The Best American Poetry 2015 (6 page)

Jenny, sunny Jenny, beige-honey Jenny

sings the parsley up from the topsoil, Jenny,

cool tabouleh, hot apple crumble Jenny,

alchemy Jenny

please
, I whispered,
teach me the secret whistle

help me coax the thistledown from the thistle

perch me on the branch where the goldfinch rustles

heedless of bristles

so she bore my heart to the eagle's aerie

folded me like down in a twig-tight nestle

kissed me til my sinews leapt up, cat's cradle

brain like a beehive

Jenny, downy Jenny, my treetop lover

from
Able Muse

I knew I had jet lag because no one would make love to me.

All the men thought me a vampire. All the women were

Women. In America that year, black people kept dreaming

That the president got shot. Then the president got shot

Breaking into the White House. He claimed to have lost

His keys. What's the proper name for a man caught stealing

Into his own home? I asked a few passengers. They replied,

Jigger. After that, I took the red-eye. I took to a sigh deep

As the end of a day in the dark fields below us. Some slept,

But nobody named Security ever believes me. Confiscated—

My Atripla. My Celexa. My Cortisone. My Klonopin. My

Flexeril. My Zyrtec. My Nasarel. My Percocet. My Ambien.

Nobody in this nation feels safe, and I'm still a reason why.

Every day, something gets thrown away on account of long

History or hair or fingernails or, yes, of course, my fangs.

from
Fence

—
Boston Globe
headline

That doctors lie, may hide mistakes

should come as no surprise. Of course

the body we must memorize

in fact cannot be trusted, breasts

embarrassing as cheese soufflés

that didn't rise, scuffed knees as dumb

as grief. The very act of touch

is like a lie, the latex gloves

we wear in case of a mistake

protecting us from pulsing blood's

blithe truths. We lie and hide from what

the stethoscope will try to say,

incapable of listening

itself: the heart, mistaken for

the place where the elusive soul

resides, in fact does not repeat

itself. Instead, it cries, “Of course

we must tell lies, and to be human

is this incalculable mistake.”

from
upstreet

1. On film I'm a sky or a swimmer

2. Red lightbulb

3. All those cross-legged girls

4. If I don't write the word “rendered”

5. I will forget it by morning

6. Boys in black sing harmonies

7. She's running a fever dressed like a Belgian

8. Can you smell her from here?

9. A mutating ghost

10. Once on a drive from Nashville to Asheville

11. I ran out of gas. I'd been watching the temperature gauge

12. Resolutely in the middle

13. I'd never run out of gas before

14. I didn't know what was wrong with the car

from
The Kenyon Review

i pledge allegiance to the already fallen snow

& to the snow now falling. to the old snow & the new.

to foot & paw & tire prints in the snow both young & aging,

the deep & shallow marks left on cold streets, our long

misbegotten manuscripts. i pledge allegiance to the weather

report that promises more snow, plus freezing rain.

though i would minus the pluvial & plus the multitude

of messages pressed muddy into the perfectly

mutable snow, i have faith in the report that goes on to read:

by the end of the week, there will be an increased storm-related

illegibility of the asphalt & concrete & brick. for i pledge

betrayal to the fantasy of ever reading anything

completely. for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me:

to be brought into a patterned world of weathers

& reports. & thus i pledge allegiance to the always

partial, the always translated, the always never

of knowing who's walking around, what's being left behind,

the signs, the cries, the breadcrumbs & the blood. the toe-

nails & armpit hair of our trying & failing to speak

our specks of
here
to the
everywhere.
dirty snow of my weary

city, i ask you to tell me a story about your life

& you tell me you've left for another country,

but forgot your suitcase. at the airport they told you

not to worry, all your things have already been sent

to your new place by your ninth grade french teacher,

the only nice one. & the weather where your true love is

is governed by principles or persons you can't name,

imagine. it is that good, or bad.

from
PANK

Don't remind me

how insufficient

love is. You

threw quarters

into a bowl. We are bones

and need, all hair

and want: this fish won't swim

in a plastic bag

forever. My makeshift

gown is a candle, my breasts

full of milk for our young—

whose flames

are these anyway?

from
Columbia Poetry Review

Huh! That bumblebee looks ridiculous staggering its way

across those blue flowers, the ones I can never

remember the name of. Do you know the old engineer's

joke: that, theoretically, bees can't fly? But they look so

perfect together, like Absolute Purpose incarnate: one bee

plus one blue flower equals about a billion

years of symbiosis. Which leads me to wonder what it is

I'm doing here, peering through a lens at the thigh-pouches

stuffed with pollen and the baffling intricacies

of stamen and pistil. Am I supposed to say something, add

a soundtrack and voiceover? My life's spent

running an inept tour for my own sad swindle of a vacation

until every goddamned thing's reduced to botched captions

and dabs of misinformation in fractured,

not-quite-right English:
Here sir, that's the very place Jesus

wept. The Colosseum sprouts and blooms with leftover seeds

pooped by ancient tigers. Poseidon diddled

Philomel in the warm slap of this ankle-deep surf to the dying

stings of a thousand jellyfish. There, probably
,

atop yonder scraggly hillock, Adam should've said no to Eve.

from
Prairie Schooner