in.That’s why our weapons were better than theirs.It’s written that this is when two fated lovers—one burned with lust, and one who assented—were approved by their fathers to make a new fatherout of that lust, and maintain the line.If only my compatriots—men of a better time,women as true as the breath of the mountainfrom which the hearth’s pine falls—were still here.But though your ears turn, I’ll still call your names,and having been summoned, you’ll drift down from…

FROM THE FEELING SONNETS

15. If Errato is the muse of poetry, who is the muse of music.No muse is the muse of music. Any muse is the muse of music.A muse is she musing about her meaning with music.Take meaning away from musing and all that remains is music.It is the music that makes for feeling and not the meaning.Music is moving but meaning, merely amusing.We do not mean meaning, we mean the feeling of meaning.It is the feeling of moving and being moved. Therefore we mean to meanmeaning but we mean music.Music names names. We assume it has meaning.It does not mean to. It means because it names but it does not mean it.I feel my name being called in its omen, amen, and moan. You yours.It may be the same omen, amen,…

FROM THE FEELING SONNETS

Impaled Matrix-stylein a hall of headless beings& beingless heads,‘The Lost Marbles’weren’t the ‘spaghetti,ends of days, onionskinrainbow orbs’ I first imagined—but rather: cold draperyof ancient stone. How had Inot known Elgin, Parthenon,pars pro toto (“a part takenfor the whole”)?Can you imagine safekeepinga broken bowl,a busted nailor a parchment scrapfor all perpetuity? Here encasedin glass, a petrified shoe.And here an amphorano longer waftingof fish sauce. Though I stillhear the sea in it, cusping.When Andres Serranojarred his urine, droppeda crucifix into it, backlit it,shot it & christened itPiss Christ, he pissedoff a bunch of peoplebut you can’t deny its impact.When an ex-lover’sfather was confrontedfor stashing glistening jarafter glistening jarof urochrome in the basement(it’d be years before the familydiscovered the hoard of emptiedrum, vodka, whiskey, wine& gin bottles hid in the attic,under the couch,…

HEADPHONE MASTERPIECES

Despite the fact that more than three decades have passed since that day, the memory of my first time seeing Queen Latifah on TV still stands out in my mind vividly. I was nine years old, cross-legged in my living room one evening watching BET when the video for “Ladies First” came on. The video opens with snapshots of Harriet Tubman, Angela Davis, Winnie Mandela, Madame C.J. Walker and the abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Immediately following these archival images, Latifah appears, dressed in paramilitary gear and flanked by her two dancers, the Safari Sisters. Despite being very young, the message was clear to me: by visually appropriating the images of these women, Queen Latifah was positioning herself as the latest step in a long line of Black women revolutionaries. Backed by…

The Bright Invisible Early such darkness, these oncoming nights& sure, I’m dull & even slow to concedehow mornings make equal, swerving measuresthere between those foremost shadowsalong the fence, amid the chickens & nerve,sheep & their indifference to any pair of foolshelpless in love, who visit through the cold,shortened, everyday hours like you & meuntil, oh yes, we take the prairie like pioneers,plumb the woods with a memory of wildflowers& the skinny, skinny leaves released as purelyas the dead houses that will, come spring,vanish in fits of a blossomed green & the singularawakening in which we kiss, merely a blinklike the hurried bird across the canvas of light& afterwards, in that heave, our mothersswell, our own fathers relish again in the flesh& without, I’m told, any timeline for griefor retrieving their clothes…

Lying In On bed rest desire becomes a sheet.Let it fall over mewithout hands. Let it. Before I knew I was in dangerI did not get up. After,when I say how long I lay downhow can I make you understand it was an order? In bed what time has done to me iswhat it cannot doto him. I become the mortalpregnant with a god, if only he canbe born. Whatever happens don’t blame yourselfthe ER nurse says when I am diagnosed with threatened abortion. She holds my shoulder with one hand.With the other, crushes a Vicodin. Can I take that before it’s over? Try to gather yourself, the nurse saysso I look for my body everywhere: The placenta dangles off like fruit about to fall half-mine half- Forget mothers. The living woman scrapes out the unlivingevery month to fermentand when I…

In High School Common sense calls out sick at the slightest inconvenience. As when the friend of a friend driving me home reveals mid-drive he is drunk. Ever the eldest immigrant daughter, I would rather die than hurt his feelings, so there I am saying No worries out the left side of my mouth and the Shema out the right. We live in a very litigious society was the reason my tennis coach refused to drive female athletes to practice alone. I nodded along, imagining overprotective parents, a jealous wife at home. Now, I understand: he was afraid we would falsely accuse him of sex crimes. This whole time, I thought the problem was society, when the problem was me. His daughter was born that year. He named her after a…

JENNIFERS OF THE 1970s A conversation

INTRODUCTION As a former schoolteacher, I’ve always been interested in name “trends,” eyeing student rosters to find the rise of presidential names, speed-inspired names, jewel tones, a team of unwitting Iditarod racers—pulses of language moving briefly through pop culture. A seasoned Jennifer in a 70s sea of Jennifers, I never thought much of my name, like it was a placeholder for “all of us,” but in my forties, I saw it a little more freshly and wanted to explore the effects of the ultra-popularity, unique in its extremeness. The Jennifers weren’t just a name trend, but a tidal wave that rose higher in use than any other name, then declined more markedly than any other.* I’ve taught now for nearly thirty years and have had zero Jennifers in my classes, although…

Artefacts in Drafts On my phone’s half-broken screen, the news comes.It seeps through like a thousand swarms of butterflies, wings phantomand torched. Notre Dame cathedral is burning today. Al-Aqsa mosque is burningtomorrow. In another time, there will be a wedding, I suppose. Something heavy with the colors of songs.A little porcelain day untouched by extinction. An early-morning future, while walking to work, I’ll notice myself for the first timein a long time, the phone’s screen blood-blue. Two eye-bags, darkened by hormones and the pimples seem like the rising lordsof my skin’s unnamed countries. The face that I’ll be seeing is mine, and I will realize. But after how long?On television, the fires look dimmer, but probably more alive. That’s how ashes work, in memories. Everything deadhas to come back in the shape of a pregnant doe. Its…

LETTER FROM MY HANDS TO MY BRAIN

After Rachel McKibbens Museum of marble, you are calling outinto the starless fields. You are sand dunes,dimpled and cold. All the brake lightson the drive home. You sit back and watch, grimacing,as we hold the shards from the jar we droppedin the driveway, feasting on allthe brokenness you’ve tallied so far. And yet,we handle the gritted edgesof glistening windows, stack them on a palm, smileat our latest sculpture. Your weighty footso often rests on the hose, choking outthe smallest stream. What would happenif you let us dig into the soil for the garlicand onion? There is never a perfectday to harvest. There are nevernails short enough. Raking in lines of dirt,this we know. We’ve lived under water,traced the blade of a knife, hoveredover a stove, run through someone else’s hair,floated on…

LETTER FROM MY HANDS TO MY BRAIN

Freedom House Manifesto leisure for the youth / housing for everyone homeless / fresh fruit in the trees & kitchens of every American / a belly full & living / land back—truly & in its truest form / reparations for all the land & promise Black America has been stripped of since the infantry of the states / no student loan debt / no credit system to keep us drowning / no inequity tolerated / inequity eradicated from every living system / no system but the body poly with all parts of the ecosystem / no belly full of legislators telling it what it can & can’t do / no unrest, no blood shed in the name of liberty & justice / no police / no prisons / no barriers between…

the best i look like someonehealing from an accidentbecause i am someonehealing from an accidentthe book of actsscales falling from saul’s eyesremembering my capacityfor stillnesshow long can i sitwithout looking awaythe fear of god escapingi desperately need my enemiesthings stay with you for a reasonwarmer airover cooler waterhonestly, just call or emailif you have any questionswhatever you hear about meplease believe iti’m sitting herelooking at ellsworth kelly paintingsand reading aboutsaul on the road to damascusi always feel inspiredin some waywhen i’m looking at arti remember seeing duchampat the philly museumand i was like, “this is it?”seeing things up closereally puts them in perspectivea toilet bowl and broken glassthe glass organsdigressionsi believed in weightas the right measurepeople fainted and screamedwhen they sawnude descending a staircasemy heart has been burningfor so many summers…

Because her thin white coat let the pinkof her skin peek through, and the tips of her ears were plushas climbing petals, and because her eyes were red and roundas hips, Rose was the only name for the albino rat my mother keptin a small cage in her bedroom. Really, Rose was rarely contained.A pirate with her parrot at the Safeway, mom steered the cart and Rose’s long tailhung down her back like a rig line, loose, flapping. It upset my sisterif no one noticed, and when they did, she reveled—did you see the bald guy?Red as a robin! she cackled on the ride home, red as rib roast! Mom answered, our bagsbulging with tofu and brown rice. My sister didn’t knowBelgian chocolate gave rats cancer, she loved the brush of whiskerson her fingers when she held the sweet to snout,…

ON A BETTER LIFE BY RANDALL MANN

Books In the first and title poem of A Better Life (Persea Books, 2021), Randall Mann looks back incredulous at having ever arrived at the age of thirty, a milestone now “fourteen years” in his past. Having survived longer than he might have imagined, Mann laments that thirty seemed old even then, “over the hill” he tells us, since “in queer years, / years are more than.” Thus begins this important collection where Mann, using both free verse and traditional forms, engages us in a type of queer history lesson. No, his feat is bigger than this. In A Better Life, Mann has perfected the art of time travel, effortlessly jumping backwards from midlife to his teenage years, and then forward again, making poignant stops along the decades in between. From…

ON A BETTER LIFE BY RANDALL MANN

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We’re so grateful for the support that our readers around the world have shown the magazine and the poets we publish. We hope you will join us again now, in our 50th anniversary year, to keep The American Poetry Review going strong. In 2021, we published six outstanding issues representing the work of 134 writers, including Rita Dove, Megan Fernandes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Tomás Q. Morín, Jennifer Chang, Sally Wen Mao, Donika Kelly, Mary Ruefle, and many more. We published the 24th volume in the APR/Honickman First Book series: Latitude by Natasha Rao, selected by Ada Limón, and we awarded the 12th Annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize to Casey Thayer. Thayer’s winning poem, “Reminding Myself That We Are Not Remarkable,” appears on the feature page of our September/October 2021 issue. We believe that…

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THE YEARS OF WRITING

I didn’t think it mattered, then it mattered, then stopped.I went to see a doctor, like it was a love song,to fix my gut, and all I took from him was a pill.“Why did you think for so long you had to live like that?”As if it’s easy to know of some other way.As if watching the basement of your house fill withwater and the things you bought and thought you loved becomenothing, as they were made to be dissolved after Idescribed them, and me, and my life, through this language thatcan’t hold anything together. I didn’t knowyou could live atop a flooded house, baking in the sun,and believe the water would return to the rivers.To think I should not live like an animal beggingwith the snare, as if to…

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