The Best American Poetry 2012 (5 page)

for Brian Keating

Light was on its way

from nothing

to nowhere.

Light was all business

  Light was full speed

when it got interrupted.

Interrupted by what?

When it got tangled up

and broke

into opposite

  broke into brand-new things.

  What kinds of things?

  
Drinking Cup

  “Thinking of you!

Convenience Valet”

How could speed take shape?

*

Hush!

Do you want me to start over?

*

The fading laser pulse

  Information describing the fading laser pulse

is stored

  is encoded

in the spin states

of atoms.

God

is balancing his checkbook

  God is encrypting his account.

This is taking forever!

from
Poetry

JULIANNA BAGGOTT

For Furious Nursing Baby

Frothy and pink as a rabid pig you—

a mauler—

a lunatic stricken with

a madness induced by flesh—

squeeze my skin

until blotched nicked. Your fingernails

are jagged

  and mouth-slick. Pinprick scabs

  jewel my breasts.

Your tongue

your wisest muscle

  is the wet engine

of discontent.

It self-fastens by a purse-bead of spit

while your elegant hands

flail conducting

orchestral milk

  and sometimes prime the pump.

Nipple in mouth

nipple in hand

you have your cake and eat it too.

Then when wrenched

loose you'll eat sorrow loss—

one flexed hand twists

as you open your mouth

to eat your fist.

from
The Cincinnati Review

DAVID BAKER

Outside

Stevie lives in a silo.

A silo lives where, mostly, Stevie is

or is not. Tipped over—a hollow vein.

The silo, I mean. For here home is out

there on the grass. If you want a drink or wash

your hands, just dip into that trunk, hot and cold

running branches feeding down. It's startling.

But sense is startling, too. See how those boots

flip skyward? Tongues lapping up dew on his

mâché dandelions. This is Stevie's dream

miniacreage on the family's old spread.

He's all spread out; he's humming when he makes

a working thing—he won't let you inside.

“So,” he says. Today he's stacked two propane

tanks and ovens—two-burners—under a

red maple, and when you open a door

there's mismatched silver and hatchets and things

he's made to eat
and
art with. Studio

as wherever-you're-itching-at-the-time:

boards with big nails banged in and from the nails

hang gourds, baby-sized cups speckled yellow

(is that old egg?), a hundred kinds of who

knows what, the center being where you are

and are not. “I stay dry,” he says. “No bugs.”

Says, “Why do walls want windows?” He's put glass

around his trees instead, head-high, to look

at trees from outside out. One chair, sleeping bag

—what he keeps inside the wild corn bin—

plus a getaway, by which he means a tunnel.

“Oh oh,” he says, “they coming.” He can worm

his way all the way to the apple trees,

he trenched it out last fall, and lights the route

with flashlights and tinfoil clipped to clothesline.

That's a trip. And that's a curvy planter full

of nursery nipples and hand-dipped Ken dolls.

If you want to see an art made wholly

in an outside mind, come see Stevie's crib.

That's his ten-foot pink polyvinyl penis

teeter-totter beside the birdcage

for potatoes. “Take a ride,” he says. All eyes—.

from
The Southern Review

RICK BAROT

Child Holding Potato

When my sister got her diagnosis,

I bought an airplane ticket

but to another city, where I stared

at paintings that seemed victorious

in their relation to time:

the beech from two hundred years ago,

its trunk a palette of mud

and gilt; the man with olive-black

gloves, the sky behind him

a glacier of blue light. In their calm

landscapes, the saints. Still dripping

the garden's dew, the bouquets.

Holding the rough gold orb

of a potato, the Child cradled

by the glowing Madonna. Then,

the paintings I looked at the longest:

the bowls of plums and peaches,

the lemons, the pomegranates

like red earths. In my mouth,

the raw starch. In my mouth, the dirt.

from
Memorious

REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS

At the End of Life, a Secret

Everything measured. A man twists

a tuft of your hair out for no reason

other than you are naked before him

and he is bored. Moments ago he was

weighing your gallbladder, and then

he was staring at the empty space where

your lungs were. Even dead, we still say

you are an organ donor, as if something

other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet

are regular feet. Two of them,

and there is no mark to suggest you were

an expert mathematician, that you were

the first runner-up in debate championships,

1956, Tapioca, Illinois. From the time your body

was carted before him, to the time your

dead body is being sent to the coffin,

every pound is accounted for, except 22 grams.

The man is a praying man & has figured

what it means. He says this is the soul, finally,

after the breath has gone. The soul: less than

4,000 dollars' worth of crack—22 grams—

all that moves you through this world.