The Best American Poetry 2013 (11 page)

stained glass, the one with a white spire

like the tip of a Klansman's hood. Churches

creep me out, I never step inside one,

never utter hymns, Sundays I hide my flesh

with camouflage and hunt. I don't hunt

but wish every deer wore a bulletproof vest

and fired back. It's cinnamon, my skin,

it's more sandstone than any color I know.

I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader, I was too

apathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block,

two blocks to the voting booth. For or against

a woman's right to choose? Yes, for and against.

For waterboarding, for strapping detainees

with snorkels and diving masks. Against burning

fossil fuels, let's punish all those smokestacks

for eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls,

but build more smokestacks, we need jobs

here in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Against

gun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing

a better fence along the border, let's raise

concrete toward the sky, why does it need

all that space to begin with? For creating

holes in the fence, adding ladders, they're not

here to steal work from us, no one dreams

of crab walking for hours across a lettuce field

so someone could order the Caesar salad.

No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down

the cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise,

but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers.

Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully

steer a mower around the cemetery grounds.

Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor

the power grid. Some of us ring you up

while some of us crisscross a parking lot

to gather the shopping carts into one long,

rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.

from
The Southern Review
and
Poetry Daily

Are you all right?
she asks, wrinkling her brow,

and I think how unfair that question is,

how it rises up and hangs there in the air

like a Welcome sign shining in the dark;

Are you all right?
is all she has to say

with that faint line between her eyebrows

that signifies concern,

and her soft, moral-looking mouth,

and I feel as if I have fallen off my bike

and she wants to take care of my skinned knee

back at her apartment.

Are you all right?
she says,

and all the belts begin to move inside my factory

and all the little citizens of me

lay down their tasks, stand up and start to sing

their eight-hour version of The Messiah of my Unhappiness.

Am I all right?

I thought I was all right before she asked,

but now I find that I have never been all right.

There is something soft and childish at my core

I have not been able to eliminate.

And yet—it is the question I keep answering.

from
Fifth Wednesday Journal

At the edge of the village roofed with mossy

slate, stood a hermitage, an embassy, and

a palace. Being spent, we chose to enter

the palace, a very busy place. Messy as we

were, we were treated like royals,

Class E, which entailed the following

advantages: Being served muesli in vintage

glasses, being assuaged that the King's

boozy rhetoric would not become policy,

and three, having the opportunity to bless

the day's carnage in homage to the deceased

Queen. Such delicacies! For our wages,

we were pinned with corsages dense with

glossy leaves, which became permanent

appendages. A page waved to indicate

that it was time to go to the embassy,

where nothing memorable happened. Then

it was on to the hermitage, the last stage,

where we would presage the image of ecstasy

and thus emboss our legacies. We pledged

to finesse the fallacy of hedge and spillage

and erase the badge of unease around certain

engagements. We gauged our audience and the time.

We lost our accents and flimsy excuses in a gorgeous

cortège. We learnt to parse our emphases.

We became quite adept. In the distance, always

the glass sea breaking. It was our time to savage.

from
Boston Review

Because my son is as old as the stars

Because I have no blessings

Because I hold tangerines like orange tennis balls

Because I sit alone and welcome morning across

the unshaved jaws of my lawn

Because the houses on my street sleep like turtles

Because the proper weight of beauty was her eyes

last night beneath my eyes

Because the red goblet from which I drank

made even water a Faustian toast

Because radishes should be banned, little pellets

that they are

Because someone says it's late and begins to rise from a chair

Because a single drop of rain is hope for the thirsty

Because life is ordinary unless you plan

and set in motion a war

Because I have not thanked enough

Because my lips moisten whenever I hear Mingus's

“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”

Because I've said the word
dumbfuck
too many times in my life

Because I plant winter vegetables in July

Because I could say the morning died like candle wax

and no one would question its truth

Because I relished being sent into the coat room

in 3rd grade where alone, I would turn off the light

and run my hands over my classmates' coats

as if playing tag with their bodies

Because once I shoplifted a pair of Hawaiian shorts

and was caught at the Gallery Mall

Because soup reminds me of the warmth

of my grandmother and old aunts

Because the long coast of my dreams is filled

with saxophones and poems

Because somewhere someone is buying a Rolex or a Piaget

Because I wish I could speak three different languages

but have to settle for the language of business

and commerce

Because I used to wear paisley shirts and herringbone sports jackets

Because I better
git it
in my soul

Because my grandfather loved clean syntax,

cologne, Stacy Adams shoes, Irish tweed caps,

and women, but not necessarily in that order

Because I think the elderly are sexy

and the young are naïve and brutish

Because a vision of trees only comes to

wise women and men who can fix old watches

Because I write with a pen whose supply of ink

comes from the sea

Because gardens are fun to visit in the evenings

when everyone has put away their coats and swords

Because I still do not eat corporate French fries or rhubarb jam

Because punctuation is my jury and the moon is my judge

Because my best friend in 4th grade chased

city buses from corner to corner

Because his cousin's father could not stop looking

up at the sky after his return from the war

Because parataxis is just another way of making ends meet

Because I have been on a steady diet of words

since the age of three.

from
Ploughshares

Because he felt that Jesus changed his heart

he listened to his heart and took its counsel.

When asked if he felt any of that counsel

had impacted the veterans he rode with

on a bike trek through hills and river beds—

some of the men without their limbs but able

to keep up despite the chafing ghost pain—

he said how honored he felt to be with them.

But no, he said, still listening to his heart,

the heart that Jesus changed, “I bear no guilt.”

How much is anyone whose heart speaks for him

responsible for what his heart has told him?

The occupation of the heart is pumping

blood, but for some it is to offer counsel,

especially if it has been so changed

all that it says must finally be trusted.

Nested within the lungs, sprouting its branches,

the heart is not an organ of cognition.

But some would argue that its power is greater

than the mind's even, once the heart is changed.

And so a change of heart he believed saved him.

I hope we understand belief like that,

for there are many we would grant that mystery.

The challenge is to grant the same to him.

Perhaps we can remember one of the columnists

who often wrote as his apologist,

arguing that a convicted murderer

must still be executed for her crime,

even though she had found the Lord in prison.

Forgiveness was between her and the Lord.

If we're outraged at him or at each other,

who will come between us and our outrage?

If there's no guilt to bear, what's to forgive?

Our losses are unbearable. Our pain

will have to be the ghost of our forgiveness.

from
Five Points