The Best American Poetry 2015 (9 page)

from
PMS: poemmemoirstory

Your belly smells disheveled.

Your armpits smell like kelp.

Your genitals smell like lily flower soup

(no MSG, please). You claim weedy

scents of medicinal broth simmering

for sick infants emanate from my neck,

and that my recently doffed sox

smell of nothing but lust. Could we

sniff each other out, I wonder,

blindfolded, from among the massed souls

queuing up for free stew,

or being shoved into box cars,

or crouched under desks protecting

our necks in disaster drills,

or getting processed in tents at the edge

of a refugee camp? Do we really want

to pledge to enter heaven together

and to live on there forever

if heaven's bereft of smell?

from
The American Poetry Review

Let me tell you something, said the old woman.

We were sitting, facing each other,

in the park at ______, a city famous for its wooden toys.

At the time, I had run away from a sad love affair,

and as a kind of penance or self-punishment, I was working

at a factory, carving by hand the tiny hands and feet.

The park was my consolation, particularly in the quiet hours

after sunset, when it was often abandoned.

But on this evening, when I entered what was called the Contessa's Garden,

I saw that someone had preceded me. It strikes me now

I could have gone ahead, but I had been

set on this destination; all day I had been thinking of the cherry trees

with which the glade was planted, whose time of blossoming had nearly ended.

We sat in silence. Dusk was falling,

and with it came a feeling of enclosure

as in a train cabin.

When I was young, she said, I liked walking the garden path at twilight

and if the path was long enough I would see the moon rise.

That was for me the great pleasure: not sex, not food, not worldly amusement.

I preferred the moon's rising, and sometimes I would hear,

at the same moment, the sublime notes of the final ensemble

of
The Marriage of Figaro
. Where did the music come from?

I never knew.

Because it is the nature of garden paths

to be circular, each night, after my wanderings,

I would find myself at my front door, staring at it,

barely able to make out, in darkness, the glittering knob.

It was, she said, a great discovery, albeit my real life.

But certain nights, she said, the moon was barely visible through the clouds

and the music never started. A night of pure discouragement.

And still the next night I would begin again, and often all would be well.

I could think of nothing to say. This story, so pointless as I write it out,

was in fact interrupted at every stage with trance-like pauses

and prolonged intermissions, so that by this time night had started.

Ah the capacious night, the night

so eager to accommodate strange perceptions. I felt that some important secret

was about to be entrusted to me, as a torch is passed

from one hand to another in a relay.

My sincere apologies, she said.

I had mistaken you for one of my friends.

And she gestured toward the statues we sat among,

heroic men, self-sacrificing saintly women

holding granite babies to their breasts.

Not changeable, she said, like human beings.

I gave up on them, she said.

But I never lost my taste for circular voyages.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Above our heads, the cherry blossoms had begun

to loosen in the night sky, or maybe the stars were drifting,

drifting and falling apart, and where they landed

new worlds would form.

Soon afterward I returned to my native city

and was reunited with my former lover.

And yet increasingly my mind returned to this incident,

studying it from all perspectives, each year more intensely convinced,

despite the absence of evidence, that it contained some secret.

I concluded finally that whatever message there might have been

was not contained in speech—so, I realized, my mother used to speak to me,

her sharply worded silences cautioning me and chastising me—

and it seemed to me I had not only returned to my lover

but was now returning to the Contessa's Garden

in which the cherry trees were still blooming

like a pilgrim seeking expiation and forgiveness,

so I assumed there would be, at some point,

a door with a glittering knob,

but when this would happen and where I had no idea.

from
The Threepenny Review

for John Whitworth

It begins with the division of a solitary cell,

Carcinogenetic fission leading to a passing-bell,

Lurking far beneath your vision like a pebble in a well—

Then it grows.

Soon enough there comes a scalpel that is keen to save your life,

Crooning, “All things will be well, pal, if you just survive the knife,

But to climb the tallest Alp'll be much easier. Call your wife.”

Then it grows, grows, grows. Then it grows.

Say you can't remember Monday night when Tuesday rolls around.

Does it mean they'll find you one day blind and frothing on the ground?

Is it ominous that Sunday sermons make your temples pound?

(How it shows!)

You may take the pledge, abstaining, thinking you can lick it all.

But it's hard when, ascertaining how diversions may enthrall,

You're still standing there and draining one well past the final call:

How it shows, shows, shows. (How it shows!)

You may lose a set of car keys and mislay a name or face.

Does your mind demand bright marquees where each star must have its place?

It's like diving in the dark. It's less a river than a race.

And it flows

Like the coming days of drivel, like the dreaded days of drool

When the very best you give'll prove you're just an antique fool,

And your thoughts will be so trivial as to lead to ridicule—

And it flows, flows, flows. And it flows.

Do you want to be a burden? Can you stand to be a drag?

Make your mind up, say the word and do not let the moment lag.

When you go to get your guerdon let them see your battle flag!

So it goes.

There'll be many there who'll miss you and a few to lend a hand,

There'll be boxes full of tissue, lots of awful music, and

Lissome maidens who won't kiss you as you seek the promised land.

So it goes, goes, goes. So it goes.

from
Able Muse

Tuck a severed thumb into a paper towel

and place it in a plastic bag on the window sill

to sprout a new one. Hydroponic tomatoes

don't taste as good as the ones on a vine.

It's a completely controlled environment

that has nothing to do with authenticity.

He made me a promise at our shotgun wedding.

He would take my thumbs if I ever slept

with another man. If you're on the train

to Cleveland, it's okay to get off at a whistle stop

but if you don't have a ticket, you have to say so.

Just say what you mean. I couldn't say I didn't love him.

In the little flash of a threat when you know you're going

to get hurt, you have to live up to it one way or another.

It's about listening, but the ear is one of the weakest

muscles in the body. Ten years after the promise

I slit my hand open on a bottle of wine over steak

with a man I thought I could love. The female cuckoo bird

does not settle down with a mate. Now we make her

come out of a clock. I sound like a local

when I give directions. I'm getting the hang of it.

If you have no ticket, say it. It's about knowing

where you want to put the stone in the wall.

You might need to cut that up for me,

since I have no thumbs. When he met the next man

I could love, he mentioned the promise.

It's difficult to go back to the land of the paved road.

Once the thumb-sprouts root, plant them.

When they sex themselves, you have to split them

so they don't contaminate each other.

from
The Southampton Review

To make the servant in the corner unobjectionable

Furniture, we must first make her a bundle of tree parts

Axed and worked to confidence. Oak-jawed, birch-backed,