Read The Best American Poetry 2013 for Free Online Page B

country wishing to overcome its own hypocrisy.
    I can see someone standing up at a meeting
    and saying, Give it to the Americans, they like
    big things for their people, they like to live
    in the glamour between exaltation and anxiety.
    Instead of an arm raised with a torch, let’s insist
    they cement its feet deep into the earth, burden it
    with gigantic shoes—an emblem of the inescapable.
    We place it on land, across from Liberty
    on the Brooklyn side. And I can see myself needing
    to visit it regularly, taking the elevator up
    to its chest area where I’d feel something
    was asked of me. Near its heart, I’d paint
    After the tyrants, there’s nothing as hateful
    as the martyrs. And I’d stare at those words,
    trying to understand my motive to enlighten
    by desecration.
    In one of its enormous feet, I imagine a gift shop
    where tourists can buy replicas
    of Responsibility for themselves and friends
    they think might need it. And I’d want
    bumper stickers selling for almost nothing:
    Less talk of conscience, more of consciousness.
    I can see my friend, the ex–altar boy,
    for so long injured by memory, writing
    near the statue’s eyes, See everything;
    overlook a great deal; correct a little —
    then scratching jagged lines through
    that wisdom of Pope John Paul II,
    clearly now irresponsible. And yet his words
    remain ones I’d like to live by.
    How to defend that? How to decide?
    from The Georgia Review

DAISY FRIED
This Need Not Be a Comment on Death

    There’s my three-year-old mom c. 1942 in the flickery movie digitized to video: Slippery blond hair, you can tell from the light of it though the film’s black and white, squiggling the little chunk of her in her tank suit, sand drizzling from her knees, her own handsome mom, dead of cancer 1949, co-author of “Direct Observation as a Research Method” and “Children and War,” smiling on a dock. This need not be a comment on death because after all my mother puts her fingers
    through my hair when I’m in labor. Contractions are jagged spikes on the monitor screen: The nurse turned the Pitocin up. My daughter’s heart zigzags its own hectic graph, a cartoon mountain range scribbled in quick. “Your hair’s always full of knots,” my mother says. Never a caress without a complaint. Dry air of grimly clean birth suite saps my mind, skin. Needs more joy , I think, quite cold, but don’t feel pain when “fuck my hair,” I say, and my mother, a plotline, leaves to wait at the B&B for news of her granddaughter. If she never said it? If I imagined it? If she was being kind? You’ll want to remember every minute of your birth story, and every birth story’s a great one , the midwife said. After thirty hours labor even the epidural can’t keep me awake, even hanging on the squat bar with the extent of my upper body strength. A plotline, I stop trying to push my daughter fully, completely, desperately out, and she’s born.Here’s the refrigerator I dragged from the wall to see what’s buzzing: A tiny toy robot bug crawled back there when my rarely crying daughter set it, legs churning, on the floor. And here am I, plotline who gave birth to her, hauling fridge desperately backward by edges. “Happy tears!” she shouts, angrily smearing with slashing curve of arm the bumpy mound of her face. “I’m stoic!” A word I taught her by accident when “she’s stoic,” I told my husband the first time she fell
    from the high slide and refused to cry. “Stoic” crawled its legs and body into the refrigerator of her brain and stuck. My arms as far around the fridge as they’ll go: I pull, pant, I groan, leave squalid grease tracks on our gouged linoleum. The plug extracts itself from the socket, rebounds clanging the coil; the bug driving its blind head forward won’t squiggle free. “It has to run down and get quiet