The Best American Poetry 2012 (16 page)

Void and Compensation (Facebook)

My friends who were and aren't dead

are coming back to say hello.

There's a wall that they write things on.

They have status updates.
What are you doing right now?

For the most part, they seem successful.

They have children, which I can only imagine.

The hairy kid we called
Aper,
I haven't heard

from him and wonder if in every contact

there are apologies inherent

for feelings hurt and falling out of touch—

I'm sorry
in the way that dogs out back

bark at the nothing they're trying to name.

Now the missing turn up online,

the immanent unheard becoming memory.

We have conversations that are flat

or we speak to one another in threads,

a wall more kind than faces posted downtown

when tower dust settled and sky went blue again.

When Leo died we couldn't believe he wasn't hiding,

that his laugh would not sound out, announce his return.

What a laugh. Goofy. His. Purely his

and out loud like a dog barking at stars.

Something heavenly. An application

against insults or things that spill.

That was Leo. And he left.

I don't think he meant to go

before he found some beloved and made

someone in and not of his image.

I want to find Leo on Facebook.

I want to discover that he's a chemist

and tell him it's like high school all over

with so much living, it was nice, to be done

and to see and hear from you after so long.

You seem great. You look exactly the same.

from
Ploughshares

CAROL MUSKE-DUKES

Hate Mail

You are a whore. You are an old whore.

Everyone hates you. God hates you.

He pretty much has had it with all women

But, let me tell you, especially you. You like

To think that you can think faster than

The rest of us—hah! We drive the car

In which you're a crash dummy! So

Why do you defy our Executive Committee

Which will never cede its floor to you? If a pig

Flew out of a tree & rose to become

A blimp—you would write a poem

About it, ignoring the Greater Good,

The hard facts of gravity. You deserve to be

Flattened by the Greater Good—pigs don't

Fly, yet your arrogance is that of a blimp

Which has long forgotten its place on this earth.

Big arrogance unmoored from its launchpad

Floating free, up with mangy Canadian honkers,

Up with the spy satellites and the ruined

Ozone layer which is, btw, caused by your breath,

Because you were born to ruin everything, hacking

Into the inspiration of the normal human ego.

You are not Queen Tut, honey, you are not

Even a peasant barmaid, you are an aristocrat

Of Trash, land mine of exploding rhinestones,

Crown of thorns, cabal of screech bats!

I am telling you this as an old friend,

Who is offering advice for your own good—

Change now or we will have to Take Measures—

If you know what I mean, which you do—

& now let's hear one of your fucked-up poems:

Let's hear you refute this truth any way you can.

from
Boston Review

ANGELO NIKOLOPOULOS

Daffodil

A poet could not but be gay

—William Wordsworth

Don't you know, sweetheart,

less is more?

Giving yourself away

so quickly

with your eager trumpet—

April's rentboy

in your flock of clones,

unreasonably cheerful, cellulose,

as yellow as a crow's foot—
please.

I don't get you.

Maybe it's me,

always loving what I can't have,

the bulb refusing itself,

perennial challenge.

I'd rather have mulch

than three blithe sepals from you.

I've never learned

how to handle kindness

from strangers.

It's uncomfortable, uncalled-for.

I'm into piss and vinegar,

brazen disregard,

the minimum-wage indifference

of bark, prickly pear.

Flirtation's tension:

I dare, don't dare.

But what would you know

about restraint,

binge-drinking

your way through spring,

botany's twink bucked

by lycorine, lethal self-esteem?

You who come and go

with the seasons,

bridge and tunnel.

You're all milk and no cow—

intimacy for beginners.

The blond-eyed boy stumbling home.

If I were you, I'd pipe down.

Believe me,

I've bloomed like you before.

from
Lambda Literary Review

MARY OLIVER

In Provincetown, and Ohio, and Alabama

Death taps his black wand and something vanishes. Summer, winter; the thickest branch of an oak tree for which I have a special love; three just hatched geese. Many trees and thickets of catbrier as bulldozers widen the bicycle path. The violets down by the old creek, the flow itself now raveling forward through an underground tunnel.

Lambs that, only recently, were gamboling in the field. An old mule, in Alabama, that could take no more of anything. And then, what follows? Then spring again, summer, and the season of harvest. More catbrier, almost instantly rising. (No violets, ever, or song of the old creek.) More lambs and new green grass in the field, for their happiness
until.
And some kind of yellow flower whose name I don't know (but what does that matter?) rising around and out of the half-buried, half-vulture-eaten, harness-galled, open-mouthed (its teeth long and blackened), breathless, holy mule.

from
Five Points

STEVE ORLEN

Where Do We Go After We Die