The Best American Poetry 2015 (20 page)

from thought to be being beyond thought

with energy as breath, a world with eyes

opening inside the light, inside knowing,

inside oneness that appears when the prison

frees me to know I am not it and it is not me.

from
The Rumpus

I made you fuck my white Barbie

even though I knew you didn't want to.

There were no whips or chains,

this was a different kind of plantation fantasy.

I didn't have a Ken doll, so I made you the man.

Not knowing what fucking looked like

I just rubbed you against each other and made you kiss.

I kept you barefoot like you came

three worlds later or fifty years earlier,

but I had Nicki Minaj dreams for us:

bleached brown skin, long stringy yellow hair,

God-blue eyes, lips pink as a Cadillac. Only then

could you wear the best dress and the one pair of pumps.

My dear black Barbie, maybe you needed a grandma

to tell you things are better than they used to be.

There was a time when you didn't exist at all.

from
Prairie Schooner

Let us shove the last 73 minutes down the garbage

disposal and vacuum up all traces of the past 17 years

and stuff them in a plastic bag and be done with them.

Let's scrape our alternative versions of everything

we have learned since 1981 off the ground and flush

them all down the toilet. I'm worn out by my misdeeds.

My hands hurt, my fingers won't curl anymore.

I'm in the emergency room at Holy Cross hoping

all is not lost. I have no one to pray to, just the vast

empty sky, the black hole inside the black hole

that swallows up everything whole. They make

me lie down on the blank slate. Dr. Baker is running

late. Then the nurse lifts the curse and Baker says

you're a lucky man. It could have been worse.

from
Beltway Poetry Quarterly

The trees glowed in water

I had half an ice arm

I waved at the sun for warmth and connection

This melting chandelier of mine

A fever grew from my ankles up

A planet fell out of my mouth

My organs bloomed, parachutes in the night

Snowbells rang along my teeth

My verbs were all in disagreement

Swallowed up in the turbulence

In the rotten rumble of boiling eggs

I held the cold along the eyelashes of cows

I held my rosehip head, splitting in two

To remain perpetually aware

A feather suspended itself in air

The fish sitting too long in the sun melted

Into a sea, cell after cell

My prized imperatives, my root words: gone

Long live the day

from
Birdfeast

1.

hyperarticulated giant black ants endlessly boiling out of a heaped-up hole in the sand

2.

such a flow of any other thing would mean abundance but these ants replay a tape-loop vision

3.

out of hell the reflexive the implacable the unreasoning rage whose only end is in destruction

4.

the way the dead-eyed Christ in Piero's
Resurrection
will march right over the sleeping soldiers

5.

without pausing or lowering his gaze for he has no regard now for human weakness

6.

since that part of him boiled entirely away leaving only those jointed automatic limbs

7.

that will march forward until those bare immortal feet have pounded a path through the earth

8.

back down to hell because there is no stopping point for what is infinite what cannot be destroyed

from
The Paris Review

S
ARAH
A
RVIO
was born in 1954. She grew up not far north of New York City and lived in the Village for thirty years. She has published three books of poetry,
Visits from the Seventh
;
Sono: cantos
; and
night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis
, which is a hybrid of poetry, essay, and memoir (all from Alfred A. Knopf). She has won the Rome Prize of the Academy of Arts & Letters and fellowships from the Bogliasco and Guggenheim foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her translation of poems and plays by Federico García Lorca is forthcoming from Knopf. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also taught poetry at Princeton. She lives in Maryland by the Chesapeake Bay.

Arvio writes: “I was writing fast, full of emotion, when I found the words ‘Buddhist' and ‘nudist.' Many words in the poem spring from the sounds of those words. I loved seeing ‘
nudist
' become ‘
neurosis
' and then ‘
new roses
,' ‘
Buddhis
t' become ‘
rosebud
,' and ‘
bodhisattva
' find ‘
body
' and ‘
fatwa
.' I think of Rushdie when I hear the word ‘fatwa': his death decree. ‘Ring around the rosy' is also a reference to death, it turns out—all fall down—a song of the plague. ‘
Nobis pacem
' is my shorthand for
Dona nobis pacem
(Give us peace), the words of a song (from the Latin Mass) that peace activists sang around our fireplace! Beyond invoking the pleasure of peace, the poem seems to say that although lovelessness is death, love is a kind of dying. After writing the poem, I learned that the Bodhisattva is on a path toward compassion and enlightenment. Like love—when it does the right thing.”

D
ERRICK
A
USTIN
was born in 1989 in Homestead, Florida. He earned his BA in English and writing from the University of Tampa and recently received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. He is a Cave Canem fellow. His work has appeared in
New England Review
,
Image: A
Journal of Arts and Religion
,
Crab Orchard Review
,
The Paris-American
, and
Memorious
.

Austin writes: “The first drafts of ‘Cedars of Lebanon' were written in early 2013, during my first Michigan winter. I'd lived in Florida for a decade before moving up north and, despite childhood stints in North Dakota and New Jersey, I've never acclimated to winter. I'm not made for snow boots and subzero temperatures. As a result, most of my poems exist in a perpetual summer. So, the poem is strongly influenced by my responding to my new environment: the flattening and disorienting effect of snow, icy distortions, and the alienating, seemingly perpetual darkness. In certain ways, winter is the hardest season to write poetry about—all the metaphors and images it seems to inspire move toward sleep, dormancy, isolation, and inevitably death, points of stasis. I wanted energy and movement, for desire to travel through violence and dominance and open, hopefully, into tenderness.”

D
ESIREE
B
AILEY
was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1989. She grew up in Queens, New York. She studied English and African Studies at Georgetown University and is currently an MFA fiction candidate at Brown University. She has received fellowships from Princeton in Africa, the Norman Mailer Center, and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She is also a recipient of the Poets and Writers' Amy Award. She is currently the fiction editor at
Kinfolks Quarterly
.

Of “A Retrograde,” Bailey writes: “This poem rose up out of the histories, experiences, and ideas to which I constantly return: the maroon communities of the Caribbean and Brazil that challenged the dominance of the plantation slavery system, the psychic trauma of a severed lineage, the historical violence that often resides in beautiful landscapes, the passing down of folklore, rites, and ways of seeing, the ocean as a mother, the ocean as a city of ancestors or as a balm.

“I pose questions in this poem: Is the liberation of the body tied to the liberation of the land? What happens to the mind when the land is warped? And vice versa? What are the consequences of cultural amnesia? How do we close the distance between the past and the present? How can we open multiple ways of seeing?”

M
ELISSA
B
ARRETT
has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a
Tin House
writer's scholarship, a Galway Kinnell scholarship from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and a national teaching award from Building Excellent Schools. Born in Cleveland
in 1983, she teaches writing at an urban middle school and lives in a century-old home in Columbus, Ohio.

Of “WFM: Allergic to Pine-Sol, Am I the Only One,” Barrett writes: “An old boss of mine used to tell me stories about her daughter, who suffered from chronic congestion for most of her childhood. Years later, she discovered that she was allergic to Pine-Sol, which her mom (my boss) sprayed around the house every day. The story stuck with me because I liked the odd personal detail of knowing my boss loved Pine-Sol, and—living in the Sinus Belt and being allergic to dust—I could empathize with someone who had her fair share of runny noses. ‘WFM: Allergic to Pine-Sol, Am I the Only One' was born from this story.

“It's a found poem, sourced mainly from Craigslist personal ads (though part of the title and the poem's first line come from a medical message board). I changed, added, or deleted words here and there, but the poem was pieced together almost verbatim from Craigslist. I found the writing there to be lively, honest, and genuine. Some posts were very direct, while others were more flowery—but nearly all of them hooked me with their desire to connect with another person (or
persons
, in some cases). I copied down my favorite bits, and began to edit them together.