The Best American Poetry 2014 (19 page)

or Asian or Indian people I don't want to be around

people I want to be here where there is

free wireless I do not want to sit at the Christian

coffee shop nor the public

library No I want religion to blow itself up

My sister converted to Catholicism

I do not want to sit at Starbucks

I like McDonald's coffee because it is cheap

and watery I like how it tastes

I like this table where the old man

is telling his old friend

about the baby black swan that he would feed

corn to in Cairo, Georgia, when he was a kid

No, Mark Twain did not write
Don Quixote
I'm going to

be here a while in this fucked up shit

You can get an old Crown Vic police car

In Cairo for $500 so I read

a poem by James Franco in the literary magazine I brought with

My mechanic wants to fuck me

And the poem isn't as bad

as people say he is bad One of his friends dies

in the poem He uses the word “cunt” I don't know

what to make of it I read it as “Cnut,”

the medieval prince of Denmark who ascended and ascended

to become the king of England I bet some managers here could relate

to Cnut Send me a pic of your

cunt the mechanic says I miss you I say what do

you miss about me He says “your big tits”

Elliott Smith is mentioned in

the Franco poem and might or might not

be a “cowboy” Maybe Franco really

is bad after all The Crown Vic is

a vehicle the way the police always

say “vehicle” not “car” but the mechanic

always says “car” not “vehicle” because I teach

the police I know how they talk The mechanic

says Sandra, stop speeding and do you want

to see a picture of my wife No, Cervantes

did not write “Because I Could Not

Stop for Death” and I will be

sitting here all day in this fucked up shit god

dammit click click click I keep looking

at things like pictures of your husband

which makes me feel sick

and watery Now a young boy, maybe 8 or 10

in a booth across from me

is telling his mamma his daddy's new girlfriend is ugly

“She's ugly, mamma” and trying to comfort her

Do you want to meet in the Home Depot

parking lot? I don't think this is a good

If I find you with him I'll kill him

and I'll kill you and no one will

know where your body But your husband

isn't ugly he is beautiful leaning over to look at himself

in pond water or leaning over

masculinity itself leaning over the family

he has made for himself and the pond

is male because he owns the pond

and the guns are male because he owns the guns

and what's happening is male because he owns the factors

that go into the car is male because he owns the police

and Home Depot is male because he owns and owns

and owns and all he can do is own

everything that will rot

like privacy or speech or porn or black swans

or my big tits which he misses

Fucking swans! A man decides to sit

next to me and he is frantically hitting

his Egg McMuffin on the table and then walks

outside and smokes a cigarette and returns

to his seat and starts hitting

his wrapped Egg McMuffin again

and then he sees my computer and asks

to check his Facebook so I let him

and then he wants to be friends on Facebook

and leaves his phone number on my page

and I “like” it and then in the background

the little boy's like “She's ugly, mommy

She's so ugly mommy” and the mom

is like “Is she? Is she ugly?” And I think the mom

is ugly even though I don't want her to be

and the other kids at the booth

are drinking milk and they are chubby

and eating fries and saying

“Yeah she's ugly

Yeah mommy she's so ugly

You wouldn't want to meet her

because she's so ugly”

from
The Awl

For decades we'd witnessed dark murders

descend through crop-facing windows—

so left our eggs un-whisked in batter

for chase from sheer anger, suds rising, hot

faucet streams, we forgot our spatulas

forging to skillets, despite smoke we

flung coats on, knocked bills akimbo,

squashed pajamas in galoshes—Christ

Armageddon—we left our cats crouched

feral at raw bacon's ledge as we winged

doors free, fell to knees, field-edge, braced

12 gauges—shot the thieves.

Someone has to clean up the

shells, toss grease-soaked papertowels, lick

the whisker, soap grass-stained knees,

sweep fresh tracks, fish the envelope

spilled down floor vent despite ash &

throw open the sash, zero out the still-

flaming gas, trash the molten utensil, hang

suds-logged rugs, straighten curtains on

the kitchen Idyll, from sheer obligation—

remake morning, scrub the afternoon clean,

search the crop-facing window—though the

crows were the only things we ever got back.

from
Birmingham Poetry Review

“She hid it well,” they say, gathered around the body. Some standing

in the gallery think of their god, big as an ox, and are thankful

for once not to be the chosen one. Her stomach opened to reveal

the tree growing inside her, seeming to take root near the navel,

branching out between the ribs. Thick bark falling away under

the scalpel. A man worries a pair of bats from her throat. Wings

raw from rubbing against the wood, panicky. Flesh houses

milk-white bulbs, new life, pale like her throat, a nice one.

A throat to be stroked nightly by some woodsman. And the bats

are the most vibrant black the man has ever seen. Their wings

seem to be living separately from their bodies, trying to detach.

And so he pictures the woman in the same light, tree its own

creature, not hers, not
her
, as he takes a bone saw to a branch,

or, with the smaller ones, snaps them off with his hands.

One must, at times, learn to ignore the body. In a dream

the man was once patron saint of ships. Not only did he build

the most seaworthy ships of his small town, but he blessed

all the vessels in the shipyard. Walking from wood hull to wood

hull, he would press his hands against them, speak to them with his

palms. And they would speak back. The man would carry their

stories with him from sleep, so that, in the morning, his hands were

still full with them, seemed to anchor him to the mattress, hands

heavy with whale bones and kelp nests. With crates of rotting

fruit, the smell of too many men together, skin sloughing off

like flakes of
sel de mer
. And the man had forgotten all this, until

his hands were around the trunk, growing like his own thigh,

and he could see each layer of the cut-into wood, which looked

not unlike each layer of the thick skin of the belly, the woman

not a woman, but a tree now. The tree, with his hands around it,

sang into him a high-pitched song, song of a siren, a woman's

voice asking to be returned to the sea. Any sea. And as he

washed his hands after, thorough as always, as he walked

home in the rain to his wife. As he drank the glass of water

she had poured him from a clay pitcher, he could feel that voice

in his throat, and that night he woke—suddenly, salt water

covering his entire body—to that other woman's song.

from
The Southern Review

On horseback, I tell them to imagine me on horseback

going back to Boston, an oversized wool overcoat on top

of layers of things that make themselves warm against me,

old tops of boxes of pictures of horses pressed flat

to mesh and weave like cloth, I tell them it might take me

a few months to get home because I like to stop when I travel,

pull over so I can rest, and what about falling asleep

on the horse, what about what I did not imagine, smokestack

man slumped down snoring in the saddle, sliding over

to the edge of the grace of horses, their mercy, forgiveness

even for people who forget how the lines between territories

are made of the flesh of ghosts who had no words for where

land ends or where land begins or why there is a horse

waiting for me to answer for the uncle who killed her.

from
The New Yorker

. . . she glided from the sky and ordered him / to plow the ground and then to plant within / the earth, the serpent's teeth: these were to be / the seeds of men to come . . .

—Ovid,
The Metamorphoses

. . . I can't make up / a name like Turnipseed! Or that // I knew a man who went by such / a goodly name. . . .

—Maurice Manning

I knew a man by such a name, though didn't know

   until you told me so, that a turnip seed is tiny,
it's

a little bit of hardly anything.
I should have known.

   Miniscule—a man, a goodly man, his seed—

what's that beside a war, misrule, history looming

   like a tower that throws its shadow

as it blocks the sun—the way (an old