The Best American Poetry 2015 (10 page)

Cedar-skinned, a pillowy bosom for the boss infants,

A fine patterned cushion the boss can fall upon.

Furniture does not pine for a future wherein the boss

Plantation house will be ransacked by cavalries or Calvary.

A kitchen table can, in the throes of a yellow-fever outbreak,

Become a cooling board holding the boss wife's body.

It can on ordinary days also be an ironing board holding

Boss garments in need of ironing. Tonight it is simply a place

For a white cup of coffee, a tin of white cream. Boss calls

For sugar and the furniture bears it sweetly. Let us fill the mouth

Of the boss with something stored in the pantry of a house

War, decency, nor bedeviled storms can wipe from the past.

Furniture's presence should be little more than a warm feeling

In the den. The dog staring into the fireplace imagines each log

Is a bone that would taste like a spiritual wafer on his tongue.

Let us imagine the servant ordered down on all fours

In the manner of an ottoman whereupon the boss volume

Of John James Audubon's
Birds of America
can be placed.

Antebellum residents who possessed the most encyclopedic

Bookcases, luxurious armoires, and beds with ornate cotton

Canopies often threw the most photogenic dinner parties.

Long after they have burned to ash, the hound dog sits there

Mourning the succulent bones he believes the logs used to be.

Imagination is often the boss of memory. Let us imagine

Music is radiating through the fields as if music were reward

For suffering. A few of the birds Audubon drew are now extinct.

The Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, and Labrador duck

No longer nuisance the boss property. With so much

Furniture about, there are far fewer woods. Is furniture's fate

As tragic as the fate of an axe, the part of a tree that helps

Bring down more upstanding trees? The best furniture

Can stand so quietly in a room that the room appears empty.

If it remains unbroken, it lives long enough to become antique.

from
The New Yorker

My husband in the house.

My husband on the lawn,

pushing the mower, 4th of July, the way

my husband's sweat wends like Crown Royale

to the waistband

of his shorts,

the slow motion shake of the head the water

running down his chest,

all of this lit like a Poison video:

Cherry Pie his cutoffs his blond hair his air guitar crescendo.

My husband

at the PTA meeting.

My husband warming milk

at 3 a.m. while I sleep.

My husband washing the white Corvette the bare chest and the soap,

the objectification of my husband

by the pram pushers

and mailman.

My husband at Home Depot asking

where the bolts are,

the nuts, the screws,

my god, it's filthy

my husband reading from the news,

my husband cooking French toast, Belgian waffles,

my husband for all

nationalities.

My husband with a scotch, my husband

with his shoes off,

his slippers on, my husband's golden

leg hairs in the glow of a reading lamp.

My husband bearded, my husband shaved, the way my husband

taps out the razor, the small hairs

in the sink,

my husband with tweezers

to my foot,

to the splinter I carried

for years,

my husband chiding me

for waiting

to remove what pained me,

my husband brandishing aloft

the sliver to the light, and laughing.

from
Court Green

A common cold, we say—

common, though it has encircled the globe

seven times now handed traveler to traveler

though it has seen the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an

seen Piero della Francesca's
Madonna del Parto
in Monterchi

seen the emptied synagogues of Krasnogruda

seen the since-burned souk of Aleppo

A common cold, we say—

common, though it is infinite and surely immortal

common because it will almost never kill us

and because it is shared among any who agree to or do not agree to

and because it is unaristocratic

reducing to redness both profiled and front-viewed noses

reducing to coughing the once-articulate larynx

reducing to unhappy sleepless turning the pillows of down,

of wool, of straw, of foam, of kapok

A common cold, we say—

common because it is cloudy and changing and dulling

because there are summer colds, winter colds, fall colds,

colds of the spring

because these are always called colds, however they differ

beginning sore-throated

beginning sniffling

beginning a little tired or under the weather

beginning with one single innocuous untitled sneeze

because it is bane of usually eight days' duration

and two or three boxes of tissues at most

The common cold, we say—

and wonder, when did it join us

when did it saunter into the Darwinian corridors of the human

do manatees catch them do parrots I do not think so

and who named it first, first described it, Imhotep, Asclepius, Zhongjing

and did they wonder, is it happy sharing our lives

as generously as inexhaustibly as it shares its own

virus dividing and changing while Piero's girl gazes still downward

five centuries still waiting still pondering still undivided

while in front of her someone hunts through her opening pockets for tissues

for more than one reason at once

from
The Threepenny Review

I.

I'm at a poetry convention and wish I were at Comic Con. Everyone is wearing boring T-shirts.

When I give the lady my name, she prints it wrong onto the name tag. I spell it and she gets it wrong again. Let's be honest: it's still my fault.

II.

Japanese tsunami debris

is starting to wash up

on the Pacific shore. At first,

they trace back the soccer balls,

motorcycles, return them

to their owners. That won't last.

There are millions more tons.

Good news for beachcombers
,

begins one news article.

III.

In the '30s, William Moulton Marston invented the polygraph and also Wonder Woman. She had her own lie detector, a Lasso of Truth. She could squeeze the truth right out of anyone.

Then things got confusing for superheroes. The Universe accordioned out into a Multiverse. Too many writers penned conflicting origin stories. Super strengths came and went. Sometimes Wonder Woman held the Lasso of Truth, and sometimes she was just holding an ordinary rope.

IV.

Grandma was doing the dishes

when a cockatiel flew in the open window

and landed on her shoulder.

This was after the wildfire

took a bunch of houses.

Maybe the bird was a refugee,

but it shat everywhere

and nipped. She tried a while

to find to whom it belonged,

finally gave it away.

Then she found out

it was worth $800.

V.

Yeah, so there are a lot of birds

in poems these days.

So what? When I get nervous

I like to think of their bones,

so hollow not even pity or

regret is stashed inside,

their bones like some kind

of invisible-making machine.

VI.

Is that black Lab loping down the street the one someone called for all last night?

Phae
-ton,
Ja-
cob,
An
-gel, or
R
a-chel, depending on how near or far the man dopplered to my window.

VII.

I can't decide which is more truthful, to say
I'm sorry
or
that's too bad.

VIII.

One family is living in a trailer

next to their burned-out house.

It looks like they are having fun

gathered around the campfire.

The chimney still stands

like something that doesn't

know when to lie down.

Each driveway on the street

displays an address on a

large cardboard swath, since

there's nowhere else to post

the numbers. It's too soon

for me to be driving by like this.

IX.

Crisis on Infinite Earths
(1985) cleared up 50 years of DC comic inconsistency, undid the messy idea of the Multiverse. It took 12 issues to contain the disaster. Then surviving superheroes, like Wonder Woman, relaunched with a better idea of who they were. The dead stayed dead.

Now the Universe is divided neatly into pre- and post-Crisis.

X.

I confess stupid things I'm sorry for:

• saying that mean thing about that nice teacher

• farting in a swimming pool

• in graduate school telling everyone how delicious blueberry-flavored coffee from 7-11 was

• posing for photographs next to beached debris.

How didn't I know everyone liked shade-grown fair-trade organic?

XI.

I wish I could spin around so fast that when I stopped, I'd have a new name.

XII.

Here's a corner section

of a house washed up

on the shore, walls still

nailed together. Some bottles,

intact, are nesting inside.

I wasn't expecting this: ordinary

things. To be able to smell

someone else's cherry-flavored

cough syrup. There is

no rope strong enough

to put this back together.

To escape meltdown

at Fukushima-1, starfish

and algae have hitched rides.

They are invasive. What if

they are radioactive? Thank

goodness for the seagulls,

coming to peck out

everything's eyes.

from
New Ohio Review