The Best American Poetry 2014 by David Lehman Read Free Book Online

ate my first fig
    from the hand of a man who escaped his country
    by swimming through the night
    and maybe
    never said more than
    five words to me
    at once but gave me
    figs and a man on his way
    to work hops twice
    to reach at last his
    fig which he smiles at and calls
    baby, c’mere baby ,
    he says and blows a kiss
    to the tree which everyone knows
    cannot grow this far north
    being Mediterranean
    and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils
    of Jordan and Sicily
    but no one told the fig tree
    or the immigrants
    there is a way
    the fig tree grows
    in groves it wants,
    it seems, to hold us,
    yes I am anthropomorphizing
    goddammit I have twice
    in the last thirty seconds
    rubbed my sweaty
    forearm into someone else’s
    sweaty shoulder
    gleeful eating out of each other’s hands
    on Christian St.
    in Philadelphia a city like most
    which has murdered its own
    people
    this is true
    we are feeding each other
    from a tree
    at the corner of Christian and 9th
    strangers maybe
    never again.
    from The American Poetry Review

EUGENE GLORIA
----
Liner Notes for Monk

    â€œMonk’s Mood” [false start]
    I had gotten off the bus too soon for my stop and so I had to walk a few
    blocks in order to gain my bearings. Thelonious Monk said, “It’s always night/ or we
    wouldn’t need light.” I read this in an essay. I wanted to have a conversation
    with someone to lighten my load. I remember seeing a woman disembarking from the next
    bus. Our gazes locked for a long second. [ It is always night wherever you go. ]
    â€œCrepuscule with Nellie” [breakdown]
    [ Monk continues alone and quiet .] Northward leads to the river southward back to my hotel
    room. An entire week had gone by and I hadn’t exchanged seven words with another
    human. The sound of words directed at me would feel like a hand on my shoulder, an arm
    brushing against my skin. It is always night when silence overcomes me, silence opening up
    within me like a wound. Black keys, I’ve been told, have an ominous, mysterious sound.
    â€œMisterioso”
    [ Monk conversing with water .] What we end up making, whether it’s something we do by
    ourselves or with others is always a form of conversation. My presence is solid, but
    others see me as a fishing weir, a foamless Mister So-
    and-So, a scavenger for anything that would flatter his eyes. What I want is a garden that will not perish, a bed of imperial, white peonies.
    from Tongue

RAY GONZALEZ
----
One El Paso, Two El Paso

    Awake in the desert to the sound of calling.
    Must be the mountain, I thought.
    The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary
    line between the living and the dead was erased years ago.
    Awake in the sand, I feared, old shoes decorated with
    razor wire, a heaven of light on the peaks.
    Must be time to get up, I assumed. Parked outside,
    Border Patrol vehicles, I had to choose.
    Awake to follow immigration shadows vanishing inside
    American walls, river drownings counted as they cross,
    Maria Salinas’s body dragged out, her mud costume
    pasted with plastic bottles and crushed beer cans,
    black water flowing to bless her in her sleep.
    Must be the roar of illegal death, I decided,
    a way out of the current, though satellite maps never
    show the brown veins of the concrete channel.
    Awake in the arroyo of a mushroom cloud, I choke,
    1945 explosion in the sand, eternal radioactive wind,
    the end of one war mutating the border into another
    that also requires fatal skills of young men because few
    dream the atomic bomb gave birth in La Jornada,
    historic trail behind the mountain realigned, then cut
    off from El Paso, the town surrounded with barbed
    wire, the new century kissing car bombs, drug cartels,
    massacres across the river, hundreds shot in ambushes
    and neighborhood soccer games that always score.
    Wake up, I thought, look south to the last cathedral
    in Juarez before its exploding bricks hurtle this way.
    Make the sign of the cross, open your