The Best American Poetry 2015 (17 page)

and leave trails of metadata I'm asked to believe no one will ever pursue.

Rather than wallow in outmoded subjectivities

raw and naked to those unseen all-seeing eyes

maybe it's better to simply claim existing chunks of language

as MacDiarmid did in the Shetland Islands in the early 1940s

transcribing lengthy passages from the
TLS

for his eventually abandoned megapoem

“Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn.”

In June 1940 the authorities judged him “a case for continued observation”

and in the following March put him on the “invasion list.”

“It is probably unnecessary,” Brooman-White wrote to Major Peter Perfect

(Box 5, Edinburgh) on March 16, 1941, “as no doubt the local Police and Military

are all standing round waiting to pounce on him,

but to make assurance doubly sure, it might be as well to have his name added.

I think we have plenty of evidence to justify this

but if you like I will send you up a summary of our file against the man.”

The character Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) in Hitchcock's
The Lady Vanishes
,

released in 1938, the year Mandelstam died,

is having tea in the dining car with the charming

but penniless musicologist Gilbert Redman (Michael Redgrave)

when she glimpses the name that Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty)

had left on the window, a second before it vanishes.

She bolts from the table and desperately addresses the travelers around her:

“I appeal to you, all of you—stop the train. Please help me.

Please make them stop the train. Do you hear?

Why don't you do something before it's too late?”

Redgrave and duplicitous psychiatrist Dr. Harz (Paul Lukas)

attempt to restrain her but she breaks away.

Before pulling the train's emergency cord and collapsing in a dead faint,

she cries out: “I know! You think I'm crazy, but I'm not.

For heaven's sake, stop this train. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.”

Amid the fascist shadows she is driven to hysteria

because a text has vanished before it could acquire other readers.

At the Whitney's “Rituals of Rented Island”

I walk into the Squat Theatre installation, suddenly remembering

evenings of radical performance circa 1979

as a long-forgotten line from one of Kafka's parables

hisses around me in low-fi analog:

“Nobody could fight his way through here even with a message from a dead man.”

from
Harper's

1. The larger portion of this text discusses El Paso, Texas, the boring sister to Ciudad Juárez, México.

2. There are apartments that feel like they are by the sea, but out the window there is only freeway.

3. The geraniums always wilt either from heat or pollution.

4. El Canelo is the red-headed Mexican boxer who speaks Spanish.

5. Sometimes the candles are religious, sometimes they are not.

6. The girl from Juárez is beautiful. The girl from Juárez is God.

7. The tortilla border has shanties on one side and trailers on the other.

8. Some call them Fronchis because their license plates read: Fron-Chi for Frontera Chihuahua. Some just call them fresas.

9. In summer, roaches cross the street and travel home to home like people.

10. Campestre, Anapra, Chaveña, Anahuac, Flores Magon, and Independencia are only some of the neighborhoods in Ciudad Juárez.

11. Some streets are lined in wires because it's so easy to steal electricity.

12. Moxas graffiti walls: mee aamooo!! noo aa laas coopiioonaas!!

13. Some days saliva evaporates from the tongue.

14. The river has become the only blue vein left pulsing on the map.

15. The river is only blue on the map.

from
West Branch

fern wept, let her eyes

wet her tresses, her cheeks,

her feet. the cheerlessness

rendered her blessed,

strengthened her nerve.

even then, she'd seen

she needed her regrets

melted. the weep-fest

helped her shed her tender

edges, she felt the steel

emerge. she'd served her

sentence. she'd get herself

west, persevere, exert

herself. they'd tell bess—

her sweet bess!—fern'd

deserted her. bess knew

better! when she left, fern

pretended phlegm, yet

she'd pledged she'd never

rest ere she freed bess:

the excellent secret they

kept between themselves.

when fern'd netted the

needed green, she'd send

bess her debt fee—then,

pressed, they'd sell her . . .

her self. (senseless!)
see
,

bess
, she'd greet her when

they re-met, necks nestled,

flesh welded, essence-deep,

we knew we'd effect the deed!

we're the bee's knees! they'll

never see cleverer femmes
.

from
Fence

It pains me to see an old woman fret over

A few small coins outside a grocery store—

How swiftly I forget her as my own grief

Finds me again—a friend at death's door

And the memory of the night we spent together.

I had so much love in my heart afterward,

I could have run into the street naked,

Confident anyone I met would understand

My madness and my need to tell them

About life being both cruel and beautiful,

But I did not—despite the overwhelming evidence:

A crow bent over a dead squirrel in the road,

The lilac bushes flowering in some yard,

And the sight of a dog free from his chain

Searching through a neighbor's trash can.

from
The Paris Review

Welcome to Humanities 203!

Here you will find the mysterious

death of the honeybee, the Byzantine emperor,

Justinian, who made church and state

a seamless whole. Quiz tomorrow.

When someone dies, you buy their relatives flowers.

1-800-FLOWERS. As a result

your driving privilege will be suspended

indefinitely on 11/13/2012.

Where's mommy?

I said I was trying to write this poem

for the day, do you mind?

The Real Ghostbusters will return

  after these messages. The trap's ready
.

I can get a girlfriend anytime I want
.

On the toddler bed, wrapped in the felt

blanket with monkeys printed all over it,

their prehensile tails curled—

I promise guys, I'll never let myself

get carried away by women again. I want pancakes.

Hey Sandra, I think Charlotte might be hungry.

I'll be there in a second
.

Okay, I'll just feed her now
.

—what could pass as love inside capital?

Maybe just these records, the real.

At the Halloween festival, my friend dressed

her child as one of the 1%. Ezekiel

was a pirate. Her little girl threw

fake bills into the air. She danced

in her suit and mustache. Thought—

it will only ever snow $ in Florida

and you seemed more like the bas-relief,

the minor key, some detail about Louis XIV's

weak blood I always forget to teach,

and for a moment I had become

the anarchy of the sea—you know how the waves

are always pounding out some polyphony

in saltwater, algae and fish

that their subjects cannot understand.

from
Colorado Review

The chair I'm sitting on is mostly nothing.

Electrons go right through it. Memory, which

is electricity, seems like less than anything

and yet in the inexplicable universe I'm there

again, and it's now, the summer of the Macarena.

Two months in Abilene, Kansas, and I see

nobody in the central air of the Sunflower Hotel.

My eighth-floor window stares at soft, buttery hills.

Streetlights pink the tracks downtown

like a chalk outline to fill in later.

I never know what next. I am writing a novel.

Its characters are historians at the Eisenhower Library.

I go to its chapel daily, sit before his tomb

looking for a way to make a story up. I write

hundreds of pages, there and at my kitchenette,