The Best American Poetry 2015

by David Lehman

  4

  The pile contains 771,002 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide, 12,412 pounds of uranium metal, and took seventeen days to build. At 3:49 Fermi orders the control rods removed. At 3:53 he shuts the reaction down. It produced a half watt of energy, not enough to flicker a bulb, but the neutron intensity doubled every two minutes.

  5

  The guard stood aside, the eye in his hand

  flinched, I lowered my head,

  when I crossed that threshold

  I was back in childhood, a swing rocked,

  a red ball bounced, the little ones

  were jumping rope and chanting

  the numbers, holy names

  that stand for nothing except themselves.

  Thorium is sequenced from that song,

  radium and the transuranic elements.

  Once or twice they clapped.

  Then it was night, my father called me home,

  by no name or voice, just darkness.

  from The Manhattan Review

  TANYA OLSON

  * * *

  54 Prince

  There exist 54 Goldilocks planets

  54 planets not too hot

  54 planets not too cold

  54 planets where the living

  is juuuuuust right

  in that particular planetary zone

  54 planets like Earth

  but not Earth Similar

  not the same 54 planets close

  but different Different

  except for Prince

  Assless Pants Prince

  High-Heel Boots Prince

  Purple Rain Prince

  Paisley Park Prince

  I Would Die For You Prince

  Ejaculating Guitar Prince

  Jehovah’s Witness Prince

  Needs A New Hip Prince

  Wrote Slave On His Face Prince

  Took An Unpronounceable Symbol For His Name Prince

  Chka Chka Chka Ahh Prince

  54 planets each with a Prince

  and every Prince

  exactly the same

  as the one we know on Earth

  54 lace 54 canes

  54 planets 54 Prince

  These 54 Prince swallow 54 worries

  The 54 worries become 54 songs

  54 songs made of 54 bars 54 bars

  using 54 chords 54 downbeats

  where they pick up the worries

  54 offbeats to lay the worries down again

  54 worried skank-beat Prince

  birth 54 worrisome funk-drenched songs

  Once an Earth year the Prince

  gather around Lake Minnetonka

  When the cherry moon smiles

  they thrust under their heads

  Under the water the Prince sick up

  the old worries Under the water

  worry sacks rise empty again

  It takes a worried man the Prince say

  to sing a worried song

  while beneath the surface of Lake Minnetonka

  the perch in the shoals

  and the gobies in their holes

  nibble at the worries

  our skimmed from the top worries

  scraped from the bottom worries

  spooned from the middle good enough worries

  There’s worries now the fish sing

  but there won’t be worries long

  from The Awl

  RON PADGETT

  * * *

  Survivor Guilt

  It’s very easy to get.

  Just keep living and you’ll find yourself

  getting more and more of it.

  You can keep it or pass it on,

  but it’s a good idea to keep a small portion

  for those nights when you’re feeling so good

  you forget you’re human. Then drudge it up

  and float down from the ceiling

  that is covered with stars that glow in the dark

  for the sole purpose of being beautiful for you,

  and as you sink their beauty dims and goes out—

  I mean it flies out the nearest door or window,

  its whoosh raising the hair on your forearms.

  If only your arms were green, you could have two small lawns!

  But your arms are just there and you are kaput.

  It’s all your fault, anyway, and it always has been—

  the kind word you thought of saying but didn’t,

  the appalling decline of human decency, global warming,

  thermonuclear nightmares, your own small cowardice,

  your stupid idea that you would live forever—

  all tua culpa. John Philip Sousa

  invented the sousaphone, which is also your fault.

  Its notes resound like monstrous ricochets.

  But when you wake up, your body

  seems to fit fairly well, like a tailored suit,

  and you don’t look too bad in the mirror.

  Hi there, feller!

  Old feller, young feller, who cares?

  Whoever it was who felt guilty last night,

  to hell with him. That was then.

  from Poem-a-Day

  ALAN MICHAEL PARKER

  * * *

  Candying Mint

  Strip thirty good-sized leaves.

  Wash them, and pat dry.

  Paint the leaves with egg white

  and dredge in fine sugar.

  Let stand upon a wire rack.

  Buber writes, “man’s final objective is this:

  to become, himself, a law—a Torah.”

  The granules glimmer upon the mint,

  hard dew, a glittery,

  sweet finish to a fine night

  and a flourless chocolate cake

  with a little raspberry sauce.

  I know that it’s my job, but Rabbi, I worry

  because I like worrying,

  and I admire the persistence of the mint,

  really just a weed: spicy, ragged, alive.

  To grow toward the sun—it’s like listening—

  and who doesn’t need to aspire?

  Yes, Rabbi, the lesson’s true:

  to become a law means to know God,

  but who could be ready for that?

  Rabbi, try the candied mint: it’s heaven.

  from The Carolina Quarterly

  CATHERINE PIERCE

  * * *

  Relevant Details

  The bar was called The Den of Iniquity,

  or maybe The Cadillac Lounge—whatever

  it was, its sign was a neon martini glass,

  or a leg ending in stiletto. Maybe a parrot. Anyway,

  in that place I danced without anyone

  touching me but seven men watched

  from the bar with embered, truculent eyes.

  Or I danced with my boyfriend’s hands

  hot around my ribs. Or I didn’t have a boyfriend

  and no one was looking and my dance moves

  were nervous, sick-eel-ish, and eventually

  I just sat down. What I remember for sure

  is that was the night I drank well gin

  and spun myself into a terrible headache.

  That was the night I thought I was pregnant

  and drank only club soda. That was

  the night I made a tower from Rolling Rock

  bottles sometime after midnight

  and management spoke to me quietly

  but only after snapping a Polaroid

  for the bathroom Wall of Fame. In any case,

  when I finally stumbled or strode

  or snuck outside, the air was Austin-thick,

  Reno-dry, Montpellier-sharp. I don’t remember

  if my breath clouded or vanished

  or dropped beneath the humidity. I don’t remember

  if the music pulsing from inside

  was the Velvet Underground or Otis Redding

  or the local band of mustached banjo men
.

  You know this poem has a gimmick,

  and you’re right. But understand: if I wrote

  Cadillac Lounge, boyfriend, beer tower, soul

  it would be suddenly true, a memory lit

  by lightning flash. Who needs that sort

  of confinement? If the way forward

  is an unbending line, let the way back

  be quicksilver, beading and re-swirling. Forgive

  the trick and let me keep this mix-and-match,

  this willful confusion of bars, of beaches,

  of iced overpasses and hands on my hands,

  all the films with gunfights, all the films

  with dogs, the Kandinsky, the Rembrandt,

  the moment the moon’s face snapped

  into focus, the moment I learned

  the word truculent, each moment the next

  and the one before, and in this blur,

  oh, how many lifetimes I can have.

  from Pleiades

  DONALD PLATT

  * * *

  The Main Event

  At the weigh-in

  on the morning of March 24th, 1962, the World Welterweight Champ,

  Benny “Kid” Paret,

  called his challenger, Emile Griffith, a maricón—

  Cuban slang for “faggot”—

  and smiled. Emile wanted to knock the Kid out right there.

  Gil Clancy, his manager,

  managed to hold him back, told him to “save it for tonight.”

  The New York Times

  wouldn’t print the correct translation, maintained that Paret had called

  Emile an “unman.”

  The sportswriter Howard Tuckner raved against the euphemistic

  copy editors, “A butterfly

  is an unman. A rock is an unman. These lunatics!”

  No one would mention

  the word “homosexual” in connection with a star

  athlete. Another

  journalist, Jimmy Breslin—Irish straight-talker—said,

  “That was what Paret

  was looking to do—get him steamed! If you’re going to look for trouble,

  you found it!”

  By the twelfth round, both men had tired. They clinched, heads ear

  to ear, embracing,

  then punching underneath, whaling away at the other’s

  ribs, face. Such

  intimate hostility. As if, could they have spoken to each other

  through plastic mouth guards,

  they would have groaned out curses, endearments, pillow talk.

  At the close of the sixth round

  the Kid had landed a combination, ending in a hard right

  to Emile’s chin.

  He had gone down in his corner for an eight count,

  but got back up

  and started slugging as the bell rang and delivered him

  from an almost certain

  knockout. The crowd had shouted, whistled, roared.

  In the black-and-white footage

  of the TV broadcast on YouTube, the referee Ruby Goldstein breaks up

  their clinch. Photographers

  lean in and slide their old-fashioned flash-bulb cameras across the ring’s

  sweat-spattered

  canvas floor to get a closer shot of the exhausted fighters. Cigarette

  and cigar smoke

  hangs heavy. The announcer Don Dunphy complains, “This is probably

  the tamest round

  of the entire fight.” One second later Emile staggers the Kid

  with an overhand right.

  “Griffith rocks him.” Emile lands twenty-nine punches in eighteen

  seconds. “Paret against

  the ropes, almost hopeless.” Emile steps back, winds up, then swings

  to get his full

  body weight into each punch. Eyewitness Norman Mailer, ten feet

  away from the fighters,

  would write that Emile’s right hand was “whipping like a piston rod

  which had broken through

  the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.”

  The crowd screams,

  frenzied as piranhas stripping in less than half a minute the flesh

  from a cow fallen

  into the river. As Emile hammers the Kid’s head with nine straight uppercuts

  in two seconds, so it whips

  back and forth in the slow-motion replay like a ragdoll’s head shaken

  by a girl throwing

  a tantrum, one commentator observes, “That’s beautiful

  camera work,

  isn’t it?” Another responds, “Yeah, terrific.” While Emile mauls

  the Kid with mechanical

  precision, he may be thinking of how the Kid reached out

  and tauntingly patted

  his left buttock, lisping Maricón, maricón, as Emile stood

  stripped down

  to his black trunks on the scales at the weigh-in. Or he may be thinking

  of his job designing ladies’

  hats in the Garment District. Attach that ostrich feather to the brim

  of the blue boater, left hook,

  pile-driver right. Lean into the punch. Put him away. But Paret,

  tangled in the ropes,

  won’t go down. Clancy had told him to keep punching until

  the referee separated

  them. Emile doesn’t know that the Kid will never regain

  consciousness, will die

  in ten days. He doesn’t know that for the rest of his life

  he will have nightmares

  in which he and Paret are marionettes. Someone jerks his strings. He can’t

  stop punching. He will become

  world champ four more times, but will himself be beaten almost

  to death by five young

  homophobes, one with a baseball bat, as he leaves a gay bar near Port

  Authority. He will drive

  a pink Lincoln Continental. After Paret’s death, Manny

  Alfaro, the Kid’s manager,

  will say, “Now, I have to go find a new boy.” His widow,

  Lucy, will bury him

  in the St. Raymond Cemetery in the Bronx. She will never

  remarry, will tell an interviewer,

  “Dream? I stopped dreaming a long time ago.” Boxing matches

  will stop being televised

  for the next decade. Ruby Goldstein will referee only one more fight,

  then retire. Emile

  will suffer dementia pugilistica. He will be forced to sell his Continental

  and will ride the bus,

  he’ll say, “like everyone else.” Benny Paret, Jr., the Kid’s son

  who was two years old

  when Emile killed his dad, will meet and forgive him forty-two years

  later. Lucy

  had refused to go to the Garden or watch the fight on TV.

  A neighbor had to tell her.

  Across nine million flickering screens nation-wide

  they hoisted the Kid’s

  still body onto a stretcher and carried him slowly out of the ring.

  Don Dunphy signed off,

  “saying goodnight for your hosts, the Gillette Safety

  Razor Co., makers

  of the $1.95 Adjustable Razor, super blue blades, foamy shaving

  cream, and Right Guard

  Power Spray Deodorant, and El Producto, America’s largest-selling

  quality cigar.”

  from Southwest Review

  CLAUDIA RANKINE

  * * *

  from Citizen

  Photograph courtesy of Michael David Murphy

  Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough. After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven’t you said this yourself? Haven’t you said this to a close f
riend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget. If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw—your memory, vessel of your feelings. Do you feel hurt because it’s the “all black people look the same” moment, or because you are being confused with another after being so close to this other?

  An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. When you look around only you remain. Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn’t bring you to your feet, not right away, because gathering energy has become its own task, needing its own argument. You are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with “yes, and” rather than “yes, but.” You and your friend decided that “yes, and” attested to a life with no turnoff, no alternative routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed, it’s another week, the blouse is beneath your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good.

  The rain this morning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your glasses to single out what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Yes, and it’s raining. Each moment is like this—before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen. What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks. Still you want to stop looking at the trees. You want to walk out and stand among them. And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you.

  from Granta

  RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN