The Best American Poetry 2014 (20 page)

   story) sin is cast on those most sinned

against; their coffins covered with a flag:

   stripes like the backs of slaves back when,

and stars—perhaps the last thing that you see

   when the landmine takes you—life and

limb, as the saying goes. My God. I knew a man,

   hardly more than a boy, though the word's

forbidden when the young man's black,

   as if you meant him disrespect. But he wasn't yet

out of his teens, a sweet kid name of Turnipseed,

   Carl as I recall, and I've always wondered how

the war turned out for him. Afraid, in fact, to know.

Showed up in class one day in uniform, but not

   to stay—to say goodbye—resigned, a fatalist.

Why struggle in a net that tightens

   when you fight its hold? Just say
so long
, and go.

All I could find to say was, please, take care

   of yourself. I mean, what good are words.
A little

bit of hardly anything.
And seeds?

What good, as they said in 'Nam, when you

   bought the farm—the field plowed with dragonseed,

from which those fratricidal armies sprang

   and fell upon each other's throats, and fell like dominoes

to join the ranks of headstones,
row on row on row . . .

   And Turnipseed? That seed was meant to grow.

from
The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review

Little soul, charismatic vagabond,

Honored guest, comrade of the body.

Now you shall depart into those regions

Fogbound, anesthetized, and barren.

Here your laughter served you well.

There, everlasting, your mouth's stitched shut.

—Hadrian, “Animula”

Assume, dear vagabond, you are permitted

  One last survey. Your 21 grams of sentience,

   Little soul—the weight exactly

Of a ruby-throated hummer—shall hover

  The foliated stamens of your

   Earthly measure. How you dart & pivot,

Honored guest, your thirst unquenchable.

 Here is Milbank, South Dakota,

   The saffron dustbowl where your father,

Dear comrade, raises his belt to crisscross your back:

  The five & twenty lesions. Here the state hospital,

   Your mother ballooning with insulin

To induce the coma meant to cure the demons

  Marauding the precincts of her abject brain.

   Now you shall depart: a milk run in Duluth,

A quart bottle bursting on a frozen stoop, then

  A troop ship bound for Tunis, & into those regions

   Of desert where you wander your forty days.

You rifle the pockets of a dead Wehrmacht corporal:

  Luger & a snakebite kit. & now you lean

   From a baggage car door, hefting a postal sack

As the train slows for a station—Breckinridge

  Or Sleepy Eye—slows but will not stop

   For twenty-seven years. The railroad men's

Hotels along the tracks, pulls of bourbon

  From a dented flask. The white Dakota plains—

   Fogbound, anesthetized & barren.

Montage of seven Chevy Biscaynes, the songbook

  Of Ernest Tubb. A shingled ranch, deriving from

   The GI Bill. GARDEN SIX TWO FOUR

SEVEN SEVEN, the receiver lifted from its cradle

  As you weep to a stranger who's purloined

   Your pension. Pulls of bourbon

From a highball glass, from a coffee cup, the thrall

  & ratchet of ECT, your dress rehearsal

   For oblivion. What I remember: your laughter

Did not serve you well. Honored guest, comrade

  Of the body, your farewell is complete.

   Blessèd the descent which beckons.

There, everlasting, your mouth's stitched shut.

from
AGNI

In the undisclosed desert facility, they strapped me to a steel table and told me to recite the poem that would save the world.

(I had arrived there in a windowless, automated van driven inside the hollow mountain—

through the forest they had chased me to exhaustion.)

They polished metal tools I'd never seen before.

To break me down, at first one of them kept tapping on my nose and whispering lyrics, access codes, rapid sequences of Greek letters and English surnames.

One tried to interface with my brain, injecting a sort of horned electrode into Wernicke's, then Broca's. My larynx in spasm. My hands were hooves, then nightingale beaks, the fluorescent tubes above me were my white bones.

I chanted baby names during sensations of drowning, overwhelming nausea. Back and forth from ice-cold water, mock burials. They crowned me with electrified laurels.

They touched me, laughing.

They touched me and I sang and for what?

from
Cream City Review

You, faithful ravens, staying on and saying

through the songbirdless winter

the biblical syntax of your declarations.

It is with great fascination I watch you excise,

with inordinate patience, the upward eye

of the fallen deer below the house.

I confess the sight through my binoculars

puts me eye-to-eye with both you

and the eye you eat and squabble over,

gustatory, opening now and then your great wings

in contretemps corvidae vexations,

like a scrum of omnivorous umbrellas.

Further plunder will require your partners, the coyotes,

slinking even now your way and awaiting

the night your plumage exemplifies

and under which they will open the carcass

for your further delectation and caws

the dozen mornings I imagine it will take.

Then the snows will bury it, and many mice

will gnaw its bones until it emerges yet again

from the melts of spring, a blessing for the blowflies

and the seethe of their maggots, until the vault

the empty brain occupied is emptied itself,

and I retrieve the skull and hang it on my shack.

There it will be filled with the thoughts of yellow jackets,

there it will grin its grim, unmandibled

half-smile out over the distances swallows

troll for the yellow jackets themselves,

and one of you will perch yourself upon a bare rib then,

to recite, for the world, your ravenous beatitudes.

from
Southern Indiana Review

One day you wake and they're there, flecks of mud

weed-eaters throw against the window, moths

in their dark migrations, salmon that taste like dust.

All month long, they fall from the laundry, dead

receipts for burritos, coffees, books. They've lotused

toilet water, drinks left out from the night before.

They rifle into floodlights, their exit wounds

so much skin, so much powdered glue. April's cruelty

is, isn't it, just a rumor floated by May and June

while everyone fans the rice pages of their Bibles

in sermons' hot wind. It's the dry air makes them rise.

In these parts now they say
sirocco
, entirely

out of place. They say
monsoon
, which is a way

of not saying fire, virga,
haboob
. I'd like to feel

the milt wind off Erie or Ontario, fresh strawberries

and airlift oysters to chew, but I've got to rise again

to pull the locust beans from the choking gutters,

which I explain as a prayer for rain. Tomorrow's

my birthday day in another month, a twelfth

of a reminder of something I can't remember,

though they say I was there, Polaroid, Panavision

images dreamed or dreamed for me, half-holy

half-haunted, like the streets of Jackson slowly going

Kodachrome, gelatin silver, dim,

my father's menthol still reporting in the tray.

You have to look away so the smoke's cursive's

written clear, my grandmother's card, her best

farmer's Palmer method,
Our pride & joy
,

flutter of money, even after all these years,

take the day off.
But there are bills to pay,

even without stamps, days in advance

so they'll post on time, someone born or someone

dying so near midnight, one day's clocked,

the next not yet in. It takes a while to sort it out.

You may already be a winner. I check, of course,

the numbers each day, though I've often forgotten

to buy a ticket, as my father reads the obits to see

if he's still alive. It would be a great excuse,

he says, call in dead for work. In the joke, God says

give me a chance. You should know, he says,

the trade-in on your car in case you want to ditch

it in a quarry, set it on fire, though the heat's never

hot enough to melt it back to stone. The fireflies

rise from the evening grass, whispering in a language

I mistake for fire, into the boughs, a few

floating higher than hunger, toward the stars.

There, the bears move slow as days,

so slow sometimes I forget what day it is.

And sometimes, thank God, they go on forever.

from
The Missouri Review