The Best American Poetry 2014 (11 page)

Awake in the desert to the sound of calling.

Must be the mountain, I thought.

The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary

line between the living and the dead was erased years ago.

Awake in the sand, I feared, old shoes decorated with

razor wire, a heaven of light on the peaks.

Must be time to get up, I assumed. Parked outside,

Border Patrol vehicles, I had to choose.

Awake to follow immigration shadows vanishing inside

American walls, river drownings counted as they cross,

Maria Salinas's body dragged out, her mud costume

pasted with plastic bottles and crushed beer cans,

black water flowing to bless her in her sleep.

Must be the roar of illegal death, I decided,

a way out of the current, though satellite maps never

show the brown veins of the concrete channel.

Awake in the arroyo of a mushroom cloud, I choke,

1945 explosion in the sand, eternal radioactive wind,

the end of one war mutating the border into another

that also requires fatal skills of young men because few

dream the atomic bomb gave birth in La Jornada,

historic trail behind the mountain realigned, then cut

off from El Paso, the town surrounded with barbed

wire, the new century kissing car bombs, drug cartels,

massacres across the river, hundreds shot in ambushes

and neighborhood soccer games that always score.

Wake up, I thought, look south to the last cathedral

in Juarez before its exploding bricks hurtle this way.

Make the sign of the cross, open your eyes to one town,

two cities, five centuries of praying in the beautiful dust.

from
Barrow Street

The Love of Jesus
is a thrift warehouse on the south side of town. Everything

inside is a dollar. On Mondays & Fridays, everything is fifty cents.

A stormy afternoon in June & I drift for hours down the aisles: bread machines

& coffee pots. Shirts

& shoes. Teetering stacks of mismatched dinnerware.

I am studying a cup whose crackled glaze is the pale blue-green of beach glass.

Two lions chase one another around its fragile eternity,

the way the lover pursues the beloved on the ancient urn, their manes & legs

washed in a preternatural purple & gold.

Behind me, a woman tells her son William

to get up from the floor so that she can measure him against a pair

of little boys' jeans. When he doesn't rise, she tells him she is going to start

counting. She says she is only going to count to two.

When I look over,

he is already on his feet at silent attention, his arms outstretched from his sides.

I live in an attic apartment above two women who have been unemployed

as long as I have known them.

This week the last of their benefits

has been unexpectedly terminated by the state.

A drop in the overall number

of jobless automatically triggers the cessation of extensions
, the letter

that comes in the mail explains.

Outside, thunder cracks. Later, the streets

will be full of limbs.

Heraclitus believed that in the beginning

creation simply bubbled forth, an inevitable percolating stream—
logos
,

both reason & word—issuing from a source unseen. Sometimes

I feel a sudden sorrow, as though my own emotions were a room

I'd forgotten why I entered.

 My mother struck me only once—

for refusing to put on my coat. I was four years old & she had been scrubbing

motel rooms all day.

I'd fallen asleep in the dark on a low shelf

in the linen closet beside the boxes of little pink soaps.

Today, that shelf

is gone & the great white polar caps

are melting. At Kasungu National Park

in Malawi, a drought has caused the lions to turn on the rangers

whose job it is to protect them.

Our skulls are chipped bowls, broken

globes, we plunge into the flow.

Heraclitus, whom the crash of time has left

in fragments, saw in the cosmos a harmony of tensions.

Imagine

the lyre, he wrote, & the bow. The store radio plays satellite gospel.

A hymn with the chorus
Every moment you shall be judged
is followed

by one in which the choir shouts
Praise! Stand up and be forgiven.

from
Painted Bride Quarterly

INT. APARTMENT/LIVING ROOM—DAY

SHE brushes her teeth next to the coffee table. The CAT sighs in the armchair. A CROW unseen cries outside the window.

CROW (V.O.)

Caw, caw, caw, caw.

EXT. MAILBOX—DAY

The MAILMAN hands her a brown package.

MAILMAN

It's heavy.

SHE

I got it.

The mailman just came back from fighting in Iraq.

His large blue body hovers in the fog.

MAILMAN

Are you going away this weekend?

SHE

No.

Lightning bolts out of his eyes.

MAILMAN

It's a holiday.

SHE

I know.

She looks away.

Sand pours out of her heart.

EXT. BUS STOP—DAY

She eats an apple.

INT. APARTMENT/BATHROOM—NIGHT

Pink and white tiles on the floor. She flosses.

SHE

          (whispers)

I didn't mean to shoot him at the temple.

Black wings flap and enfold her heart.

EXT. MAILBOX—NIGHT

The wind blows.

from
MAKE

In times of the most extreme potatoes

My hair is very thin,

Almost ink-like.

Space is like an accordion,

Accordion-like.

But also, our fingers become accordions

And start dancing.

In times of the most extreme bossa nova

Your pants are very thin,

Almost transparent.

Space is very interesting to think about

But so are your pants.

But also, the wind is very cold

And we freeze, like accordions.

In times of the most extreme minnows

The windows are very dark,

Almost intransigent.

Water is harmonica-perforated;

The fish, of course, go back and forth.

But also, the little boats turn around

And around in the sink, like accordions.

In times of the most extreme unction

My name is very thin,

Almost zipper-like.

Space is very thin also;

And distance is that way too.

But also, the stars become very accordion-like

So we eat them.

In times of the most extremely long, emotional, blue lines

The rest of the lines

Get very thin,

Almost meaningless.

Vegetables arise out of nowhere and change.

But also, the letter V becomes invisible

And unpronounceable.

from
Pleiades

Up and up the mountain, but suddenly a flat spot

exactly the size of the house they would build,

and when they went to dig for the foundation, the foundation

appeared, just as the beams for the floor, as they started

to set them in place, revealed they had always been there,

it was like coming into the room to find your diary

writing itself, she told the interviewer, who wanted to talk

about her paintings but she kept coming back to the house,

including the sky above the house, how it resembled

her childhood, forgetting how to rain

when it wasn't raining, remembering blue

just when she needed to be startled most, don't you think

it odd that my life has always had just enough space

for my life, she asked the man's recorder

as much as the man, hoping the recorder

would consider the question and get back to her, then you moved

to Madrid, the interviewer was saying, and started painting

your invisible landscapes, I remember the first window

we lifted into place, she replied, that the view of the valley

it would hold was already in the glass when we cut the cardboard box

away, we just lined them up, the premonition

with the day, he had twenty more questions

but crossed them off, I have always wanted to build a room

around a painting, he said, yes, she replied, a painting

hanging in space, he added, a painting of a woman

adjusting a wall to suit a painting, she said, like how the universe

began, he suggested, did it begin, she wondered, is that

what this is?

from
The Believer