American Journal, page 6
They always sing their telegrams.
Their old gods do not die.
Then I realized the very futility was salvation
in this greeny entanglement of breaths.
Yeah, as if.
Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism,
the trick still convinces.
Then I came to in Texas
and realized rockabilly would never go away.
Then I realized I’d been drugged.
We were all chasing nothing
which left no choice but to intensify the chase.
I came to handcuffed and gagged.
I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam.
This too is how ash moves through water.
And all this time the side door unlocked.
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.
STEVE SCAFIDI
For the Last American Buffalo
After a photograph by Richard Sherman
Because words dazzle in the dizzy light of things
and the soul is like an animal—hunted and slow—
this buffalo walks through me every night as if I was
some kind of prairie and hunkers against the cold dark,
snorting under the stars while the fog of its breathing
rises in the air, and it is the loneliest feeling I know
to approach it slowly with my hand outstretched
to tenderly touch the heavy skull furred and rough
and stroke that place huge between its ears where
what I think and what it thinks are one singing thing
so quiet that, when I wake, I seldom remember
walking beside it and whispering in its ear quietly
passing the miles, the two of us, as if Cheyenne or
the lights of San Francisco were our unlikely destination
and sometimes trains pass us and no one leans out hard
in the dark aiming to end us and so we continue on
somehow and today while the seismic quietness of
the earth spun beneath my feet and while the world
I guess carried on, that lumbering thing moved heavy
thick and dark through the dreams I believe we keep
having whether we sleep or not and when you see it
again say I’m sorry for things you didn’t do and
then offer it some sweet-grass and tell it stories
you remember from the star-chamber of the womb
or at least the latest joke, something good to keep it
company as otherwise it doesn’t know you are here
for love, and like the world tonight, doesn’t really
care whether we live or die. Tell it you do and why.
ABOUT THE POETS
JAN BEATTY is the author of Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, and was named by the Huffington Post as one of ten women writers for “required reading.” She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
JERICHO BROWN is the author of The New Testament and Please. He teaches in the creative writing program at Emory University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
TINA CHANG is the author of Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers, and is coeditor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
VICTORIA CHANG’s poetry collections include Circle, Salvinia Molesta, The Boss, and Barbie Chang. She lives in Southern California.
OLIVER DE LA PAZ is the author of four poetry collections, Names above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, and Post Subject: A Fable. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. He lives in Massachusetts.
NATALIE DIAZ was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Diaz teaches at Arizona State University, and her first poetry collection is When My Brother Was an Aztec.
MATTHEW DICKMAN is the author of All-American Poem, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and Wonderland. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
MARK DOTY is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Deep Lane and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award. He lives in New York, New York.
NORMAN DUBIE is the author of twenty-eight collections of poetry, most recently The Quotations of Bone, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He lives and teaches in Tempe, Arizona.
JEHANNE DUBROW is the author of six books of poetry, including Dots & Dashes, Red Army Red, and Stateside. She is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.
EVE L. EWING is a poet, essayist, sociologist, and educator. Electric Arches is her first book of poetry. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
VIEVEE FRANCIS is the author of Blue-Tail Fly, Horse in the Dark, and Forest Primeval, which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. She teaches at Dartmouth College.
ROSS GAY is the author of Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He teaches at Indiana University.
ARACELIS GIRMAY is the author of three collections of poetry, including Teeth, Kingdom Animalia, and The Black Maria. Originally from California, she lives with her family in New York, New York.
NATHALIE HANDAL is the author of five books of poetry, including The Republics and Poet in Andalucía. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York, New York.
JOY HARJO is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. She was recently awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry from the Poetry Foundation. She is a member of the Muscogee Nation and teaches at the University of Tennessee.
YONA HARVEY is the author of Hemming the Water, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
TERRANCE HAYES is the author of six poetry collections, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, How to Be Drawn, and Lighthead, which won the National Book Award. He is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
CATHY PARK HONG is a poet and critic whose books include Translating Mo’um, Dance Dance Revolution, and Engine Empire. She is a professor at Rutgers–Newark University.
MARIE HOWE is the author of four books of poetry, including Magdalene and What the Living Do. She lives in New York, New York.
MAJOR JACKSON is the author of four collections of poetry, Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn. He teaches at the University of Vermont.
ILYA KAMINSKY was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of two poetry books, Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa, and editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He received a Whiting Writers’ Award. He teaches at San Diego State University.
LAURA KASISCHKE teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of many books of poetry, including Where Now: New and Selected Poems and Space, in Chains, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
DONIKA KELLY’s first poetry collection is Bestiary, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS’s first book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus, won the National Book Award in Poetry. She lives and teaches in Los Angeles, California.
ADA LIMÓN is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying and Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California.
PATRICIA LOCKWOOD is the author of two books of poetry, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, and a memoir, Priestdaddy. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.
LAYLI LONG SOLDIER is the author of WHEREAS, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
PATRICK PHILLIPS is the author of Chattahoochee, Boy, and Elegy for a Broken Machine, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
LIA PURPURA’s latest poetry collection is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she teaches at the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
MELISSA RANGE is the author of Horse and Rider and Scriptorium. Originally from East Tennessee, she now lives in Wisconsin and teaches at Lawrence University.
MATT RASMUSSEN is the author of Black Aperture, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Robbinsdale, Minnesota.
ERIKA L. SÁNCHEZ is the author of a poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, and a novel for young readers, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
STEVE SCAFIDI is the author of four poetry collections, including Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer and To the Bramble and the Briar. He lives in Summit Point, West Virginia.
NICOLE SEALEY is the author of Ordinary Beast and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named. She is the executive director of Cave Canem and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
CHARIF SHANAHAN’s first poetry collection is Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing. He is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in the Bay Area of California.
SOLMAZ SHARIF is the author of a poetry collection, Look, a finalist for the National Book Award. She is currently a lecturer at Stanford University and lives in the Bay Area of California.
DANEZ SMITH is the author of two books of poetry, [insert] boy and Don’t Call Us Dead, a finalist for the National Book Award. They live in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
SUSAN STEWART is the author of six books of criticism and six collections of poetry, including Cinder: New and Selected Poems and Columbarium, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in New Jersey and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
MARY SZYBIST is the author of two poetry collections, Granted and Incarnadine, which won the National Book Award. She teaches at Lewis & Clark College and lives in Portland, Oregon.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY is the author of four collections of poetry, including Thrall and Native Guard, which won the Pulitzer Prize. She served as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014. She is Board of Trustees Professor at Northwestern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.
BRIAN TURNER is a veteran of the United States Army and the author of the poetry collections Phantom Noise and Here, Bullet, as well as the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country. He lives in Orlando, Florida.
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Headwaters and Messenger: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She is a MacArthur Fellow and lives in Cabot, Vermont.
SUSAN WHEELER is the author of six collections of poetry, including Assorted Poems and Meme, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.
DARA WIER is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, including You Good Thing and Selected Poems. She is the director of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
CHRISTIAN WIMAN is a poet, translator, and essayist. His books of poetry include Every Riven Thing and Once in the West, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Yale University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
CHARLES WRIGHT was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2014. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems. He taught at the University of Virginia.
JOHN YAU has published more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism, including A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns and Bijoux in the Dark. He teaches at the Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University), and lives in New York, New York.
DEAN YOUNG is the author of many collections of poetry, including Shock by Shock, Bender: New and Selected Poems, and Elegy on a Toy Piano, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin.
KEVIN YOUNG is director of The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and poetry editor of the New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Brown, Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995–2015, Bunk, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Jelly Roll, a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry.
PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Sister as Moving Object” from The Switching/Yard by Jan Beatty, copyright © 2013. Reprinted by the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Jericho Brown, “N’em,” from The New Testament. Copyright © 2014 by Jericho Brown. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Tina Chang, “Story of Girls,” from Of Gods and Strangers. Copyright © 2011 by Tina Chang. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com.
Victoria Chang, “Dear P,” from Barbie Chang. Copyright © 2017 by Victoria Chang. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
“In Defense of Small Towns” from Requiem for the Orchard, The University of Akron Press, copyright © 2010 by Oliver de la Paz. Reprinted by permission of The University of Akron Press.
Natalie Diaz, “My Brother at 3 AM,” from When My Brother Was an Aztec. Copyright © 2012 by Natalie Diaz. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
“Minimum Wage,” from Wonderland: Poems by Matthew Dickman. Copyright © 2018 by Matthew Dickman. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Apparition,” from Deep Lane: Poems by Mark Doty. Copyright © 2015 by Mark Doty. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Norman Dubie, “Lines for Little Mila,” from The Quotations of Bone. Copyright © 2015 by Norman Dubie. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
“The Long Deployment” by Jehanne Dubrow from Dots & Dashes, copyright © 2017 by Jehanne Dubrow; reproduced by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.
“Elegy for Fifth Period and the Things That Went on Then,” by Eve L. Ewing from Electric Arches, copyright © 2016 by Eve L. Ewing. Used by permission of Haymarket Books.
“Sugar and Brine: Ella’s Understanding” copyright © 2012 Vievee Francis. Published 2012 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
“becoming a horse” from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay copyright © 2015. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Aracelis Girmay, “Second Engagement,” from The Black Maria. Copyright © 2016 by Aracelis Girmay. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, www.boaeditions.org.
“Ten Drumbeats to God” by Nathalie Handal copyright © 2015. Reprinted from The Republics with permission of the author.
“No,” from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Yona Harvey, “Hurricane,” from Hemming the Water. Copyright © 2013 by Yona Harvey. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com.
Excerpt from “[American Journal],” by Robert Hayden. Copyright © 1978, 1982 by Robert Hayden, from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
“At Pegasus,” from Muscular Music by Terrance Hayes. Copyright © 1999 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of the author.
“Who’s Who,” from Engine Empire: Poems by Cathy Park Hong. Copyright © 2012 by Cathy Park Hong. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Walking Home,” from Magdalene: Poems by Marie Howe. Copyright © 2017 by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Mighty Pawns,” from Roll Deep: Poems by Major Jackson. Copyright © 2015 by Major Jackson. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“We Lived Happily during the War,” from Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky. Copyright © 2019 by Ilya Kaminsky. Used by permission of Graywolf Press.
Laura Kasischke, “Heart/mind,” from Space, in Chains. Copyright © 2011 by Laura Kasischke. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
“Fourth Grade Autobiography,” from Bestiary by Donika Kelly. Copyright © 2016 by Donika Kelly. Used by permission of Graywolf Press.
“Dog Talk,” from Voyage of the Sable Venus: And Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis; compilation copyright © 2015 by Robin Coste Lewis. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
