American Journal, page 3
in the world, and a voice that swings brass back
and forth, you can hear it, and a focal point where
my face should be. What do I have, I have absolute
power, and what I want is your money, your drool,
and your mind, and the sense of myself as a snake,
and a garter in the grass. Every bone in the snake
is the hipbone, every part of the snake is the hips.
The first sound I make is silence, then sssssshhh,
the first word I say is listen. Sheep shearers
and accountants hypnotize the hardest,
and lookout sailors who watch the sea, and the boys
who cut and cut and cut and cut and cut the grass.
The writers who write page-turners, and the writers
who repeat themselves. The diamond-cutter kneels
down before me and asks me to hypnotize him, and
I glisten at him and glisten hard, and listen to me and
listen, I tell him. Count your age backward, I tell him.
Become aware of your breathing, and aware of mine
which will go on longer. Believe you
are a baby till I tell you otherwise, then believe
you’re a man till I tell you you’re dirt. When a gunshot
rings out you’ll lie down like you’re dead. When you
hear, “He is breathing,” you’ll stand up again.
The best dog of the language is Yes and protects you.
The best black-and-white dog of the language is Yes
and goes wherever you go, and you go where I say,
you go anywhere. Why do I do it is easy, I am working
my way through school. Give me the money
for Modernism, and give me the money
for what comes next. When you wake to the fact that you
have a body, you will wake to the fact that not for long.
When you wake you will come when you read the word
hard, or hard to understand me, or impenetrable poetry.
When you put down the book you will come when you
hear the words put down the book,
you will come when you hear.
ERIKA L. SÁNCHEZ
The Poet at Fifteen
after Larry Levis
You wear faded black
and paint your face white as the blessed
teeth of Jesus
because brown isn’t high art
unless you are a beautiful savage.
All the useless tautologies—
This is me. I am this. I am me.
In your ragged
Salvation Army sweaters, in your brilliant
awkwardness. White dresses
like Emily Dickinson.
I dreaded that first Robin,
so, at fifteen you slash
your wrists.
You’re not allowed
to shave your legs in the hospital.
The atmosphere
that year: sometimes you exist
and sometimes you think you’re Mrs. Dalloway.
This is bold—existing.
You do not understand your parents
who understand you less:
your father who listens to ABBA after work,
your mother who eats expired food.
How do you explain what you have done?
With your hybrid mouth, a split tongue.
How do you explain the warmth
sucking you open, leaving you
like a gutted machine?
It is a luxury to tell a story.
How do you explain
that the words are made by more
than your wanting?
Te chingas o te jodes.
At times when you speak Spanish, your tongue
is flaccid inside your rotten mouth:
desgraciada, sin vergüenza.
At the hospital they’re calling your name
with an accent on the E. They bring you
tacos, a tiny golden crucifix.
Your father has run
all the way from the factory.
NATALIE DIAZ
My Brother at 3 AM
He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps
when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.
O God, he said, O God.
He wants to kill me, Mom.
When Mom unlocked and opened the front door
at 3 a.m., she was in her nightgown, Dad was asleep.
He wants to kill me, he told her,
looking over his shoulder.
3 a.m. and in her nightgown, Dad asleep,
What’s going on? she asked, Who wants to kill you?
He looked over his shoulder.
The devil does. Look at him, over there.
She asked, What are you on? Who wants to kill you?
The sky wasn’t black or blue but the green of a dying night.
The devil, look at him, over there.
He pointed to the corner house.
The sky wasn’t black or blue but the dying green of night.
Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives.
My brother pointed to the corner house.
His lips flickered with sores.
Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives.
O God, I can see the tail, he said. O God, look.
Mom winced at the sores on his lips.
It’s sticking out from behind the house.
O God, see the tail, he said. Look at the goddamned tail.
He sat cross-legged, weeping on the front steps.
Mom finally saw it, a hellish vision, my brother.
O God, O God, she said.
MATT RASMUSSEN
Reverse Suicide
The guy Dad sold your car to
comes back to get his money,
leaves the car. With filthy rags
we rub it down until it doesn’t shine
and wipe your blood into
the seams of the seat.
Each snowflake stirs before
lifting into the sky as I
learn you won’t be dead.
The unsuffering ends
when the mess of your head
pulls together around
a bullet in your mouth.
You spit it into Dad’s gun
before arriving in the driveway
while the evening brightens
and we pour bag after bag
of leaves on the lawn,
waiting for them to leap
onto the bare branches.
CHARLES WRIGHT
Charlottesville Nocturne
The late September night is a train of thought, a wound
That doesn’t bleed, dead grass that’s still green,
No off-shoots, no elegance,
the late September night,
Deprived of adjectives, abstraction’s utmost and gleam.
It has been said there is an end to the giving out of names.
It has been said that everything that’s written has grown hollow.
It has been said that scorpions dance where language falters and gives way.
It has been said that something shines out from every darkness,
that something shines out.
Leaning against the invisible, we bend and nod.
Evening arranges itself around the fallen leaves
Alphabetized across the backyard,
desolate syllables
That braille us and sign us, leaning against the invisible.
Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world.
Morning arrives and that’s it.
Sunlight darkens the earth.
ADA LIMÓN
Downhearted
Six horses died in a tractor-trailer fire.
There. That’s the hard part. I wanted
to tell you straight away so we could
grieve together. So many sad things,
that’s just one on a long recent list
that loops and elongates in the chest,
in the diaphragm, in the alveoli. What
is it they say, heartsick or downhearted?
I picture a heart lying down on the floor
of the torso, pulling up the blankets
over its head, thinking this pain will
go on forever (even though it won’t).
The heart is watching Lifetime movies
and wishing, and missing all the good
parts of her that she has forgotten.
The heart is so tired of beating
herself up, she wants to stop it still,
but also she wants the blood to return,
wants to bring in the thrill and wind of the ride,
the fast pull of life driving underneath her.
What the heart wants? The heart wants
her horses back.
ROSS GAY
becoming a horse
It was dragging my hands along its belly,
loosing the bit and wiping the spit
from its mouth made me
a snatch of grass in the thing’s maw,
a fly tasting its ear. It was
touching my nose to his made me know
the clover’s bloom, my wet eye to his
made me know the long field’s secrets.
But it was putting my heart to the horse’s that made me know
the sorrow of horses. The sorrow
of a brook creasing a field. The maggot
turning in its corpse. Made me
forsake my thumbs for the sheen of unshod hooves.
And in this way drop my torches.
And in this way drop my knives.
Feel the small song in my chest
swell and my coat glisten and twitch.
And my face grow long.
And these words cast off, at last,
for the slow honest tongue of horses.
CHRISTIAN WIMAN
After the Diagnosis
No remembering now
when the apple sapling was blown
almost out of the ground.
No telling how,
with all the other trees around,
it alone was struck.
It must have been luck,
he thought for years, so close
to the house it grew.
It must have been night.
Change is a thing one sleeps through
when young, and he was young.
If there was a weakness in the earth,
a give he went down on his knees
to find and feel the limits of,
there is no longer.
If there was one random blow from above
the way he’s come to know
from years in this place,
the roots were stronger.
Whatever the case,
he has watched this tree survive
wind ripping at his roof for nights
on end, heats and blights
that left little else alive.
No remembering now …
A day’s changes mean all to him
and all days come down
to one clear pane
through which he sees
among all the other trees
this leaning, clenched, unyielding one
that seems cast
in the form of a blast
that would have killed it,
as if something at the heart of things,
and with the heart of things,
had willed it.
LAURA KASISCHKE
Heart/mind
A bear batting at a beehive, how
clumsy the mind
always was with the heart. Wanting
what it wanted.
The blizzard’s
accountant, how
timidly the heart approached the business
of the mind. Counting
what it counted.
Light inside a cage, the way the heart—
Bird trapped in an airport, the way the mind—
How it flashed on the floor of the phone booth, my
last dime. And
this letter
I didn’t send
how surprising
to find it now.
All this love I must have felt.
III. WORDS TANGLED IN DEBRIS
CATHY PARK HONG
Who’s Who
You wake up from a nap.
Your mouth feels like a cheap acrylic sweater.
You blink online and 3-D images hopscotch around you.
A telenovela actress hides under your lampshade.
You switch to voice activation.
Good Afternoon! Sings the voice of Gregory Peck.
You look out your window, across the street.
Faded mattresses sag against a chain-link fence.
The mattress seller sits on a crate, clipping his fingernails.
You think of inviting him in.
You do a scan.
Gregory Peck booms: Dwayne Healey, 28, convicted felon of petty larceny.
You don’t know what to do so you pet your ceramic cat.
What? You ask. What? You want to go out? Well you can’t.
You hear a chime.
It is your former employer informing you that they cannot release
your husband’s password due to the Privacy Policy.
It is the 98th auto reply.
You bite your hand.
You check in on your husband.
After your husband went on roam, you received one message from him:
I am by a pond and a coyote is eating a frog. It’s amazing.
You decide to go outside.
You walk to the public park.
There is a track where people run while watching whatever
they’re watching.
You sit on an oversized bench.
You think of your old town house with the oatmeal sofa
before you and husband downgraded to this neighborhood.
The sofa made you happy.
You decide you need to keep up appearances.
You need to clip your husband’s nails. They are getting long.
A strangled yip escapes from you and a jogger stares at you.
You see a palm tree and it is carved up with little penis drawings.
You make a sound like tut-tut.
You enhance the park.
You fill in the balding grass and rub the offensive drawings
from the tree. You add coconuts.
You feel your insides are being squeezed out through a tiny hole
the size of a mosquito bite.
You hear children laughing as they rush out of a bus and it sounds
far away and watery, like how it used to in the movies, when the light was haloey,
and it was slow-motion, and the actor was having a terrible flashback.
But you are not having a flashback.
Underneath the sound of children laughing, you hear users chatting
over each other, which all blurs into a warring shadow of insects
and the one that sounds like a hornet is your husband,
telling you to put his stuff in storage.
Or sell it to pay off bills or
leave, why don’t you goddamn leave.
You sit on the bench until the sky turns pink.
When your former employer let you go,
they said, you are now free to pursue what you want to pursue.
So here you are.
MATTHEW DICKMAN
Minimum Wage
My mother and I are on the front porch lighting each other’s cigarettes
as if we were on a ten-minute break from our jobs
at being a mother and son, just ten minutes
to steal a moment of freedom before clocking back in, before
putting the aprons back on, the paper hats,
washing our hands twice and then standing
behind the counter again,
hoping for tips, hoping the customers
will be nice, will say some kind word, the cool
front yard before us and the dogs
in the backyard shitting on everything.
We are hunched over, two extras on the set of The Night of the Hunter.
I am pulling a second cigarette out of the pack, a swimmer
rising from a pool of other swimmers. Soon we will go back
inside and sit in the yellow kitchen and drink
the rest of the coffee
and what is coming to kill us will pour milk
into mine and sugar into hers.
LIA PURPURA
Proximities
A man walks into a coffee shop.
But it’s not a joke.
I bought coffee there
last summer.
Small, with milk.
It’s never a joke
to walk in or out of a shop
unharmed. It’s easy
to forget
you aren’t a person
being shot at.
I’m not.
I wasn’t, though
I was there
last summer.
Not-shot-at
and I never knew it.
Did not once
think it.
Thinking it now
the moment thins,
it sheers
and I move back
to other coffee shops
where I never fell, or bled,
and then
I sit for a while
with my regular cup
and feel things collapse
or go on, I can’t tell.
TINA CHANG
Story of Girls
Years ago, my brothers took turns holding down a girl in a room.
They weren’t doing anything to her but they were laughing and
sometimes it’s the laughing that does enough. They held the girl down
for an hour and she was crying, her mouth stuffed with a small red cloth.
Their laughing matched her crying in the same pitch. That marriage
of sound was an error and the error kept repeating itself.
There were threats of putting her in the closet or in the basement
if she didn’t quiet down. One cousin told them to stop but no one could
hear him above the high roar. After that the boy was silent, looking down
