The Best American Poetry 2013 (12 page)

punctuated wrong. honest. human. my uncle

committed suicide when i was in the sixth grade,

basement/gun, gun/basement as if

these things come in a package with the special bonus

of a cracked open door, cigarette smoke,

revolving fan. when i think of my uncle i find myself

trying not to think about my uncle and then

i think about him even more.

how at a seminar that discussed “helpful tips

for a successful interview,” two panelists debated

whether first and last impressions

were the most important part of it all, but i find it

hard to imagine a leather band without a clock,

a body without its belly or a poem without its middle.

would “it's hard as so much is” followed by

the line i haven't written yet satisfy (you)

me? at times i forget to embrace the afternoon,

only love the morning, only kiss what falls above

the waist and there are so many parts of the day/body,

body/day that go untouched and i think it's because

in the light i think about what others think

too much. consider that (me writing) you reading

this now might be wondering where the “heart” went

and if this will eventually fit together, function

how i want, but it won't. but only because the middles

are such a necessary mess that i could endlessly sift

like the second drawer where an incomplete deck

of playing cards and sewing needles and a ceramic

monkey with a missing tail and other stuff

can be found, and it's the “stuff” that i love the most

that i often forget, let go. like two summers

before the gun went in my uncle's mouth,

and how his chevron mustache would scratch my face

and how he would pick me up over his head

and how his arms held me at my bathing-suited waist.

from
Mid-American Review

Mel Brooks, 1975

What's so funny about racism

is how the racists never get the joke.

In most settings, racists stick out

like Count Basie's Orchestra in the middle

of a prairie, but they're as awkward as he is

elegant compared to the world around him.

And, if you still don't get it, imagine

a chain gang with perfect pitch

singing Cole Porter's “I Get a Kick Out of You,”

to their overseer, whose frustration swells so

for an “authentic-nigger work song,”

he and his crew demonstrate their darkest

desires and break into song themselves,

“Camptown Ladies Come Out Tonight,

Doo Dah, Doo Dah,” kicking up their heels

in the dirt, tasting an old slave

trick on their tongues, each syllable

falling from their lips like a boll

of cotton. Funny, to the naked eye,

but consider the Native American

who speaks Yiddish, appearing out of the dust

of the Old West, reminding us

of how we learn to comfort ourselves

by making ourselves a little uncomfortable

over time in the fossil of race.

Jump cut: Black Bart, our hero, enters

town where danger awaits

him, our hero who we hope

to see beat up bad guys

and win the woman, even when

the hero is black and the woman,

Lili von Shtupp, is German. “One false move

and the nigger gets it.” Yes, self-sacrifice

with his gun to his own head, but

the unwitting white liberals save him

from himself, which is their life's mission.

You see, what's so funny about racists,

is that they never get the joke, because

the joke always carries a bit of truth.

Notice how we can laugh only when we recognize

a Sambo of our own design, by communal hands—

in our own likeness, a likeness we own—

so we can laugh at the absurd pain of it all.

This joke, like an aloe released on a wound,

like a black man trying to do a job

in a town in which he's not wanted,

like a black man unzipping his pants

in the Old West to a white woman in a hotel

room in the center of this town. Did I mention

how he was released from a chain gang?

Did I mention how she was an exotic dancer

who slept with men for money, helping them

hang their insecurities on a hook

on the back of a hotel-room door before entering?

Careful with your laughter; one false move and

Nigger here gets appropriated. That's not funny

to you? Well, when they saw themselves

on screen in their comedy-drama romance,

in the darkness of the theater, they laughed.

And they needed to see it; it had to project

on the wide screen to get a good cathartic laugh

from the tragedy of the 20th century.

And it's okay to laugh at these ironies

today because they're blown from a wind

of past pain, with the velocity of memory.

You see, when the Jewish artist has suffered

enough he knows he can strike back

with just a stroke of laughter: A black man
shtupping

a German floozy, who tries to ensnare him

between her legs, but gets hoisted by her own

garter petard? Well, that's just some funny
scheiße.

Now, please, excuse all this humor

wrapped in truth—or, is it a chiasmus of this?

Whether you're ready or not, stand back, please,

and back away from all those stereotypes

restricting you from stereotypes you

aspire toward. As you deny self

through elective surgery on your nose or lips,

excuse me, please, as I rear back in laughter;

and excuse me as I recall the 1970s

and remember myself laughing, laughing

blue-black gut bursting songs of truth. Yeah,

please excuse me folks as I whip this out.

from
The Virginia Quarterly Review

 . . . and when, then, the imagination is transmogrified

in circles of hatred, circles of vengeance

and killing, of stealing and deceit? Behind

the global imperia is the interrogation cell. It's not

a good story. Neither the Red Crescent

nor journalists are permitted entry, the women tell

how men and boys are separated, taken in buses

and never seen again, tanks in the streets

with machine guns with no shells in the barrels

because the army fears that those who will use them

might defect. Who knows what has happened,

what is happening, what will happen? God knows.

God knows everything.
The
boy? He is much more

than Mafia; he, and his, own the country. His militias

will fight to the death if for no other reason than

if he's overthrown they will be killed, too. “Iraq,

you remember Iraq, don't you?” she shouts,

a refugee. Her English is good. Reached via Skype,

she speaks anonymously, afraid of repercussions.

“You won't believe what I have seen”—her voice

lowered almost to a whisper—“a decapitated

body with a dog's head sewn on it, for example.”

Yes, I know, it's much more complicated than that.

“It's the arena right now where the major players are,”

the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs concludes

his exclusive CNN interview. Dagestan—its province

in the North Caucasus—is what the Russians compare

it to, warring clans, sects; Lebanese-like civil war

will break out and spread across the region. Online,

a report—Beirut, the Associated Press—

this morning, “28 minutes ago. 4 Said to Be Dead

at Syrian University,” one Samer Qawass,

thrown, it is said, by pro-regime students

out of the fifth-floor window of his dormitory room,

dying instantly from the fall . . .

from
The Nation

for David

We imagine Natalie held a gelatinous green

sliver on her tongue, that its watery

disk caught the lamplight before

she slipped from her yacht

to drown in the waves off this island. This was

thirty years ago. And our tomato's strain

stretches back decades, to an heirloom seed

saved before either of us was born,

before Natalie's elbow

brushed the clouded jade

face of the ancestral fruit

in a Catalina stand, before she handed it

to her husband, saying,
This one.
We hover

near the plate, where the last

half of our shadowed tomato

sits in its skin's deep pleats. I lean

toward you to trace each

salted crease with a thumbnail—

brined and wild as those lines

clawed in the green

side of the yacht's

rubber dinghy. Those lingering

shapes the coroner found—the drowned

actress's scratch marks. That night

we first met, I had another lover

but you didn't

care. My Bellini's peach puree,

our waiter said, had sailed across

the Atlantic, from France. It swirled

as I sipped and sank

to the glass bottom

of my champagne flute. You whispered,

Guilt is the most

useless emotion.
After Natalie rolled

into the waves, the wet feathers

of her down coat wrapped

their white anchors

at her hips. This was 1981. I turned

a year old that month and somewhere

an heirloom seed

washed up. You felt an odd breeze

knock at your elbow as I took

my first step. We hadn't yet met.

Tonight, we watch the wet date palms tip

toward the surf and, curling,

swallow their tongues.

from
The Southern Review