The Best American Poetry 2012 (13 page)

I listened for Dolphy's pipes in the pitch dark:

A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.

5.

A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.

A nightingale is recorded in a field

where finally we meet to touch and sleep.

A nightingale attests

as bombers buzz and whir

overhead enroute to raid.

We meet undercover of brush and dust.

We meet to revise what we heard.

The year I can't tell you. The past restages

the future. Palindrome we can't resolve.

But the coded trill a fever ascending,

a Markov chain, discrete equation,

generative pulse, sweet arrest,

bronchial junction, harmonic jam.

6.

Bronchial junction, harmonic jam,

her disco dancing shatters laser light.

Her rock rap screamed through a plastic bullhorn

could save my life. Now trauma is a remix,

a beat played back, a circadian pulse we can't shake,

inherent in the meter we might speak,

so with accompaniment I choose to heal

at a show where every body that I press against

lip syncs:
I've got post binary gender chores . . .

I've got to move. Oh, got to move.
This box

is least insufferable when I can feel

your anger crystallize a few inches away,

see revolutions in your hips and fists.

I need a crown to have this dance interlude.

7.

I need a crown to have this dance interlude

or more than one. Heating flapjacks you re-

read “Danse Russe,” where a man alone and naked

invents a ballet swinging his shirt around

his head. Today you're a dandier nude

in argyle socks and not lonely as you

slide down the hall echoing girly tunes

through a mop handle:
You make me feel like. . . .

She-bop doo wop . . .
an original butch

domestic. The landlord is looking through

the mini-blinds. Perched on a sycamore,

a yellow throated warbler measures your

schisms, fault lines, your taciturn vibrato.

Tonight, as one crowd, we will bridge this choir.

from
Beloit Poetry Journal

LAWRENCE JOSEPH

So Where Are We?

So where were we? The fiery

avalanche headed right at us—falling,

flailing bodies in mid-air—

the neighborhood under thick gray powder—

on every screen. I don't know

where you are, I don't know what

I'm going to do, I heard a man say;

the man who had spoken was myself.

What year? Which Southwest Asian war?

Smoke from infants' brains

on fire from the phosphorus hours

after they're killed, killers

reveling in the horror. The more obscene

the better it works. The point

at which a hundred thousand massacred

is only a detail. Asset and credit bubbles

about to burst. Too much consciousness

of too much at once, a tangle of tenses

and parallel thoughts, a series of feelings

overlapping a sudden sensation

felt and known, those chains of small facts

repeated endlessly, in the depths

of silent time. So where are we?

My ear turns, like an animal's. I listen.

Like it or not, a digital you is out there.

Half of that city's buildings aren't there.

Who was there when something was, and a witness

to it? The rich boy general conducts the Pakistani

heroin trade on a satellite phone from his cave.

On the top floor of the Federal Reserve

in an office looking out onto Liberty

at the South Tower's onetime space,

the Secretary of the Treasury concedes

they got killed in terms of perceptions.

Ten blocks away is the Church of the Transfiguration,

in the back is a Byzantine Madonna—

there is a God, a God who fits the drama

in a very particular sense. What you said—

the memory of a memory of a remembered

memory, the color of a memory, violet and black.

The lunar eclipse on the winter solstice,

the moon a red and black and copper hue.

The streets, the harbor, the light, the sky.

The blue and cloudless intense and blue morning sky.

from
Granta

FADY JOUDAH

Tenor

To break with the past

Or break it with the past

The enormous car-packed

Parking lot flashes like a frozen body

Of water a paparazzi sea

After take off

And because the pigeons laid eggs and could fly

Because the kittens could survive

Under the rubble wrapped

In shirts of the dead

And the half-empty school benches

Where each boy sits next

To his absence and holds him

In the space between two palms

Pressed to a face—

This world this hospice

from
Beloit Poetry Journal

JOY KATZ

Death Is Something Entirely Else

Department of Trance

Department of Dream of Levitation

Department of White Fathom

Department of Winding

Sometimes my son orders me lie down

I like best when he orders me
lie down  close your eyes.

Department of Paper Laid Gently

(Department of Sound of Sheets of Paper

he covers me with)

then sings

I like best the smallest sounds he makes then

Department of This Won't Sting

Am I slipping away

Department of Violet Static

as if he were a distant station?

Department of Satellite

My child says
you sleep

Department of Infinitely Flexible Web

and covers my face with blankness

Department of Tap-Tapping the Vein

Department of Eyelash

I can't speak

      or even blink

or the page laid over my face will fall

Department of Clear Tape in Whorls and Double Helixes on the Wall

He says
mama don't look

Department of You Won't Feel a Thing

I cannot behold

Department of Pinprick

He will not behold

Department of Veils and Chimes

Lungs Afloat in Ether

I like this best

Department of Spider Vein

when I am most like dead

and being with him then, Department of Notes

Struck from Thin Glasses Successively at Random

I must explain to my child that sleep

is not the same as dead

Department of Borderlessness

so that he may not be afraid of

Department of Fingertips Lightly on Eyelids

so I can lie and listen

not holding not carrying not working

Department of Becalmed     faint sound of him

I am gone

His song is the door back to the room

I am composed of the notes

from
The Cincinnati Review

JAMES KIMBRELL