The American Poetry Review July/August 2022

Bonfire Brides The embers of a Thousand YearsUncovered by the HandThat fondled them when they were FireWill stir and understand——from Emily Dickinson’s “1383” Remember when we hurriedourselves into the evening’s sacral blaze: Our coal-covered bridal gownsdrenched in the long silver of our mother’s years? Our hearts ceaselesslysucking on their stars long dead? Our laughter pouring out of uslike a sacrifice to age and weather? If we had known what lay beyond the gatesof our hooded child, would we have even left? Would we have so happily run into the enflamed morningwith our fists and query and hunger? Should we have stayed? Sister, do you remember when we wanted god?Were all tendril? Sweet-cheeked for heaven? Do you remember when we were sick with Bible verses and hymns?Our mouths overcome with hallelujah? Our mouths slowly sewn into the crooked neckof every sunset?…

The Key You have to go back to being immature,a timed regression essentialto running up a further lifetime of debt. I owe you, the polar bear says,an icy French OUI. A kiss on both cheeks,plus a wish to sit on a bench at the center of a green-painted park,your legs planted. The unique sensoryeffect of the mind holding onto itself while steadying the sky in orderto sustain the injury and the after effectsof the earthquake, the cut-off that occurs against your willwhere you have to turn off in orderto engage with the light that comes in to announce the day’s breathingand being in a complicated networkmade of mesh that allows everything to fall through. This goes on throughoutthe day and night where you dreamof being better than you ever imagined: a surgeon holding a freehand scalpel, themetal drawing…

The Shadow Cast Golden Gate Park As any poet will tell you, the weight of the lineis essential, but here these practitioners havemore on their minds than poems. The weight of their lines is uniformly light, the line selectedto land and then rest gently on the surface,its goal to capture the attention of surface-feeders found in nearby lakes. Back and forth, back and forth,the arm swings repetitively, predictably, the linethen cast out and over the pond until it comes to rest. In the late morning sunlight, the great treeslittering the pools with shadow, these studentsof sorcery practice unspooling their lines, their craft. We have come not to study magic but to escapethe boredoms of another Saturday morning.Slowly, we take a lap around the pools. Back and forth, the casters execute the motion—they do it as a way…

Born in the Mekong Delta, poet Hoa Nguyen moved to Washington, D.C. early in the diaspora of Vietnam. She has authored five books and more than a dozen chapbooks, including As Long as Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998–2008, Tells of the Crackling, Violet Energy Ingots, and most recently, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure. For over two decades, she has instructed creative writing workshops, and currently is a faculty member at Ryerson University and Miami University, and Co-Chair of Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College’s MFA Program. She is a co-founder of the small press, reading series, and creative hearth Skanky Possum, along with the poet Dale Smith, her longtime partner and co-collaborator, and their celebrated colleagues Renee Gladman, Cliff Gassoway,…

The Curator of the Earth Museum Speaks of People We know that the people loved beautiful things.From their earliest kind they were fools for shineand order: necklaces strung with tiny seashells,amulets of amethyst and chalcedony. The peopleloved tall buildings with many gleaming windows;from these they would survey the land below them,parceled into fields or city blocks. In their later iterations,they crafted vehicles that required the earth’s bloodto run, but this they extracted in quiet violencesin remote places, and then it was as if their shiningtransports ran on nothing. The people lit their homeswith delicate glass globes, filaments vibratingwith a white-hot glow. Sometimes this glow camefrom the earth’s bones, which the people minedat great cost. Sometimes it came from scientists,who learned that atoms could be harnessed to fuel bothlight and ruin. The…

How I Stopped Praying After centuries of deferralto the white sky cloud cover God, who kept me on orange alert,babbling for mercies that were batted away sloppilylike dustballs in the wake of a sock, I turned to the Divine Creatrix,who built the short night, I was convinced, and forged the shaded grove,and opened the arms of her starry kimono. I flicked the sharp edge of devotion,ever vivacious without a tick’s slackening.She forgave so much, even the woodchuck whose nasty scuttling knows neitherchange nor shame. With her leaking colostrum she revivedanimals, plants. Why not me? She was a bucket, I a berry.My engineer, my Gibraltar made my person the topographyof an unheard-of city, made my knuckle a lithe shell,made my hair hot gray, made me put on jeans and a t-shirt.Made me eat. Thenit fell. The concept. Quick, inarguable. One day I was answered, the next…