The Best American Poetry 2014 (17 page)

latest progress toward a model's sashay on the catwalk.

And after that, when I'd come over, in those

outfits I wore then, Diana-ing

for a man, Stanley would be holding the stuffed

animal, and petting it,

nape to rump, nape to rump,

stub of the bob tail—98,

99, 100, those huge old beautiful

hands, stroking the world, which hummed when Stanley stroked it.

from
The Harvard Review

Outside the Met a man walks up sun

tweaking the brim sticker on his Starter cap

and he says pardon me
Old School
he

says you know is this a wishing well?

Yeah
Son
I say sideways over my shrug

at the limpid smooth as spandex behind me.

   Throw your bread on the water.

I tighten my chest wheezy as Rockaway beach

sand with a pull of faux smoke from my e-cig

to cozy the truculence I hotbox alone

and I am at the museum because it is not a bar.

Because he appears not to have changed

them in days I eye the heel-chewed hems

of his pants and think probably he will

ask me for fifty cents any minute now wait

for it. A smoke or something. Central Park exhibits

the frisking transparency of autumn. Tracing

paper sky, leaves like eraser crumbs gum

the pavement. As if deciphering celestial

script I squint and purse off toward the roof

line of the museum aloof as he fists two

pennies from his pockets mumbling and then

aloud my man he says hey my man I'm going

to make a wish for you too.

   I am laughing now so what you want

me to sign a waiver? He laughs along ain't

say all that he says but you do have to

hold my hand.  And close your eyes.

I make a sabbath of my face before

he asks are you ready. Yeah
dawg
I'm ready.

Sure? Sure let's do this his rough hand

in mine inflates like a blood pressure cuff and I

squeeze back as if we are about to step together

from the sill of all resentment and timeless

toward the dreamsource of un-needing the two

of us hurtle sharing the cosmic breast

of plenitude when I hear the coins blink against

the surface and I cough up daylight like I've just

been dragged ashore. See now

you'll never walk alone he jokes and is about

to hand me back to the day he found me in

like I was a rubber duck and he says you got to let

go but I feel bottomless and I know he means

well though I don't believe

   and I feel myself shaking

my head no when he means let go his hand.

from
Painted Bride Quarterly

Suppose: a Device for measuring subdural space.

Let your Device be audible in all nightmares.

Suppose: all nightmares stick to the nerves & veins.

All veins get injured. Let that be true.

It's a great honor to get injured in a nightmare.

The honor is: you can activate your Skeleton-Gear.

Let
X
equal the force of your Skeleton-Gear striking a Life Token.

Let
M
equal the length of one nightmare.

Now multiply your Devices.

The shearing pain in your head comes from linear force.

You must have filled your head with Life Tokens.

Or: you've kicked a headful of Tokens with linear force.

Try to locate your Life Token without touching it.

Try to release your Life Token without locating it.

Then press
ESC
to affix your nightmare to a plane.

Your Device will jangle when it's ready to start affixing.

Let your nightmare expand along the inside of your Skeleton-Gear.

It's true that some nightmares have flags.

Indicate your readiness by smashing a handful of turf.

Collect: the Feelings Token.

Collect: the Flag Token.

You can step right out at any time.

from
The Baffler

The virus, your gentleman caller, pays his vulgar respects. We'll work from a composite sketch. Send out a dragnet.

The thing is, those creatures can hide. Oviparous inside your ear canal they hatch in your cochlea spiral & spiral.

How did he get inside?
Jimmy, oh Jimmy, oh Jimmy Mack, why don't you
cut the lock. Somebody's mocking me.

He's like yesterday's newspaper: Sure you'd pick him up in a bathroom. But you already know his type.

Hit the lights. Now who's at the door? It could be anybody. Let's call him Jimmy now for continuity's sake.

Jimmy's not going to give us his specimen without we got a warrant. You're going to have to catch him in the act.

from
The Iowa Review

It is customary to hold the dead in your mouth

Next to the other dead and their failing trophies:

Quetzal, starthroat, nightjar, grebe, and artic loon:

This ash for my daughter's tongue, I give without

Sackcloth or sugar: the museum closing,

The whale falling from heaven due

Upon our heads at any time: our haloes already

Flat as plates and broken about our ankles:

How often can you send a child to meet a ghost

At the river before the child comes back speaking

As the river, speaking as the pedal-less red

Bicycles half-buried in its bank, speaking bolt oil

Spilling down the legs of a thrice-trussed bridge

Just after a train lurches toward a coast covered in smog:

The river must be thick with this type of body:

A daughter bearing bird names on her lips, cutting

Her ankles on cans that resemble her mother's tongue.

from
The Cincinnati Review

He made a statue of the east wind

Reconciled never too late, in

Silhouette, never too late as these

First days of March turn backward,

Facing the full of winter in

Enduring love, full jollity

Of winter's face to reconcilement,

In silhouette.

He did not forget

Who lost his life to remember it.

Step down. Do not be proud.

There is a double heart behind

The breast bone. Bare it. Beat it.

Begin to eat it in full view,

Who loves you every inch of the wind.

First days of March, lords of jollity.

from
The Literary Review

And because you're not an antelope or a dog

you think you can't drop your other two limbs down

and charge toward the Eternal Heart. But

those are your legs too, the ones that have hauled

your strangest body through a city of millions

in less than a day, at its own pace, in its own pain,

and because you cannot make the pace of the one whom you love

your own, and because you cannot make the pain of the one you love

your own pain, your separate aches must meet somewhere

poised in the heaven between your bodies

—skylines turned on their sides—reminders

of what once was, what every man and woman

must build upon, build from, the body, the miserable,

weeping body, the deep bony awkwardness of love

in the bed. If you've kissed bricks in secret

or fallen asleep where there was no bed or spent time

lighting a fire, then you know the beginning of love

and maybe you know the end of it too,

and maybe you know the far ends, the doors, where

loved ones enter to check on you. It's not someone else speaking