Read The Best American Poetry 2013 for Free Online

and more
    of them slaves to be irreversibly,
    totally different from, they were.
    Then others were not, then were,
    or were not, but gradually became,
    leaving only, for a time, black
    and yellow to be not.
    Then there were other words
    for those who were still or newly
    (see immigrant , Arab ) somehow not
    the same and therefore not.
    Thus history leaves us nothing
    but not: like children playing at being
    something, we made, we keep
    making our whiteness up.
    from Harvard Review

KWAME DAWES
Death

    First your dog dies and you pray
    for the Holy Spirit to raise the inept
    lump in the sack, but Jesus’ name
    is no magic charm; sunsets and the
    flies are gathering. That is how faith
    dies. By dawn you know death;
    the way it arrives and then grows
    silent. Death wins. So you walk
    out to the tangle of thorny weeds behind
    the barn; and you coax a black
    cat to your fingers. You let it lick
    milk and spit from your hand before
    you squeeze its neck until it messes
    itself, its claws tearing your skin,
    its eyes growing into saucers.
    A dead cat is light as a live
    one and not stiff, not yet. You
    grab its tail and fling it as
    far as you can. The crows find
    it first; by then the stench
    of the hog pens hides the canker
    of death. Now you know the power
    of death, that you have it,
    that you can take life in a second
    and wake the same the next day.
    This is why you can’t fear death.
    You have seen the broken neck
    of a man in a well, you know who
    pushed him over the lip of the well,
    tumbling down; you know all about
    blood on the ground. You know that
    a dead dog is a dead cat is a dead
    man. Now you look a white man
    in the face, talk to him about
    cotton prices and the cost of land,
    laugh your wide open mouthed laugh
    in his face, and he knows one thing
    about you: that you know the power
    of death, and you will die as easily
    as live. This is how a man seizes
    what he wants, how a man
    turns the world over in dreams,
    eats a solid meal and waits
    for death to come like nothing,
    like the open sky, like light
    at early morning; like a man
    in red pinstriped trousers, a black
    top hat, a yellow scarf
    and a kerchief dipped in eau
    de cologne to cut through
    the stench coming from his mouth.
    from The American Poetry Review

CONNIE DEANOVICH
Divestiture

    Here’s your mistake back
    you never made it
    here’s the cushion
    reshaping the couch
    your shadow slips under the threshold
    you never crossed it
    private paradise
    is just another storm splitting in space
    the sheets you never crumpled
    fold up again
    the words you spoke
    were never spoken
    when I walk into the library
    I’m not thinking of you
    when my heart drains like sand from a shoe
    I’m not thinking of you
    something was having trouble ending
    think of energy’s mutations not of you
    yesterday I devirginized
    my own story
    stuck my fingers in and out of my own future
    until I broke its promise
    today I’m not thinking of you
    but of a souvenir tossed on the compost
    a smelly time unpetalling
    blackening rain and garbage
    from New American Writing

TIMOTHY DONNELLY
Apologies from the Ground Up

    The staircase hasn’t changed much through the centuries
    I’d notice it, my own two eyes now breaking down the larger
    vertical distance into many smaller distances I’ll conquer
    almost absently; the riser, the tread, the measure of it long
    hammered into the body the way it’s always been, even back
    in the day when the builders of the tower Nimrod wanted
    rising up into the heavens laid the first of the sunbaked bricks
    down and rose. Here we are again, I say, but where exactly
    nobody knows, that nowhere in particular humming between
    one phoneme and a next, pulse jagged as airless Manhattan-
    bound expresses on which I’ve worried years that my cohort
    of passengers’ fat inner monologues might manage to lurch
    up into audibility at once, a general rupture from the keeping
    of thoughts to