The American Poetry Review September/October 2022

Gratitude, 2001 The red strip is not a tongue or fire. I try to imagine it without the white strip above it. Or the green blocks. What is the red strip withoutanything else? Agnes said suffering is necessary for freedom from suffering. Maybethe yellow strips are suffering. See how far away they are? Always distant butalways there. Or maybe they are language, in how we can still see the yellow on the periphery when we look at the red in the middle. Iwant to pull the yellow closer but maybe I should push it away. What am I outside of language? Is this the solitudeAgnes spoke of—standing in an auditorium without a microphone or anaudience, at a podium reading wind. And where the skin that has beenwound tightly around me my whole life, is…

KAVEH AKBAR This book is built around the epistolary form, these letters from you to friends, futures, cockroaches, your radiator, William Shatner. And then there are also these letters to you, many of them actually poems to you, written by friends. I’ve never seen a “single-author” poetry collection include several whole poems written by other people to the poet, which seems wild, to land upon a whole new poetry-book-thing in 2022. Can you talk about how those poems in the book came about? MATTHEW OLZMANN I think there are a lot of interesting collaborations happening in poetry. In the case of this specific book, it sort of emerged as a natural extension of the collection’s epistolary motif. In addition to the more outward-facing letters where the speaker is addressing various aspects…

After the Masquerade The masquerade was over, but the guests refused to leave.We taught our children to stay a grave’s depth apart. “Six feet under” originated with the plague to keepthe animals from digging too deeply into our wounds. At the party, the Sun King carried a parasol decoratedwith lice and lilies. We were the last ones naked in the swimming pool. Millions died. For scope,we looked at the stars. All those names we could not remember. The streets were made of broken glassand monumental body parts. [At night, in the rain, a chandelier]. I practiced my posture not with a book,but a candelabra. I did not call my mother. I walked with my shoulders back to suggest wings.We prided ourselves on each having our own masks like snowflakes or clowns copyrighting their facesby painting them on eggs…

The Long Blue Dress I whooshedthrough the party. I grewa set of invisible hands. I was flower girlto the Commonwealth where lovers danced a dancecalled the snowdrift. Sugar mapleshelicoptered samarasin my glass. The dogs slackenedin their webs of shade. A democracyof clouds formed, a stormwas decided. Everyone inside,candles on. I sayit makes sense! Every raindropa little bell, every switchbackand holler baptized. But it feltso good to cry. I stackedthe wood so high I never again left.I never again wore shoes. My long blue dresssuggested my power, my powerful sadness.And you and you and youand the gyrating populace and everyonewas there. Bobby Boris Pickett For no real good reasonexcept for the gravity of being alive all the time, I wept in silence in a corner of the farm.I climbed the pawpaw tree and shook it hard and had no bra on and you whistled from below,waving your hilarious pawpaw stick, and my wagging boobs waved back…

Election Night Are you ready? I nodded. She slid the needle inand the sick cat, who only a moment before had tried toleap to the floor closed his eyes and exhaled. Andthat’s it, she said a little too brightly, pulling the needle out.That’s it? I asked. That’s all there is to it. + The syringe going in, and then the pressurewhen the vet pressed the plunger, familiar,then unfamiliar, a sort of sparkling in the cornersof the cat’s eyes like fireflies in the darkening back yard—and then the sparkling grew thick and filled the air,handfuls of black glitter— + Hours earlier, after I had voted, I found the doghad strewn garbage over the kitchen floor, the TV onloud—a commercial for pharmaceuticals. The cat wasstill alive at the vet’s. All I wanted was to lie on the…

Listen—if I’ve learned anything from men,it’s that their tongues are bareand motherless, lapping the breast of brawnthey mistake for a masculine God. Too young, I’ve earned the word beheadin my mother tongue— How young? She, named for light, was twenty-seven.My hunger for fresh language carries mecloser to violent shores, gravel voices. Once before Fajr I cracked a date pit betweenteeth, lilted the sharp half into a lover’s mouth.I tested the crimson I was sure seethed beneathhis, every man’s, skin. You’re like a furnace,he’d whisper, dry against my sweat-laced back. It’s true I dream of handshot around my throat, the finger marksI saw fading grime-green against [] ’s.No one has blued me, but still I wake afraid,keen until the complex dogs bark back. How to fathom it, my grandfather alive nowlonger than our new-bloom nation. meaning pure.Land…