The Best American Poetry 2012 (12 page)

      Anne Wiebe, Lois

Hexter, Jeunesse Ames,

  David McConnehey, Duncan Chu

and today's guests,
Mike Rahn & Clark Taft

visiting from the Fourth-Grade Class

from
The Antioch Review

MARIE HOWE

Magdalene—The Seven Devils

Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out

—Luke 8:2

The first was that I was very busy.

The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could

not happen to me, not like that.

The third—I worried.

The fourth—envy, disguised as compassion.

The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,

the aphid disgusted me. But I couldn't stop thinking about it.

The mosquito too—its face. And the ant—its bifurcated body.

Ok the first was that I was so busy.

The second that I might make the wrong choice,

because I had decided to take that plane that day,

that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early

and, I shouldn't have wanted that.

The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street

the house would blow up.

The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer

of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing.

The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living

The sixth—if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I

touched the left arm a little harder than I'd first touched the right then I had

to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.

The seventh—I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that

was alive and I couldn't stand it,

I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word—cheesecloth—

to breathe through that would trap it—whatever was inside everyone else that

entered me when I breathed in

No. That was the first one.

The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened?

How had our lives gotten like this?

The third was that I couldn't eat food if I really saw it—distinct, separate

from me in a bowl or on a plate.

Ok. The first was that I could never get to the end of the list.

The second was that the laundry was never finally done.

The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did.

And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was

love?

The fourth was I didn't belong to anyone. I wouldn't allow myself to belong

to anyone.

Historians would assume my sin was sexual.

The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn't know.

The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.

The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying.

The sound she made—the gurgling sound—so loud we had to speak louder

to hear each other over it.

And that I couldn't stop hearing it—years later—

grocery shopping, crossing the street—

No, not the sound—it was her body's hunger

finally evident—what our mother had hidden all her life.

For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,

the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.

The underneath—that was the first devil. It was always with me.

And that I didn't think you—if I told you—would understand any of this—

from
The American Poetry Review

AMORAK HUEY

Memphis

You like to pretend you will meet her again someday in Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis.

Tennessee—state of forgiveness, of makeup sex, of uneaten ribs. O Memphis!

Drink more, hit on waitress with tattoo & pierced navel, slouch toward gracelessness.

Imagine there are no consequences. What fails in your fantasies stays in Memphis.

Any home not your own offers a chance to shed skin & slither free from what is.

Ancient city covered with silt now, no earthen dam legible enough to protect Memphis.

You are so prepared to be disappointed by Graceland that you fall in love with it.

How have I failed to mention the music? That is, after all, why you come to Memphis.

Buy a shirt at B. B. King's, guzzle beer on Beale Street. Hell yeah, Elvis lives.

Just another plastic anagram. Why would anywhere be different? Why Memphis?

Sun sets over this river city: the transient slap & echo of blues. Water makes the best witness.

If you never stand still, there's nowhere you can't end up. Why not Memphis?

None of us ever falls where we belong—we are ghosts on our way to someplace else.

This is especially true in the American South. Write me a letter from Memphis.

If you think you are happy, you need a more accurate measure. Nothing lasts. Ask Ramses.

Floods will always find you, water seeking other water. Even here, even Memphis.

from
The Southern Review

JENNY JOHNSON

Aria

1.

Tonight at a party we will say farewell

to a close friend's breasts, top surgery for months

she's saved for. Bundled close on a back step,

we wave a Bic lighter and burn her bra.

At first struggling to catch nylon aflame,

in awe we watch as all but the sheer black

underwire melts before forming a deep

quiet hole in the snow.

      Sometimes the page

too goes quiet, a body that we've stopped

speaking with, a chest out of which music

will come if she's a drum flattened tight, if she's

pulled like canvas across a field, a frame

where curves don't show, exhalation without air.

Then this off-pitch soprano steals through.

2.

Then this off-pitch soprano steals through

a crack that's lit. A scarlet gap between

loose teeth. Interior trill. We're rustling open.

Out of a prohibited body why

long for melody? Just a thrust of air,

a little space with which to make this thistling

sound, stretch of atmosphere to piss through when

you're scared shitless.
Little sister, the sky

is falling and I don't mind, I don't mind,

a line a girl, a prophet half my age,

told me to listen for one summer when

I was gutless, a big-mouthed carp that drank

down liters of algae, silt, fragile shale

while black-winged ospreys plummeted from above.

3.

While black-winged ospreys plummeted from above,

we were born beneath. You know what I mean?

I'll tell you what the girls who never love

us back taught me: The strain within will tune

the torqued pitch. In 1902 the last

castrato sang “Ave Maria.”

His voice—a bifurcated swell. So pure

a lady screams with ecstasy.
Voce

bianco!
Breath control. Hold each note. Extend

the timbre. Pump the chest, that balloon room,

and lift pink lips, chin so soft and beardless,

a flutter, a flourish, a cry stretching beyond

its range, cruising through four octaves, a warbler,

a starling with supernatural restraint.

4.

A starling with supernatural restraint,

a tender glissando on a scratched LP,

his flute could speak catbird and hermit thrush.

It was the year a war occurred or troops

were sent while homicide statistics rose;

I stopped teaching to walkout, my arms linked

to my students to show a mayor who didn't

show. Seven hundred youth leaned on adults

who leaned back. We had lost another smart kid

to a bullet in the Fillmore, Sunnyside,

the Tenderloin. To love without resource

or peace. When words were noise, a jazz cut was steel.