The American Poetry Review May/June 2022

exordium While sound and seaworthy, I confess a life of false confessions, false hearts, ample contempt for bench warrants charging me with failures to appear. Let what interest death’s elbow grease won’t erase compound, judgments sealed in my ova, my oeuvre, my juvie, and on Q-tips scribbled like rice grains with the starshine of my stem cells. Yardsell my cracked hourglass, my salt-crusted astrolabe, my maps of the lunar seas. Collect my student IDs, my employee discounts, my almost-winning scratch-off. Take my voice mails from the clouds. Dismantle my altar to Walter Mercado, phrenologist of the stars. But stay memory, time’s plagiarist. Stay poem, spare tire for memory. Stay reader, beloved, prosthesis for the soul. narratio In 18th Century France, Franz Mesmer made friends dance in synch like iron filings under the magnetized…

Benefactor Dana Asher Margot Berg and Robert Epstein Bruce Greenwald Muriel Karr Jonathan Katz William Kistler Terri E. Moreland Ethel Rackin Ava Seave Mark Stein Nicole Steinberg Peter Waldor Bank of America Patron Adil N. Godrej Judy Newman Joyce Carol Oates John Wright Sponsor Linda Lee Alter Kenneth Boockvar Marianne E. Brown John Carswell Paul Cummins Helen W. Drutt English Werner Gundersheimer Millie Lane-Berg Dana Levin Anne Marie Macari Alicia Ostriker Kathryn Slott Page Starzinger Anonymous (1) Supporter Andrew Anway Bridget Barnes Ellen Bass Robin Becker Dennis Brennan Ira Brind John Briscoe Robert Brown Stephanie Brown and Derek Christiansen Deborah Burnham Ann Butchart Oscar Chamberlain Henri Cole Brian Cronwall Susan Davie Carolyn Dille Rachel Fichter Ruth Fine Bill Gothorpe Robert and Judith Greene Susan Grossman Hendrik and Nancy Hartog Robert Hasselblad Jane Hedley Jazan Higgins Jane Hirshfield Ditta Baron Hoeber Sue Howell Joann Karges Edmund Keeley Claire Keyes David Kirby and Barbara Hamby Rodger Lowenthal James McCorkle Richard G. McGuire Sarah L. Meiklejohn Holly Metz Michael Miller Delia Moon Bill Nathan Joan Ockman Eugene O’Connor Sharon Olds KJ Page Gail Peterson J.E. & G.W. Rock Timothy Schaffner Suzanne Sheeder Marielle Smith Randall Smith Patrick J. Stafford Susan Stewart Elaine Terranova Rosanna Warren John Valery White Stephen C. Wittkowsky Margot Wizansky Anonymous (1) (Donations received July 1, 2021 through April 15, 2022)…

Unlove Poem If I call myself unlovable, I am, practically; if I say itenough times: unlovable. Then, like practical magic, I’m hollow as old garlic; I’m distance-skinned.I’m a long, mean package, a terror-dyke, a nag, a squinting, slut-spun hag—it’s easy, really. It’s the simplest thing,I do it in my sleep. I have invasive dreams, after all, they infect my lover’s skull, they crank our jawsinto four slow hammers. After all, I’m made of distance plus the beautiful things people have tried to putinside me, they fall out the bottom. No one can kill me with kindness. No one can reach me through the soundof such ancestral ugly, sound of my grandmothers gagging a half-century ago (did they?). My grandmother beatingher stomach with her fists, drinking medicine, then poison (did she?). I’m distance-skinned. No one can put a story…

Delilah —after Gerrit van Honthorst’s “Samson and Delilah,” c. 1621 They’ve made a monster of me, marring my namefor eternity. I’m not Delilah,but Laila. I loved him. Each night, in bed, after our bodies became one body, he would succumb to sleep, resting his manein my lap. Dream -starved, I’d wind his black locks, their feathered curls, as if he were a birdwho flew by means of his hair. How heavy and tender we were, not like the jawboneof the ass he raised against my family, mowing us down like grass. He was weary of killing, the riddles, the deception.In the end, his sight narrowed to me. I was no slut. I helped us wing free. Terminal Hair For you out me as animal, wolf risingwith the moon and by morning, pepper and salt my cheeks, for youflare beneath my arms your fragrant fire—woven pubic neststhe scent…

Giant Visits the Nursing Home I walked the sterile halls alone,walling my heart, afraid of whatI’d see. I found my mother first.You haven’t changed, she said, though I knewshe was merely hoping I’d say it back.Before I could speak, my father crieddown the hall. I guess his earsworked extra hard in lieu of his eyes,or else he smelled my fear, the sweat setfast in my palm. When I looked back at my momshe met my gaze, winced, said Time is running out,what can you do? I scooped her up, held hertight to my chest, rocked her then to the slowslug of her heart. I love you a bushel, I whispered,love you a peck. She threw her arms botharound my neck, making my hearta barrel in a heap. That’s when I knewI’d…

KATE A poem I keep returning to in your book [Path of Totality] is “Urine Season.” It ends with the lines: “Some will say this is not a poem for them. But I say it’s a poem for anyone who ever expected anything.” “Urine Season” is about the loss of your child, and takes place in the hospital. It gutted me with its grief, but what brought actual tears to my eyes was its generosity, bringing the reader into the speaker’s suffering. There is this quality throughout the book, the speaker’s grief spilling out so that it encompasses everything, including the reader. I am not sure this is a question, only that I wanted you to know this before we talk about anything else. NIINA Thank you for telling me that,…